Don’t politicize the arts
In the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt lent a hand to unemployed artists as a part of his New Deal. The Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project jolted hundreds of thousands of artists back to work and swept the country with an unprecedented wave of public art.
Once again, America’s artists and arts organizations are in severe economic jeopardy. Artists and culture writers are proposing that WPAstyle funding be included in the next federal stimulus package, and some state and local governments have already commissioned arts projects.
The artistic results of the Federal Art Project were generally benign, but such sweeping, arts-focused measures should not be repeated in today’s fraught cultural climate.
This is not to say that artists and organizations shouldn’t receive stimulus money or have access to the same benefits and loans as other Americans, many of whom are struggling just as hard to make ends meet. Indeed, some Pittsburgh arts institutions received Paycheck Protection Program loans, which have helped stave off furloughs and some salary reductions. Individual artists were able to access the $600 federal unemployment enhancement as well as Paycheck Protection Program loans of up to $10,000 for independent contractors.
The importance of art in this country’s cultural fabric can’t be overstated, and at $25 billion in Pennsylvania
alone, the economic value of the arts should not be underestimated. (The Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council does yeomen’s work in tracking such data for local organizations.)
However, the government should not have a direct hand in apportioning taxpayer funding to specific artistic projects.
The so-called “culture wars” have swaddled the arts in the same political demagoguery that contaminates most aspects of daily life in this country. Even as far back as 1938, the WPA-funded Federal Theater Project came under congressional scrutiny for allegedly mounting plays with communist messaging, though many of the projects commissioned by the Federal Art Project focused on depictions of pastoral bliss and everyday images of the working class. These rustic, utopic images were thought to promote unity, an ideal vision of American life.
Could the arts bring unity today? Should that even be a priority? Who should decide such metrics and what sorts of projects are worthy of taxpayer dollars? Certainly not government operators, whose well-intentioned haste with the first stimulus package has resulted in a disturbing lack of oversight.
Art is an essential aspect of quality of life for many Americans, a necessary community resource that deserves recognition and support.
But the government should not be in the business of tastemaking.