Modeling the future of US arts policy: Beyond supply-side pump-priming

Abstract

This commentary begins with an examination of how culture, including the arts, sports and religion typically operates from an anthropological perspective. The acquisition of cultural knowledge from socially transmitted sources leads to individual cultural expression (amateur practice), which in turn generates demand for the consumption of professionally produced cultural goods and services. Using this generic model of culture, the article then traces the evolution of the arts and arts policy in the USA beginning with baseline policies protecting free speech and intellectual property, and providing tax-exempt status to non-profit forms of artistic production. Tax exemption is shown to be a significant element in the early twentieth century when emerging elites and immigrant artists split away from the mainstream of the commercial arts sector to found a separate high arts sector. In the postwar period, the high arts sector is judged to be lagging in quality and in financial decline, factors that are cited to justify major new policies characterized as “supply-side pump-priming”. Beginning in the mid-1960s, these policies become widespread among federal, state and municipal governmental agencies and many non-governmental funders, and though the high arts grow in quality, output, and geographic distribution, they never achieve a breakthrough in attracting substantial non-elite audiences, which continue to patronize the vastly larger commercial arts. In light of recent trends of declining audiences and reduced contributed and earned income, the future of supply-side policies becomes questionable. A case is made that demand-side policies may offer a more democratic way forward for both arts and sports policies. In addition, reference is made to a new online arts policy simulation, entitled “Medici's Lever”, which provides a laboratory for testing alternative demand-side and supply-side policies.