Should Government Pay for Art?

Media stories here in the San Francisco Bay Area lately been covering a movement among artist's (under-employed in their view) for a repeat of the Government subsidies of Art that occurred during the Great Depression.

San Francisco and other older parts of the Bay Area are full of Art from the Great Depression, particularly murals on public buildings.  I love them.  I could live without them easily, sometimes I stand right by or under a mural oblivious to its existence, but still from time to time I have contemplated a mural and enjoyed it as an emotional expression of the views of a particular time in history.

But in my estimation government sponsorship of Art is generally inappropriate and unwise because of the nature of Government and the nature of Art.  

First, Government is inherently coercive.  Even in our democracy, you have to pay your taxes.  We tolerate this coercive nature of government because for many things only government effectively address needs for the common good.  But government is also very susceptible to individual groups of people using political power to bend government to what is in their interests rather than some clearly defined common good.  

Second, Art is fundamentally personal expression.  Art can be a form of play that is very healthy and necessary, particularly for children, or it can be an expression of deeply rooted emotions, but in either case Art is primarily created to make the artist feel good about himself.

To me, Art that is timeless, is generally created by people for whom self expression is more important than money.  They see the world through their emotions and their Art allows them to express those emotions.  Many great artists did not achieve much financial success during their lifetimes because they did not cater to the current fads in art, or did so within the context of exploring deep and timeless emotional worlds in their own soul.

But there is another world of Art - Art as a business - filled with intelligent people who have good social skills and  are primarily motivated by financial and social success.  This world is about our logical brain, not our emotions.  It grows out of one of the characteristics of human behavior that becomes more prominent as life gets easier.   When we feel secure about basic needs some people become willing to pay inordinate amounts of money to buy designer clothes or handbags as a status symbol to assure themselves they are more special than everyone else around them.  When everyone can buy designer jeans, those with more money turn to Art to be special.  It is the world where Andy Warhol paints a Campbell's Soup can and sells it for millions, because he is perceived as a little more cool than everyone else.  Art as business isn't about exploring deeply held emotions, its about current fads.  Its about looking at what everyone else thinks is the latest cool thing in art, then trying to figure out how to do something just different enough to be perceived as clever and cooler.

I used to live in an upper middle class university city.  It is a great town, filled with intelligent, highly educated people, I doubt there is a nicer place to live in the world.  That city has been buying public art and putting it around the city for years.  It is abysmal.  I never had any involvement in how the art was chosen, but have talked to a few local politicians about it at social events so I have a suspicion what happens.   It is Art as business.  Successful politician's generally build their life around figuring out what society thinks is good and supporting it.   Art is good so supporting the arts becomes an important goal, particularly in and upper middle class city where meeting basic needs has never been an issue for most people.  

Politician generally are not going to encounter a moody starving artist focused on self expression, nor have the background to recognize artistic genius.  But they are going to encounter lots of the Art as business people because the Art as business people are going out lobbying for public money.  So the art as business folks get the public money.   In that city I lived in that has resulted in a town full of public art that to me has no more emotional appeal than a banana peel on the sidewalk, and is often tacky in its efforts to use color to give an installation some meaning.  Most of it I find not particularly pleasant to look at nor is it capable of sparking any kind of coherent emotion.

I am sure there are lots of folks who view themselves as artists in that city who think the local public art is great.  That's fine, or it would be if they had paid for it.  But my tax dollars apparently were used to pay for something that I, and I suspect many other taxpayers, consider inappropriate and/or ugly.  I have no problem with the Art as business folks building a whole industry out of selling stuff to people with too much money, but I do have a problem with Art becoming just another lobbying group trying to advance their interests at the public trough.

When all the hungry people have been fed, and all the old folks taken care of, and all those who aspire to be educated have been educated, maybe then I would consider government getting involved in paying for public art.