Funding the arts presents a particular problem for the classical liberal. While arts and culture are essential to a thriving civic life, is it the government’s role to fund the arts, and if so, how should it go about deciding what art to fund? This central tension can be seen as a clash between paternalistic and laissez-faire values. Ultimately, arts funding bodies make decisions based on a given vision of what constitutes good art, and so the question becomes when—if ever—the government can appropriately determine what constitutes “the good life” rather than leave such questions up to individuals acting on their preferences.
In his new book, The Moral Foundations of Public Funding for the Arts, cultural economist Michael Rushton probes these questions and searches for the moral justification for arts funding by considering different perspectives from various schools of thought—economics, liberalism, egalitarianism, communitarianism, conservatism, and multiculturalism. Rushton provides a survey of the issues—he avoids advocating for one approach over another or purporting to have all the answers—but does pose questions as to why, for example, economics and liberalism struggle to provide the moral foundation that would justify any public arts funding. Rushton does try to build a case for public funding models based on the intrinsic value of the art itself, but his answers leave us without a fully formed argument. His purpose seems rather to highlight the complexity of the questions, but in the end, he struggles to resolve the question of whether arts funding can ever be morally justified in a liberal society.
Rushton begins by describing the importance but also the limitations of the economic method in any articulation of the moral foundation of arts funding. Much economic justification boils down to the inability of the market to provide for certain types of art, especially public goods, and compensate for positive externalities. Rushton argues that many subsidized arts—including theaters and museums—simply are not public goods. Ultimately, he admits that while economic theories can help design policies to address apparent market failures, the economic method cannot justify the government’s role in arts funding over the free market if it cannot price aesthetic or cultural value.
Rushton then turns to John Rawls as a representative of modern liberalism. Attempting to theoretically construct a more egalitarian society, Rawls asked how people behind a “veil of ignorance” would decide on society’s rules without knowing their attributes, advantages, and disadvantages. Rawls believed that people can agree on certain “primary goods,” namely political rights and a certain level of economic equality. Beyond these primary goods, however, the government must practice neutrality, allowing people to pursue their own conceptions of “the good life.” For this reason, Rawls disapproved of public arts funding; it would be a step too far toward government determining the good for all of society.
Rushton contrasts this Rawlsian position with “perfectionism,” the doctrine that the government must provide certain goods because they “complete” the good life. Richard Dworkin, in particular, attempted to “square the circle” with Rawlsian liberalism and arts funding; Dworkin proposed that the state should fund the arts out of equitable consideration to future generations and leave them with a “rich cultural structure.” Rushton posits that the closest we come to implementing such a model would be a public library—open to all without ideally favoring certain ideas or conceptions of the good over the other.
In practice, though, Rushton disagrees that Dworkin’s policy could be implemented neutrally. After all, an arts council must still have some criteria by which to make decisions and over what aspects of a culture are most important to leave to other generations. Rushton concludes that modern liberalism by itself also struggles to morally justify public funding of the arts.
Other approaches also lead us to more questions but few answers. With egalitarianism, Rushton asks if public arts funding is justified as a means to achieve social equality. Rushton says no—goods such as opera or ballet only serve a small, relatively wealthy population. But he also suggests that not all of what he terms “expensive tastes” are enjoyed disproportionately by the wealthy. Some expensive tastes—deemed so because they are costly to provide and serve a relatively small population—may represent a minority culture, such as the Hmong Cultural Center in St. Paul, and he suggests that arts funding could increase the level of access to such culture among minority groups such as the Hmong people.
Rushton turns to the question of whether the government should fund art to reinforce the value of culture itself—a “primary social good” that promotes self-respect among different groups. Yet “self-respect” is a very broad concept and Rushton does not explain what such a policy constitutes such that it breaks down as a rationale for any governmental arts support. By contrast, others such as economist Tyler Cowen have noted how government policy can and does effectively play a role in incentivizing through tax exemptions the individual to freely choose to support the philanthropic and artistic projects they care about. Rushton might have dealt more explicitly with how such market-oriented mechanisms can help justify what the role of government could and should be without the paternalism of direct public funding.
Conservatism departs from utilitarian calculus and the neutrality of economics and liberalism in favor of preserving things for their intrinsic worth.
So far, the schools of thought Rushton analyzes are methodological individualist, but he also explores certain collectivist perspectives. He explains how communitarians posit that the intrinsic value of certain goods cannot be captured in economic analysis, and caution against asking how much someone values a cultural good when those cultural goods have themselves determined their values. One can calculate the benefits to each person for an infrastructure project like a road or a dam, but cannot do the same with a work of public art; the value of the Trevi Fountain in Rome is embedded within its incalculable value to Western culture.
Rushton then asks if art meant to build national character, patriotism, and communal bonding could provide a moral foundation for arts funding. Rushton also correctly urges caution here. He writes, “If the criterion by which artists and art presenters receive priority for funding departs from the excellence of the art itself, as determined by peer review panels of experts in the field, then the activities of artists and arts presenters will shift in the direction of what is that gets funded.” Rushton takes aim at conservatives defunding art they dislike, but does little to explore this problem as manifested in DEI mandates and incentives.
What then do conservative schools of thought offer for moral justifications for arts funding?
Similar to communitarianism, Rushton argues that conservatism departs from utilitarian calculus and the neutrality of economics and liberalism in favor of preserving things for their intrinsic worth. He describes the conservative disposition as “the enjoyment of the present, and our attachments to what we have now, with all their imperfections.” This “small c” conservatism is as much psychological as philosophical, and one that is probably shared by most people to one degree or another, even if they do not consider themselves politically conservative. According to Rushton, cultural conservatism takes a step further than communitarianism in emphasizing tradition—it is not opposed to innovation or bound by nostalgia, but seeks innovation in continuity with the past, building on and revising previous traditions. Indeed, our artistic traditions remain relevant for the present. As T. S. Elliot wrote, “Someone said: ‘the dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know.”
Rushton gives the example of a museum that wants to replace a collection of long-standing familiar works of art with those that are deemed by curators as being more objectively valuable. A conservative might argue that one must consider not merely the narrowly instrumental worth of those paintings but also their intrinsic worth and the attachment that patrons may feel to these familiar works. If I think, for example, of old movie houses with a Wurlitzer organ showing classic and silent films—they do not carry much utilitarian benefit and have but a small patron base, but isn’t there still something intrinsically valuable about preserving this pre-modern form of cinema? The question then is at what point this intrinsic worth justifies direct public spending versus leaving cultural entrepreneurs to carve out and develop their own artistic niches.
A liberal society in which the government does not directly subsidize art need not be a society in which art and culture cannot thrive.
Conservative arts policy favors universal standards as opposed to subjectivism for judging excellence and stands against political art. Funding agendas that take account of political criteria take away from the intrinsic value of the art itself. Indeed, here Rushton missed an opportunity to connect this conservative argument more with his own criticism of funding “magical art” when he touched on communitarianism.
Ultimately, one may substantially agree with the various tenets of cultural conservatism, but as Rushton correctly contends, the question is whether this compels some kind of state action to fund. Ultimately, state funding would impose its own view of good art and potentially stifle expressive freedom.
In the final chapter, Rushton looks at funding art in diverse, multicultural societies. Can multiculturalism be reconciled with a liberal emphasis on individual rights? Sadly, Rushton misses an excellent opportunity to look for such moral justifications in models of decentralized government that better accommodate local tastes. For instance, as William Osborn has written, Europe’s funding for the arts relies heavily on funding at the state and municipal levels, and Europeans would “find it strange for a federal government to fund the arts in any specific way because it is so difficult at that level to have direct contact with the lives and work of artists and the communities they serve.” He argues that American funding models relying more on the centralized National Endowment for the Arts leave them open to “populist” political attacks. Although some of these attacks may themselves be a reaction to overly politicized cultural programming, Rushton could have dealt more with how the moral foundations of public arts funding may fundamentally differ depending on the source of public funding.
In the end, Rushton contends that art cannot be looked at from a purely economic or utilitarian perspective; he argues for a recognition of the intrinsic value of art and a funding body to adjudicate what art to fund. He cautions that arguments highlighting purported positive externalities or egalitarianism are ultimately insufficient by themselves. A justification for public arts funding requires a “flexible” liberalism that does not insist on the government’s strict neutrality with regard to the good. But this also fails to address the problem of “capture” in arts funding; unavoidably, the interest groups that hold power will determine what art should receive funding priority and what perspectives to elevate. The beneficiaries may therefore be those interest groups rather than the taxpayers who pay the burden. This can result in a barrage of influence peddling and the potential politicization of the arts.
While Rushton does well to point out the limits of economic, liberal, and egalitarian arguments for arts funding, he would have been well served to further develop why, at what level, and by what objective criteria any public entity should fund art of “intrinsic” worth—and how these factors can change the calculus for what may be “morally justified.”
To some extent, Rushton preaches to the already initiated. He does not address libertarian arguments claiming the government has no normative mandate to fund the arts—indeed he seemingly lumps these ideas in with contemporary American conservatives who want to “defund” the NEA for political motivations. He might have contended with liberal perspectives outside of the Rawlsian framework as well, such as Tyler Cowen’s argument that tax incentives can spur innovation—and diversity—better than direct funding. Indeed, a liberal society in which the government does not directly subsidize art need not be a society in which art and culture cannot thrive; indirect subsidies can incentivize private philanthropy in the arts while avoiding the paternalism of funding bodies determining what art should be funded.
While Rushton’s survey still leaves us with many open questions, one can agree that any public arts funding should somehow prioritize art for its intrinsic worth rather than push political agendas. He is also correct that in the end, the paternalism inherent in public funding of the arts cannot be easily reconciled with the principles of laissez-faire.
