Art for the Market’s Sake?

Even the most idealistic and independent artists in the US must rely more and more on private sources of funding to survive in an increasingly rationalised market. The European ideal of art for art’s sake is a luxury many US artists simply can’t afford. Artshub Global this week looks at the gulf between public funding for the arts in the US and Europe, and asks the question, is American art increasingly becoming art for the market’s sake?

Well before the war in Iraq, US Government funding for the military was in excess of $400 billion. The funds allocated to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), by contrast, has hovered at around $100 million – that’s 0.025 % of the money spent to defend and destroy being spent on celebration and creation within the world’s largest economy.

European nations, by contrast, provide significant levels of public funding to artists and creators.

So what has lead to this huge disparity? Is it an ideological chasm between the culture of the US and Europe? And if so why?

The different approaches to arts funding are based in the economic models and political ideology of the US versus that of the European tradition.

US neo-liberalism, and now neo-conservatism, hold that government intervention in individual pursuits is kept to a minimum. Despite inconsistencies – such as the constant intervention in personal medical decisions by increasingly right-wing politicians – this tenet seems to remain intractable when it comes to funding for the arts. The US tax code, which offers generous breaks to those investing in domestic artistic activity, works in concert with this broader ideology to create an environment where almost all money for artistic endeavour comes from private sources.

In fact, 99% of funding for the arts in the US comes from the private sector – from companies and corporations, philanthropic foundations and wealthy individual citizens. It’s a culture of private philanthropy envied by many other countries, but is it private philanthropy at the cost of public support needed to enable artists to work independently from vested interests? By contrast, arts funding in most European countries is 99% sourced from the public purse. Robert Freeman, Dean of the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin, has written at length about this dichotomy.

It’s more than a financial concern. In the US, artists engaged in cutting-edge or controversial work can be demonised and held up as examples of the kind of moral corruption that public funds just cannot be used to support. The idea that the arts should challenge society and explore new and often unpopular ideas is undermined by the decree that art with no ready-made, popular audience is worthless. If an artist or arts company cannot sustain itself by commercial success, the argument is that it doesn’t deserve to exist at all, and certainly not at tax-payers’ expense.

A vast amount of privately-funded art in the US is created for an elite, inner-urban and very wealthy audience, which can afford to fund its art form of choice, while community-based and progressive art suffers from a severe lack of support. The majority of artistic activity in the US occurs in large, wealthy cities and tends to cover old ground, appealing to established audiences and being focused on turning a profit.

By contrast, artistic endeavour in Europe is decentralised and communal, and offers a greater degree of autonomy to the artist. The integrity of ideas, and the creation of new and innovative artistic forms, is supported and even celebrated in European countries, where government spending on the arts is routinely ten to 50 times greater, per capita, than in the US.

William Osborne, an American living in Europe, states that Germany, for example, has 23 times the number of full-time symphonic orchestras per head of population than does the US. German opera lovers fare even better, with 28 times the number of opera houses than their American counterparts enjoy.

When artists have to justify every work, every artistic or cultural pursuit, every new idea within the framework of the marketplace, artistic integrity and innovation suffer. Conformity and complacence become real dangers in a bottom-line driven culture, while diversity and innovation are the hall-marks of a thriving art scene.

So is it a case of either/or? Is the US arts market more pitched at financial profit than spiritual enhancement? Perhaps not. After all one could argue that renaissance Europe also worked markedly through a patronage system – and a great history of art came from that period. So it might very well be – that the concept of art for art sake is simply a great myth – a cliche even. One that we now in the 21st century are finally starting to pull apart.

Further Reading