This week, the good news for federal arts funding in the epic battle to raise the U.S. debt ceiling is that, unlike defense or Medicare, it will not “automatically” be eviscerated if the U.S. government fails to get spending under control.
The bad news is this, however: In the next months Congress still must cut $21 billion from the 2012 budget and, once again, arts funding is in play. What is more, there is always at least one member of Congress who will introduce a wild card amendment to cut all arts funding.
So far, the survival of arts funding looks pretty good for 2012, according to the main arts lobbying group, Americans for the Arts. Last week, the House passed a budget that preserved $135 million for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), escaping a Republican amendment to cut it further. Still, the approved amount is $20 million lower than last year, though no serious attempts to shut down the NEA are currently on the horizon.
When this column looked at 2011 NEA funding in the last budget cycle (see “Those Crazy Art Dollars,” Feb. 24, 2011), the U.S. government was nearly five months late on passing the annual budget. (It was using stop-gap measures to fund everything as Congress wrangled over final numbers). That five-month overlap explains why it seems that, only yesterday, annual arts funding had been in the news.
As of this week, the 2012 arts funding battle may have only begun. It may run into next year, depending on how the new debt ceiling agreement quickens the 2012 budget votes. As art advocate groups are saying at the present, “Here we go again.”
In the debt ceiling deal this week, Congress and the White House agreed to raise the legal ceiling on how much the U.S. government can be in debt. Meanwhile, the Congress must also produce a ten-year plan to dramatically cut government’s titanic over-spending and over-borrowing, which threatens the nation’s economic health. This moment may look painful, but next year (the 2013 budget) will be worse. Next year, if Congress does not pass its ten-year deficit reduction plan, an automatic guillotine will make draconian cuts in defense, Medicare, and much else.
One advantage of arts funding, despite the “culture war” rhetoric that can make it controversial, is its small, exclusive domain. Essentially, the NEA is the single arts entity: to lose it would be like the extinction of a rare species. Still, the NEA has been pruned back most years for nearly two decades. As Americans for the Arts says, even with the good early signs on the 2012 arts budget, it involved the “deepest [cut] to the NEA in 16 years.” It could have been far worse, the group says, if not for supporters sending 35,000 “messages” to Capitol Hill last month.
The messages typically are e-mails. In their shotgun effect, they are part of a vigilant system set up by Americans for the Arts and other groups in the “creative industry,” a name chosen to suggest its power to create jobs and generate revenue. Arts votes always go by a slim margin, so the message system will surely be working overtime in the months ahead.
Back in the early 1990s, the NEA budge went as high as $190 million. In those days it also gave out grants to individual artists. After protests over taxpayer funding of the “obscene” art done by some individual artists, the NEA restricted its grants to community arts groups and arts panels. This avoids direct funding to maverick artists who, frankly, do enjoy scandalizing the public.
According to the bipartisan Congressional Arts Caucus, under the current proposed 2012 House budget, the NEA will be able to give out about 2,400 grants for the arts. In a nation of 2 million artists (according to the Census), that is not a lot of federal arts funding. The fine arts are also supported through tax exemptions for philanthropic giving to the arts. In truth, philanthropy makes up the lion’s share of the non-profit fine arts funding in the United States.
For the Republicans, tax cuts and private support for the arts are the way to go. For the Democrats, public funding is the best guarantor of the arts in our culture. Fortunately, the smallness of public funding for the arts has earned enough sympathy—like a fawn in the woods—that neither the Republicans nor Democrats want to be responsible for making it extinct.
However, that arts budget battle still looms on the horizon. I will take weeks and months to know exactly where the NEA comes out. Meanwhile, there’s no reason for the nation’s artists to stop what they are doing. They can hope for the best at this time of “shared sacrifice,” as the saying goes on Capitol Hill.
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