Earlier this month, Arts Analytics published a provocation that asked: Why does arts policy still look at the sector from the supply side—from the stage—rather than from the seats? The post challenged entrenched habits in cultural policy, arguing that we need to pay closer attention to how people actually engage with culture—not just how it’s produced.
In response, we people weigh in. Below are a couple of the responses we received—each one engaging with the original question while offering new ways of thinking about cultural value, data, and public purpose.
Michael Rushton. Professor Emeritus, Author, The Moral Foundations of Public Funding for the Arts
When it comes to using public funds to support the arts, a question needs to be asked at the outset: Why? What is it about the market allocation of resources and distribution of outputs in the cultural sector that could use some improvement via public policy? This has to come first, and then we can ask: so, given the goal we want to achieve, what is the best means of getting there?
Normally, we look to subsidies when we think there is under-consumption and production. But is that what we have? Recorded arts – video, music, images, text – are widely available at extremely low prices to the consumer. As you note, we already have tons of consumer surplus. This is in itself a result of a market failure – in an internet world with digital recordings, it is really hard to guard one’s intellectual property, and so any provider of product is sharply constrained in what they can charge without consumers turning to other options. So, in that sphere there is loads of access, and any state subsidy would be superfluous – would we really need to subsidize Spotify subscriptions?
So, what about “live” arts – performances, and visual art on canvas or in marble? Again, we would need to ask what problem we are trying to solve. You are correct that if we thought there was less-than optimal consumption, we could subsidize, and we could subsidize either through grants to nonprofits (as we typically now do in North America) or through consumer vouchers (as with, for example, the youth cultural vouchers that were tried in some European countries recently). Now, while in teaching undergrad public finance we show students that when it comes to subsidies (or excise taxes) on a good, in terms of outcome and incidence it doesn’t matter which we choose regarding who “officially” gets the subsidy (if we want to put a ten cent subsidy per pint of blueberries, it doesn’t matter whether it is given to consumers or producers – prices will adjust the same way), in the arts it is a different sort of thing, because the subsidy isn’t per pint of arts. Consumer vouchers are more like an ordinary subsidy – they apply to purchases – but producer subsidies are not – they apply to the grant-writing prowess of the organization, in which audience numbers play some role but are not the whole story.
I think what you are trying to say here is that there ought to be a subsidy of some sorts, and that basing it on consumer choices is better than a system of grants that is only tangentially related to audience numbers. Okay. But it leaves the question of why we are doing this. When French kids with culture vouchers mostly ended up at the manga store, the government was forced to ask, “is this what we were trying to do?” What sorts of things would the voucher apply to, and what would be left out? Respecting consumer choice doesn’t get the state out of having to answer that question. And once it gets into the job of figuring out where to draw the boundaries, well, that has to be “top down”. It requires a statement that these things warrant a subsidy that other things do not. If I can shamelessly self-promote, that is one of the arguments in the final chapter of my book – arts policy means choosing what is going to count as art worthy of subsidy, and what is not. You can’t get around it.
Bill Ivey. Writer, teacher, folklorist, and former Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts.
The [nonprofit] arts sector likes to “look at itself from the stage” because a producer dominated perspective frees policy actors to pay little or no attention to audience demand, audience choice, or audience taste. This focus conceals the reality that given the opportunity, many Americans would not buy what arts organizations are selling. Early in the most-recent incarnation of government support for the arts (The NEA Era,1965-2025), advocates disdained popular arts and mass culture, offering an alternative that justified nonprofit access to public money. In this formulation, the nonprofit fine arts were embraced as an antidote to TV, movies, rock ‘n’ roll, and so on. This public interest role justified the development and maintenance of a closed system: producers and experts who “knew what is best” for audiences would frame objectives, determine costs, and then motivate a tiny audience – government officials – to “consume” the nonprofit arts product. The pitch to funders was about secondary, instrumental benefits: an investment of a few million would make their communities happier, their youth better aligned, their nation a bit stronger. Favorable tax policy complimented grantmaking. Freed from the limits imposed by demand, this approach enabled a spectacular expansion of the nonprofit sector, one that over the decades all but guaranteed a “chronic oversupply” of many kinds of artmaking. Today, nonprofit leaders know that their foundational argument – a virtuous alternative to corrupting mass culture — isn’t the political asset it was years ago. Although no longer in the foreground, disdain for “the popular” that justified claims made to policy actors lives on in the field’s DNA. (Our nonprofit art is just better!) Unfortunately, no new “why?” has been advanced in support of the current model, and the “replace-TV- and-rock argument” has retreated to the background. It is surprising that, despite the absence of a compelling justification, a closed system in which the only “demand” is what can be sustained among a handful of elected officials and societal elites remains essential to the fiscal health of the entire nonprofit arts community.
A possible shift to a demand-oriented arts policy frame offers an interesting but daunting thought experiment. True, letting audiences steer some public money is a useful idea and helping audiences “turn into creators” a worthy objective. But tax credits for ticket purchases and other nonprofit services is in fact just an indirect approach to preserving the “fund what the field wants” model. A more intriguing, bigger policy reinvention would be to have government actors take on corporate consolidation, IP law and media regulation, and trade policies that have historically created obstacles that disrupt or redirect demand. Consider Clear Channel/Live Nation and Taylor Swift ticketing, the “lockup” of vast segments of American artmaking in copyright-enabled “dark archives,” the persistent efforts of streaming services to push down the tiny percentage of revenues flowing to singers and songwriters, the ability of AI entrepreneurs to build software models by scraping up millions of artistic works without compensating artists. These are some of the arenas of policy that can facilitate or inhibit the satisfaction of demand. Do leaders in today’s nonprofit sector find these issues important? Are leaders even interested?
But demand may still have its day, even if its effects are filtered through government and our electoral process. After all, it’s likely that over the next couple of years the popularity of our current system of producer-dominated arts policy will be tested, its assumptions challenged. Defunded and dismantled in early 2025, the NEA and partnering state arts agencies are today wandering in a kind of policy wilderness. Can they return? Will the public insist — or demand — that the cultural agencies and their modest budgets be brought back to life once the Trump experience ends? A few decades ago, when the NEA was threatened with elimination, response was crafted “inside” the closed, producer dominated space. The target of this advocacy? Congress and the White House who held the policy purse strings. Government was the core audience for arguments asserting nonprofit value and need. The tactics? Talk up Sesame Street, get Bob Redford to testify and shake a few hands, have Americans for the Arts twist as many arms as they could, and the system would stagger back to life. But we’re not in the 1990s. Today the NEA is orphaned — not alone, but in the company of Voice of America, USAID, NIH, SNAP (food stamps) and other damaged agencies and programs. When Congress and a future administration start to rebuild the US government, and when our citizenry gets asked by leaders what it wants, what it demands, will voters and taxpayers hear the old arguments and come to the rescue? Will the American people agree that the entrenched, cost-side needs of artistic directors, nonprofit board leaders, and arts experts are important enough to take money away from foreign aid, food security, and health research? Will there be demand? We almost certainly will see.