-Art Funding

Issue : Art-Funding

 

Pin-Point SUMMARY

 

Prop.

 

 

1.    Art funds have the mindset of entrepreneurial small and medium-sized enterprises always looking to develop new income streams.

A.    The contribution of music and visual and performing arts to the British economy exceeds £4 billion in gross value added, and the creative industries overall contribute £36 billion. In contrast, the economic downturn in America is starting to bite into its market-driven model, with at least one of its world-class orchestras facing bankruptcy.

2.    The opening ceremony of the Olympics was a perfect example—a cultural spectacle viewed live by an estimated 900 million people worldwide.        

A.    Its creator, Danny Boyle, cut his teeth in the subsidised theatre. It was intelligent, coherent and had deep expertise, craft and tradition from the funded arts sector behind it—from performers to technicians.

B.    It was the result of years of training for many: training as exacting and as worth investing in as the sportsmen and women who came next.

 

Opp.

 

Samuel Johnson wrote, "We that live to please, must please to live". When government seeks to get between artist and art lover, art will surely suffer.

 

 

1.    The arts are important to everyone. Yet involving governments in their provision can be disastrous

2.    It is impossible for state organisations to fairly choose which projects to fund. Panels of experts must attempt to determine the preferences of the public and anticipate future trends. To objectively compare the subjective is counter-intuitive. These experts cannot know whether we prefer a new dance act or a gallery. Private markets, however, can give us this information. People vote with their wallets.

3.    What is more, the presence of subsidy makes life harder for donors. They worry that private backing will cost their chosen cause its government subsidies. As state funding crowds out private funding for the arts, the knowledge imparted by markets is lost.

4.    Those projects that do receive funding must necessarily appeal to the machinery of the state. This diminishes artistic freedom—it is censorship by stealth. Instead of making the arts more independent, state funding creates dependency around a single donor whose tastes are dictated by the political whims of the day. Artists that rely on an income from the government must create content that pleases the government, just as, without it, they must please consumers to generate an income.