Arts Funding: Overview

Introduction

Controversy over government funding for the arts in the United States has been a persistent issue throughout the country’s history. At the heart of the issue is the disagreement over whether the arts (dance, music, drama, literature and the visual arts) should be funded through public or private means. Among those who believe government funding should be provided, the debate tends to focus on the amount and type of support. The primary controversy in arts funding today, however, concerns the content or subject matter of art and whether public money should pay for work that some people find offensive.

The debate surrounding public funding of the arts, part of what politicians and the media have labeled culture wars, revolves around the following issues: moral standards; the definition of obscenity, or what is and is not acceptable in American society; the value of art and its contributions to culture, education, and the betterment of society; and the relationship between the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of expression, and government spending.

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is one of the most prestigious sources for arts funding, and has been at the center of controversy even though it represents a small percentage of money used to support the arts in the United States. In fiscal year 2023, the NEA was budgeted for about $207 million in federal tax dollars, out of a total of $1.7 trillion in discretionary spending and a $6.1 trillion federal budget.

Conservative organizations, such as the Traditional Values Coalition, the Eagle Forum, and Concerned Women for America, as well as many Republicans and conservative Christians, believe that the NEA’s budget should not pay for art that is, in their opinion, obscene, sacrilegious, deviant, or otherwise “lacking redeeming value.” Many conservatives believe that the government should not provide funding for the arts at all.

On the other side of the culture war are arts organizations, including Americans for the Arts, the American Arts Alliance, and the American Associations of Museums, who believe that the value of art is subjective, and that any content limitations imposed as a condition of government funding amount to censorship and violate the First Amendment.

Understanding the Discussion

Arts Funding: The majority of US government funding comes indirectly from tax deductions for businesses, organizations, and individuals that support the arts, and direct funding from federal, state, and local sources, both of which comprise only 10 percent of total financial support. The other 90 percent comes from private foundations and individuals, and earned income, such as box-office receipts and admissions.

Obscenity: The legal definition for obscenity derives from the 1973 US Supreme Court case Miller v. California. For an artwork to be declared legally obscene, it must meet three criteria: “1. The average person, applying contemporary community standards would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest; and 2. The work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and 3. The work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”

First Amendment: The First Amendment to the US Constitution states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

History

Until the twentieth century, government funding for the arts consisted of individual work-for-hire contracts. One of the first controversies involved the artist John Trumbull, who was hired by Congress to create mural-sized paintings of Revolutionary War scenes for the Capitol rotunda. Members of Congress were disappointed with the quality of his enlarged work, which they felt was inferior to the original paintings. Although the paintings were displayed, Trumbull lost out on additional commissions.

In 1832, Congress commissioned Horatio Greenough to sculpt a statue of George Washington for the Capitol lawn. His completed partially-nude sculpture proved so controversial that it was eventually moved to the Smithsonian Institution.

Large-scale arts funding began during the 1930s, with the initiation of the Works Project Administration (WPA) as part of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. Separate funds existed for visual arts, music, theatre, and literature, and provided jobs or grants to a variety of creative individuals who met financial eligibility requirements. Some of the most accomplished artists of the twentieth century received support, including Grant Wood, John Cheever, and Arthur Miller.

In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson established the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) along with an advisory board, the National Council on the Arts. State agencies were then established with the help of federal subsidies. Modern arts and cultural policy is based on the national arts infrastructure created in the 1960s. The 1960s’ economic and social environment was characterized by racial desegregation, affirmative action, growth of welfare programs, and increased environmental awareness. Federal and state governments were searching for help and solutions for many American cities suffering economically and socially from job loss and disinvestment by corporations. Federal arts funding, often developed in relationship with a private-sector organization such as the Business Council for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation, was viewed as a potential solution or remedy to the social chaos and economic crisis of American inner cities.

The contemporary culture wars began in 1988, when the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia presented a retrospective exhibit of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, entitled “The Perfect Moment.” The exhibit included sexually explicit images, and because it was funded by a $30,000 NEA grant, it raised the issues of the definition of obscenity and the use of tax dollars. When the show traveled to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the museum’s director cancelled the exhibit, although the Washington Project for the Arts stepped in and hosted the exhibit with private funds.

In 1989, the photograph “Piss Christ” by Andres Serrano, which depicted a plastic crucifix submerged in urine, and which had won an award from the NEA-funded Southeastern Center for Contemporary Arts in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, provoked additional commentary from conservative Christians and others who found the work to be blasphemous.

As a result of these and other controversial art exhibits, Congress debated whether or not to take away all funding from the NEA. In the end, funding was cut, and Congress prohibited funding for arts projects that “promote, disseminate or produce materials which in the judgment of the National Endowment for the Arts or the National Endowment for the Humanities may be considered obscene, including but not limited to, depictions of sadomasochism, homoeroticism, the sexual exploitation of children, of individuals engaged in sex acts and which, taken as a whole, do not have serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”

Other changes to the NEA occurred in 1996, when Congress voted to eliminate grants to individuals in all disciplines except literature. In addition, six congressional representative seats were added to the National Council on the Arts to ensure a balanced representation.

In other highly-publicized cases during the 1990s, funding was withdrawn from the School of the Institute of Chicago, which featured an exhibit in which an American flag was draped on the floor, and from the List Visual Arts Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston for a film program that was suspected of including pornographic sexual content. In 1999, New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani threatened to take away funding from the Brooklyn Museum of Art when it exhibited “Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection,” which included multi-media work by Chris Ofili, who used elephant dung to paint a picture of the Virgin Mary.

Starting in the 1990s, the controversy over arts funding took a back seat to other contemporary issues, but still simmered behind the scenes. The exception may have been the controversy over funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) that began in 2005, when the former chairman of the CPB, Kenneth Tomlinson, voiced his concern that programming leaned too far to the left of the political spectrum. The House Appropriations Committee voted to decrease funding to the CPB and to curtail funding in 2009. The CPB oversees National Public Radio, (NPR), the Public Broadcasting System (PBS), and Public Broadcasting International (PRI).

Beginning in 2006, state and local funding for the arts plummeted as the economy experienced a downturn. Some funds were later increased or completely reinstated, but many artists and art education programs that depend on federal money were affected. For instance, the NEA was allocated approximately the same amount of funding in 2006, $124 million, as in 1978, $123.8 million. In February 2011, the House voted to cut funding to the NEA by $22.5 million.

In 2015, controversy about the content of works funded by the NEA arose when the endowment granted $10,000 to a San Francisco theater company to produce a collection of plays about same-sex marriage. President Donald Trump attempted to eliminate all funding for the NEA in 2017 and 2018; however, in both years, a Republican-controlled Congress passed a budget that included continued funding for the program. A number of Republican legislators support the NEA, in particular because it funds art therapy programs for military veterans.

Arts Funding Today

In the United States, contemporary arts and cultural funding policy is developed and implemented at the national and regional levels. At the national level, responsibility for arts and cultural policies is divided among a number of federal institutions, including the National Endowment for the Arts, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Gallery, the Kennedy Center, the Office of Copyright and Patents, the National Trust for Historical Preservation, the Fine Arts Commission, and the General Services Administration Art in Architecture Program. At the state or local level, arts and cultural funding policy is increasingly tied to culture-led development in economically depressed urban environments such as Detroit and Washington, DC.

While some people object to the NEA on the grounds of its occasional funding of controversial works, there are others who object to it because they feel that government intervention in the arts leads to the creation of banal works that are designed to avoid controversy. Another argument against the NEA is that most of the country, besides large cities on the East and West Coast, does not benefit from it. However, it funds arts organizations and museums across the country, and those in rural areas and small cities often rely on the NEA for a larger percentage of their funding than major institutions such as New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

According to the NEA in 2022, it recommended an average of 2,300 grants per year, serving 4,000 communities. Some 41 million Americans attended NEA-funded live arts events, such as concerts, exhibitions, performances, and readings. Thirty-five percent of the organization's grants reached low-income audiences or populations that are underserved, and 11 percent of NEA-supported projects occurred in rural communities.

These essays and any opinions, information or representations contained therein are the creation of the particular author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of EBSCO Information Services.

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