For every dollar I give to Uncle Sam, 12 cents goes to military defense contractors like Raytheon. 0.004 cents go to the National Endowment for Art.

I know which of those two provides more value to society, and I think it's a fucking joke how art & music are not seen as things humans do like birds making a nest, but as something to commodify and court private investment with. We completely cut art and music from most curriculums in K-12 to afford budget cuts and what did we get out of them? Did you notice the extra fraction of a fraction of a penny this year on your return?

The reason private entities don't fund art is the same reason they don't fund public transit or worker pensions or guaranteed pay sick leave or... it's not profitable. I yearn for the day Americans are willing to support something regardless of how much money it makes them. Especially for a country that waxes so much poetic about its "moral majority".

As a person living outside of US I appreciate those 12 cents from you much more than 0.004. US provides at least some level of global security and I don't want this role to be taken by any other country. As for art, I always can look for other options.

I would rather your own country pay for your own defense (and join NATO for a boost) but if the USA has to be a hegemony rather than Russia or China, I can see your point.

We have enough money to do both! I like that the US military is a military superpower. And I like finding art (and healthcare, and a bunch of other things). If we stopped giving uber rich people unearned tax breaks, we could afford to do them trivially.

What global security? The military has done more harm than good and the reason no one fights back is because of how mighty it is and the IMF. Look at Afghanistan and Iraq, did it leave it better off? Or its influence in Latin America. How's it's going in Ukraine, other than selling weapons? You don't want the US to "protect" you.

Billions are spent on art. Every video game, movie, cartoon, anime, song, comic book, coffee table book, and even ad, is art. There is arguably no reason the government needs to fund art as it's already extremely well funded.

It isn't, and only someone who mostly consumes art but doesn't create it says otherwise. The possible exceptions being artists already regally compensated and upset they aren't making more (e.g. Don Henley)

Take any city of cosmopolitan reputation, and take away their public arts programs and presence, and I guarantee in a generation, they will wither out, as the prestige/tourist status and even business status will decline.

Take a city like San Jose where I live; smaller neighbors Oakland and SF have vibrant ecosystems between creatives and public works that fosters their reputations as places worth seeing. SJ has a small but active community that largely has to scrap for their own, such that its largely overlooked to the point that most of its best talent only gets known after it leaves for cities that will recognize them and provide tools an opptys for them (e.g. Cellista, Peanut Butter Wolf, etc). And even SF is pricing out creatives, such that many are booking for Oakland or out of state to continue.

The arts are poorly funded, and in the few places they do better, tends to be in old bunkers where socialites can 'invest'/launder their money and get a surname placed on a building.

Apparently you've defined "the arts" as things people don't want to pay for and hence you think the government should pay for them.

I define the arts as things artist make.

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+art+of+spiderman

https://www.amazon.com/Art-Matrix-Newmarket-Pictorial-Movieb...

https://www.amazon.com/Art-Ratatouille-Karen-Paik/dp/0811858...

https://www.amazon.com/Art-Sleeves-Album-Covers-Artists/dp/0...

https://www.amazon.com/Magazine-Power-Photography-Katherine-...

> only someone who mostly consumes art but doesn't create it says otherwise.

I've created art that has collectively sold to 20-30 million people. Have several titles to my name and have hundreds of artist friends making $70k-$150k + royalties across various industries. I can look at the credits list of any movie or video game and see hundreds, sometimes thousands more. Also have friends doing patreon, etsy, and youtube making a living making art.

"The Arts" are doing just fine.

> I define the arts as things artist make.

And "artist" as "anyone who manages to sell some shit that doesn't fit into any other category", judging from your links?

Your reasoning feels just as wrong as the GP's.

""The Arts" are doing just fine. "

No, you are doing fine. You are not the entirety of the space, but thanks for playing.

I always thought art was for creation’s sake not capitalism (though it could be both). And I believe unbridled creativity is the bleeding edge of innovation.

Under a pure profit motive, the whole of art will converge around the best ROI, and spaces for new ways of expressing and perceiving will become narrow.

Sure it’s easier than ever to create and disseminate art, but also harder than ever to find art that isn’t streamed or commodified down your throat.

If for no other reason, some kind of non-corporate funding is needed so that new artistic outputs can generate a signal amongst mass produced art. Maybe that’s not the govt, but it sure ain’t MassMediaPublisherProducerCorp.

Many (most?) celebrated works of art were for $$$$. Go into any museum of classical art, it's almost all art that was made because someone paid the artist to make it.

>it’s already extremely well funded

Pretty sure no one in the arts agrees with this. As a filmmaker I know I certainly don’t. What makes you say that? I’m curious where this opinion comes from.

You seem to think the arts is a bunch of connected people getting welfare to make terrible-to-mediocre art no one actually wants, and because that doesn't get obscene amounts of funding that the arts as a whole are underfunded. Movies, music, gaming, industrial design, advertising, architecture, publishing, and more are each individually billion dollar industries with an enormous amount of diversity in what is produced. Additionally, hobbyists can go easily semi-pro (or pro) nowadays thanks to websites like Amazon (books), YouTube (movies), SoundCloud (music), Etsy (design/physical art), and Patreon (other). The problem that you are describing is that people who make art that no one wants or people who suck at getting their art to people who like it are not rich. If you make something people like it is easier than any other time in history to make a living in art.

> I yearn for the day Americans are willing to support something regardless of how much money it makes them.

HN sneers about "voting against their own interest" when they do that.

Maybe I haven’t been around here long enough but this entire comment section is very disheartening and at least somewhat not what I expected. Seems like a lot of folks here simply think “if it isn’t particularly profitable/giving a direct ROI to investors, as well as self-sustaining, then it isn’t worth it.”

It seems like a lot of Americans are brainwashed into thinking that "public transit or worker pensions or guaranteed pay sick leave or..." are Socialist, or even worse, Communist.

They are socialist, but they should be available as well. Socialism isn't a bad word, and neither is Capitalism, both can be used in moderation. It's just the balance has swung way too far in the USA, and it's mostly controlled by corporations (and therefore is crony capitalism). The only place US citizens still have much power is in social reform and even that is being subjugated by crony appointments to the Supreme court and the Red states which are currently passing acts of oppression against LGBQT and women with nods from the Red supreme court.

I would point out, as an aside, that Opera itself is basically "an open-source community of musical-play development" — i.e. performances where the source material is in the public domain such that anyone can put on a performance of them without paying royalties.

This is unlike "musicals", which are protected by copyright, and are thus only run by the musical's rights-holder's licensed troupe(s), in a particular place (usually Broadway), with a particular interpretation of the material (the rights-holder's); where the revenues are due to high ticket prices that can be charged often only due to the artificially-created scarcity of performances of said musical due to IP law. (I.e. for many musical, nobody is going because they're fans of the particular actors/director/etc; they just wanted to see a performance of musical X, akin to what you'd get from seeing opera X. But there's only one available performance of a given musical X. Musical producers have a monopoly on performances of their musical.)

Musicals make money, by design. Opera does not make money, by design. Instead, opera houses take donations, in much the same way that you might imagine a "local open-source software development collective" might take donations.

When the people of a municipality get together and decide that they consider their local opera house a "local cultural institution" worth supporting with their tax money (usually only to prop it up in bad donation years), this does certainly make the opera house into a "government-backed" project. But in this case, the "government" here is just the mob-action of the people of the city. It's the atheist version of a church congregation agreeing that their tithes should be partly directed to some local needy cause.

While I love opera and have supported it financially in multiple places I've resided, I find it laughable that any major urban electorate in the US would actually support the Opera fiscally if that decision was left to them directly.

Nothing in a democracy happens because the majority of constituents want it to happen. The majority of constituents don't know or care enough to explicitly agree with any particular novel-and-domain-specific policy.

Instead, things happen in a democracy because vocal minorities of constituents push for it, and nobody in the rest of the constituency cares enough to push in the opposite direction.

If a policy turns out to be disliked by the majority, the expectation is that the policy will rile up another vocal minority enough that they'll be inspired to come along and advocate to change things back in the other direction. If no vocal counter-minority ever forms, the policy stays.

To be clear, this isn't a corruption of the democratic process; rather, this is what it means to have a decision be made "democratically."

See also: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1039854944

I am well aware of this. I'm responding to the notion that support of institutions like the Kennedy Center has any correspondence to the desires of anything beyond an extreme minority of the population. You're lecturing the wrong person.

Most programs aren't supported by most people. However, the bundle of programs is. That's compromise.

West End theatre in London is developed by a complex amalgamation of arts organizations, grants, &c. and personally I find the scene more inventive and exciting than broadway, as a theater-goer.

> for any private entity to have enough skin in the game to fund it.

This is exactly what capital markets are for and some capable and incentivized entrepreneur would acquire/develop such a venue and charge rental rates as applicable.

The answer to arts funding is not “capitalism” any more than military funding is. We don’t question the financial cost there because we assume there is a broader benefit beyond direct profits. Why aren’t the arts treated the same way? Do people really not see why they are worth funding, regardless of whether or not they turn a profit?

Unless I’m misunderstanding your point, you’re sort of indirectly advocating against grants for the arts. Is that accurate?

Yes, there is an issue with megastadiums that double as a concert venue. Among other things, the stadium and associated concert revenue, while built with government money, go to the sports team.

It's hard to get a large amphitheater going without government support. While I'm sure there are examples, but none spring to mind either currently or throughout history. But subsidizing live events of a revolving nature is different from subsidizing a billionaires sports team.

The flip side of it is I can't imagine going entirely private either. You would have a billion dollar asset completely beholden to the local government, which could extract what they want from you.

> You would have a billion dollar asset completely beholden to the local government, which could extract what they want from you.

That's not how anything in America works. Billion dollar skyscrapers or complexes as private enterprises exist, often in the same jurisdiction as they stadiums.