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March 2005 |
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Are Culture Wars Inevitable in the Arts?
Arthur C. Brooks
Controversial art is nothing new in American cultural life. Over the past 20 years, scandals have erupted on numerous occasions, in which government funds have gone to subsidize the production or exhibition of art considered by some to be obscene, blasphemous, or offensively unpatriotic. The resulting clashes between opponents and supporters of the offending art have constituted battles in America's so-called "culture wars" between one group that is traditional, conservative, and religious, and the other which is permissive, liberal, and secular.
Take, for example, the infamous Sensation exhibit at New York City's Brooklyn Museum of Art, which is funded with City subsidies, and uses a city-owned building. In September 1999, the Museum opened a show featuring British artists under age 40. The show had several pieces that generated immediate controversy. The most notorious was "Holy Virgin Mary," a large painting by Nigerian-born artist Chris Ofili, in which the Madonna was adorned with elephant dung and pictures of women's genitalia cut out from pornographic magazines. Another piece some people found objectionable was Damien Hirst's "This Little Piggy Went to Market, This Little Piggy Stayed Home," which featured a pig split in half and preserved in formaldehyde.
Protests erupted from traditional religious groups, conservative political activists, and New York's Republican Mayor, Rudolph Giuliani. In a September 1999 press conference, Giuliani asked, rhetorically, "How can you ignore something as disgusting, horrible and awful as this?" and proceeded to take action against the government-funded museum. He cut off city funding, attempted to fire the Museum's Board of Trustees, and announced plans to evict the Museum from its building. Sensation's supporters reacted with equal bombast, accusing the Mayor of censorship by threatening to withhold public resources, and of having no sense of the exhibit's exquisite quality. Arnold Lehman, the Museum's Director, declared that the exhibition was "a defining exhibition of a decade of the most creative energy that's come out of Great Britain in a very long time." Lehman, with the backing of the American Civil Liberties Union, sought and won a legal restraining order against the Mayor’s actions.
Public furor disappeared when the exhibit moved on to its next location; the controversy became moot, and the City dropped its action against the museum after six months. While it has faded from public view, however, the case still illustrates the peculiarities of the public value of controversial art: It is a paradox in which, in the very same works of art, some people see a valuable contribution, while others see cultural degradation. And as such, it may suggest to some people that "culture wars" in the world of art are inevitable.
The benefits and costs from art
Most goods and services meaningfully affect only their direct producers, sellers, and consumers. For example, when I buy groceries at the supermarket, the only parties likely to perceive the transaction (or care about it) are me and the store. This, however, is not the case for the class of goods and services that produce what economists call "externalities": spillover effects onto those that have no direct market relationship to the good or service. Externalities can be either positive or negative. For example, a smelly paper mill may negatively affect its neighbors; or our schools' improvement of children might advance social conditions for everybody.
Economists argue that externalities tend to distort markets, and advocate policies that correct them. In the case of external costs, the party imposing the externality must somehow bear this cost in order to make production or consumption decisions that are efficient. The remedies favored by economists for addressing external costs are usually a variant of taxation: Producers or consumers of the activity in question should face fines, fees, or some other penalties, with the objective that they lower the activity to acceptable levels. External benefits receive the opposite treatment: The activity is subsidized or otherwise rewarded; as such, producers or consumers have an incentive to increase it.
The standard economic case for government support of the arts can be understood as one of correcting a beneficial externality. The traditional reasoning is that the arts, while directly enriching artists, arts firms, and arts consumers, also produce benefits that spill over onto the rest of us. The possible sources of external benefits can be classified as follows.
- Education. People may be culturally enriched by living in a community with a vital arts sector, even if they don’t specifically attend arts events.
- Prestige. The arts may bring external prestige to their community.
- Option for future use. People may value the option to consume the arts in the future, and hence derive benefit from their current preservation.
- Bequests to future generations. Future generations may enjoy arts that are preserved today.
- Economic improvement. The arts might improve a community’s economic conditions by attracting "high-value" citizens who seek an artistic environment.
- Expressive freedom. Society may benefit from an environment in which tolerance (expressed in subsidies) flourishes for all kinds of art.
- Diversity. Society might benefit from greater cultural tolerance when majority groups are exposed to other cultures ands taste through the arts.
The external benefits of the arts are not the end of the story, however. Indeed, the case against controversial art such as that in Sensation can be understood in terms of external costs. These costs can be categorized as follows. - Offense. People may be offended by indirect exposure to (or even the mere existence of) art that has religious, sexual, or political content. This offense may come because the art denigrates something or someone of value (e.g. the Madonna), or because it glorifies something or someone disliked (e.g. homosexuality).
- Inscrutability. There may be cost involved with art that is intellectually or aesthetically impenetrable for the majority of people.
In the case of most goods and services that create externalities, disagreements arise over the magnitude of the effect, but not whether it is positive or negative. For instance, arguments about pollution abatement policies usually focus on whether, how, and how much to penalize pollution production; they don’t feature one group that believes pollution is bad, and another that believes it is good. But this disagreement over the sign of the external effect is precisely the case with controversial art. If the Brooklyn Museum's Director calls Sensation "the defining exhibition of a decade," and the Mayor calls it "disgusting, horrible, and awful," we can be confident that there are at least two groups in the population, including one that sees Sensation as inflicting a public cost, and the other that sees it as creating a public benefit. This provides insight into the apparent intractability of battles in the culture wars: The sides are culturally simply too far apart.
This point lurks in the background of my recent study in Public Administration Review with Greg Lewis, which shows that, on an extremely wide range of cultural issues, supporters of the arts bear little resemblance to the rest of the population. For example, we have found that arts donors are 32 percentage points more likely than the general American population to say they have no religion, 18 points less likely to see homosexual sex as wrong, 10 points more likely to describe themselves as politically left-wing, and 12 points more likely to support abortion on demand.
These differences make cultural policy difficult, as long as any of the subsidized content is controversial. Indeed, it is difficult to conceive of a satisfying policy for any activity if one part of the population perceives efficient treatment of it to involve subsidies, while for the other it involves censorship (or at very least, that it not be government-funded).
What is the solution? As ingrained as the differences are between art-lovers and the rest of society, the culture wars may not be inevitable in the arts. Options to eliminate the controversy--at least in the context of public policy--come in four types: elimination of direct arts funding; controlling publicly-funded content; and shifting funding from arts supply to arts demand.
First, public arts policy will be far less likely to lead to controversial content if there is no longer any direct funding. Governments could eliminate direct public subsidies to the arts. Note that this would not mean the effective end of public arts funding. On the contrary, researchers have consistently found that indirect funding—from tax revenues foregone on tax-deductible contributions to arts organization—outweigh direct subsidies by at least $5-to-$1.
Second, legislatures and arts agencies can place more restrictions on the content of subsidized art. To some extent, the U.S. Congress has done this by adding a "decency clause" to federal arts funding guidelines, eliminating grants to individual artists, and focusing funding on cultural institutions. It might go further and eliminate funding for contemporary art museums and theater in favor of institutions that preserve the great art of the past. Though this could diminish religious and sexual controversy, it might strengthen concerns about the elitist nature of arts subsidies.
Third, government could shift its support away from both artists and art institutions to arts education, exposing more children and young adults to politically and socially uncontroversial art. If arts education advocates are correct, universal exposure could have many potential benefits, from enhanced intelligence (e.g., the "Mozart Effect") to less juvenile delinquency. Currently, arts audiences are less religious and more sexually permissive than other Americans, but that may simply be because people with these values tend to be attracted to the arts as they currently exist. Broader arts education could enlarge arts audiences, perhaps especially for art that supports traditional religious and sexual values. Of course, a final alternative to these policies is to do nothing. It may be the case that culture wars skirmishes in the arts are inconsequential, compared with the importance of the art subsidized. Whether or not this is the case, however, should be the focus of responsible ongoing assessment of the benefits and costs of art and arts policy.
Arthur C. Brooks is Associate Professor of Public Administration and Director of the Nonprofit Studies Program at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University.
Further reading
Arthurs, Alberta and Glenn Wallach (Eds.) (2001). Crossroads: Arts and Religion in American Life. New York, NY: The New Press.
Brooks, Arthur C. (2004). "In Search of True Public Arts Support," Public Budgeting & Finance 24(2): 88-100.
Frey, Bruno S. (1997) "Evaluating Cultural Property: The Economic Approach," International Journal of Cultural Property. 6 (2) 231-246.
Lewis, Gregory B. and Arthur C. Brooks (2005). "A Question of Morality: Artists' Values and Public Funding for the Arts." Public Administration Review 65(1): 8-17.
Marquis, Alice Goldfarb (1995). Art Lessons: Learning from the Rise and Fall of Public Arts Funding. New York: Basic Books.
Rothfield, Lawrence (Ed.) (2001). Unsettling "Sensation": Arts Policy Lessons from the Brooklyn Museum of Art Controversy. New Bunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press.
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