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Comment by marcus_holmes | Hacker News Reader

I'm always opposed to government funding the arts.

Mainly because if the government funds it, then they become the customer. Arts programs become designed to appeal to whatever the current set of civil servants think is worth funding. Academics get pulled in and join the bubble. The whole mess starts moving away from any kind of relevance to wider society and disappears up its own intellectual orifice.

And the sheer arrogance of arts intellectuals saying "we're invaluable for society, so we should be paid by the government to do whatever we want to do" beggars belief.

I'm way happier for the market to decide. There are viable business models out there for good quality content with niche appeal. It doesn't all have to be mass-market pap to be commercially sustainable.

Failing that, there's always UBI. We should all be paid by the government to do whatever we want.

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The way you frame it is only a problem if civil servants are not part of society and that people don't have an influence about what the government spends money on, that is: you don't live in some form a representative democracy. Clearly lots of people value the arts enough to want the government to be funding it. To frame it as some ivory tower conspiracy to get a free ride from the government seems a little disingenuous.

I don't necessarily disagree that there are business models that could support good quality content, or that UBI is a good way to keep arts alive; maybe we could have all three.

> Clearly lots of people value the arts enough to want the government to be funding it.

More accurately, they want someone else to fund it. They don't find it worthwhile to spend their own money on it.

> The way you frame it is only a problem if civil servants are not part of society and that people don't have an influence about what the government spends money on, that is: you don't live in some form a representative democracy.

I mean, we don't live in a representative democracy. Not in the sense you're describing.

(Assuming you, like me, live in the U.S.) Civil servants are not elected, are not directly accountable to elected officials, and are certainly not drawn from a representative cross section of the public. You may feel like they represent you, but that is (to be frank) little more than an expression of your own place in society. Civil servants form a discrete and powerful class, with their own interests, unions, and lobbying groups. Ignoring this is, optimistically, naive.

To be clear, we're talking about funding of the arts here. Without going down the rabbit hole of debating all of your critiques of the civil servant, if you really have this view of the public sector of the government of the US, then public spending on arts funding is pretty far down the totem pole as far as problems go.

I will say I think your general picture of civil servants as a cabal of lobbyists and special interest does apply to a portion (arguably a disproportionately powerful portion) of them, but the population of civil servants is huge and is definitely not monolithic.

I agree with parts of this, but I do want to complicate it a bit...

> the sheer arrogance of arts intellectuals saying "we're invaluable for society, so we should be paid by the government to do whatever we want to do" beggars belief.

The arts aren't the only place where this happens. A lot of scientific/medical research is in part or whole funded by public money. Is your belief just as beggared by "the sheer arrogance of scientists saying: we're invaluable for society, so we should be paid by the government to study whatever we want"?

> I'm way happier for the market to decide. There are viable business models out there for good quality content with niche appeal. It doesn't all have to be mass-market pap to be commercially sustainable.

I see a connection between people trying to carve out a living in OSS and in the arts. Many artists and OSS developers are just people who work a day job that they may like, hate, or be indifferent to--and then go do something they are passionate about in their spare time.

Do we, at scale, have a better society when most of these people's productive hours are fettered to whatever pays their bills (whether it uses their talents or squanders them) and they have to squirrel away energy for those passions--or are we better off when they can chase what makes them want to wake up on this side of the dirt every day?

Markets can absolutely be unsustainable.

Here's a very simple model of an art ecosystem which can't be sustained by the free market: "Popular art" is widely consumed, but can only be produced by "good artists." "Good artists" are a minority, and must be inspired by "high art." "High art" isn't popular enough to sustain itself, but without it, "popular art" can't exist. Voila, grants are a necessity within the model.

Obviously the model is pretty simplistic, but my point should be clear: You can't just assume that the free market leads to the best outcomes. Lots of the time, incentives just don't line up.

> Academics get pulled in and join the bubble. The whole mess starts moving away from any kind of relevance to wider society and disappears up its own intellectual orifice.

Surely politicians would rather be seen as supporting popular art than academic art, no? "Disappearing into their own orifices" won't impress voters.

Besides, lots of great art gets government grants. I suspect this isn't a real-world problem.

I dispute that popular art is inspired by, and cannot exist without, high art.

Popular art usually comes from street art, not high art.

Then we can make the reverse argument, substituting "high art" for "the art of the downtrodden," which is sanitized and repackaged for the mainstream. The underlying idea — that the art which inspires popular artists is distinct from the art produced by popular artists — is the same. It's still a simplistic model, but it illustrates the point equally well.

but the key point about street art is that it is not funded (and I would argue that it cannot be funded - any attempt to do so destroys it).

Sure it is. The artists have to eat somehow.

Hmm, if the market were the only decider, presumably only the richest could have, say, a large sculpture? Or would businesses underwrite those as a goodwill gesture? I'm not sure that public art is all good, or was even the best use of the money, but I guess on balance I appreciate the impulse.

There's a long history of rich people funding the arts, voluntarily. The great art coming from medieval Italy, for example.

There is a long history of feudalism and ignorance and illteracy, of starvation and war. What does that tell us?

It tells us that life in modern America is pretty good.

Do you oppose government funding of parks?

If the point of funding a park is to create a beautiful space that we can all enjoy for free, then no.

If the point of funding a park is to "fund parks" and some people get allocated a bunch of money to create whatever they feel like creating, while others get nothing, based purely on the whims of whoever allocates the funding with no accountability, then yes.

> I'm always opposed to government funding the arts.

Even participatory theatrical work like the TSA?

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