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Comment by greggman | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure this will get down voted but why, in the last 30 years, have we needed the National Endowment for the Arts at all?

Art is massively funded. The Motion Picture Arts, The Musical Arts, The Art of Literature, The Art of Architecture, The Popular Arts (as San Diego calls comics and graphic novels), The Video Game Arts

Kickstarter will help fund more art. That's great. I doubt it will get rid of NEA. The NEA is about funding things nobody wants. If people wanted them they'd already fund them directly.

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There's a difference between getting funding from the NEA for the purpose of pursuing your work and starting a Kickstarter campaign for designing consumables. Yes, artists "make great T-shirts," but how is that the same as receiving a grant to pursue your work?

Let's say I have some large sculpture I'd like to create, but it requires more money than I have. I could find someone privately to fund it (and likely own it when I am finished), I could apply for an NEA grant, or, could I create a Kickstarter project? Maybe, but at that point, it's just a donation service, right?

Related, as far as "art no one wants": can you back up assertions that every dollar the NEA gives out is to hacks that no one cares about?

http://www.nea.gov/grants/recent/12grants/12AAE.php?CAT=Art%...

Certainly we can all find some recipients in that list who think aren't worthy (art is subjective, right?), but no one cares about jazz performances at the Lincoln Center?

> The NEA is about funding things nobody wants.

That's an interesting perspective. I see it more as a tragedy of the commons situation. It's possible to make important and influential art which is not commercially viable. NEA is great for funding art that wouldn't look good on a T-Shirt, but is beneficial to the culture as a whole.

Is it?

The majority of art created today isn't founded because it doesn't look good on a T-shirt. It is because it is crap.

And you art doesn't have to fit on a T-shirt to be founded. Stories could be printed in beautiful books, movies and documentaries made available as high quality downloads, paintings as posters, etc.

The only art you couldn't found this way would be art that didn't say anything to anybody. §100/year from 10 thousand people is a pretty good wage. If you can't get 10 thousand people to see something in you art, then it is properly because your art is crap.

Is it?

You equate financial viability with artistic value. But, there was Vincent van Gogh; large swaths of what we consider art today was commissioned by kings and popes and presidents on their dime, not sold or traded; it is virtually impossible, in the Kickstarter model, to fundraise sculptures and installations.

I certainly don't think art needs an erudite committee approving it for 'value' (in a non-financial sense), but neither does it need to be subjected to the tyranny of the majority, lest we want to limit ourselves to bazaar kitsch dolls and whatever else can be easily mass-made and sold. So while Kickstarter can certainly replace entities like NEA for many artists (many projects seem easier, logistically, to fund through KS) I don't know this says NEA is no longer needed.

But that is the key issue, you are not subject to the tyranny of the majority. Your quest is just to find a few people who like your art. The majority can hate it, consider you a witch and attempt to burn you at the stakes.

All of that doesn't matter. Just that a few people like you.

> Art is massively funded.

No it's not. Not compared to the military or sports.

> The NEA is about funding things nobody wants.

Really?! There are so many incredible projects funded in my state alone [1]. I find this argument similar to the narrow minded view "What's the point of going into space?".

[1] http://www.nea.gov/grants/recent/12grants/states1/12_states1...

The problem is that the people who would loses out if NEA was closed would lose a lot, whereas those who would benefit would benefit only a little bit.

Art may be massively funded, but I generally evaluate art based on two criteria:

- Skill (how much skill did it take to produce?) - Expressiveness (how well does it convey something or evoke emotions?)

Neither of those criteria will necessarily make something popular, which is why I think a completely crowdsourced approach to funding art may not give us the best results.

Not to say that the NEA is the best solution by any means, but I do think there is some value to funding art that "nobody wants" because that is the same art that has the potential to be priceless in the future.

Additionally, art is very different from business. The quality/originality of the work and its popularity/commercial success are almost completely unrelated. You just have to look at the same industries you pointed out earlier. How many of the works of art those industries produced were made for the purpose of capitalizing on an opportunity to make money? How many were made to be truly expressive of ideas?

If all art is popularly funded, you'd only get pop.

There are certain types of investments that are very long-term and tend to have high risk. These sort of investments tend to fair poorly in a free market system--markets tend to only look at the short/medium term and shy away from certain kinds of risk.

A perfect parallel is basic research. A significant amount of basic research in a bunch of fields (like cosmology and more abstract mathematics) is done on public funding. Why? It's simple: companies and individuals rarely want to invest in such ventures because there is no guarantee they will be useful in any reasonable time frame. And yet this is doubtless a good investment for the future--we are much better off thanks to mathematical developments that most people would have thought too abstract initially.

If you asked the people on the street to fund research in category theory (before it got all popular :P), nobody would have done it. So basic research is exactly the same--it's funding something nobody wants. And yet it is patently useful.

Basic research is exactly one of the things that I do want even a minimal government to fund. The exact same logic applies to art. After all, I certainly don't know what sort of art will have cultural significance in the future, and don't see any reason to exclusively trust the public at large either--just the same as I don't know what mathematical research will yield useful advancements and wouldn't trust the public there either.

> If all art is popularly funded, you'd only get pop.

I'm going to go ahead and yell, "False!" on this. Music is almost entirely popularly funded (i.e.-no government grants). Pop is not the only music that exists. There are many niches and genres of music, for good reason--there's a lot of money out there. It's not an American election--more than one party can win.

Your other points are moot. Research and art are two very different things. Art is an expression, research is the seeking of knowledge. That knowledge may or may not be valuable to us in the future (and may or may not be worth the cost), but we're willing to take those risks because the reward can be fantastic. Art has its importance, but scientific research has practical and valuable applications, and there lies all the difference.

I cannot think of what art could possibly require a long-term and high-risk investment (long-term being on the order of a decade) that is currently not supported by the private market.

Note that you didn't discuss the fine arts, the one category that actually is heavily funded through grants and sponsors. Free and cheap access to the masters work is about education.

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