Should Art Be Subsidized?

Let me answer your question with a question (bitches love questions):

What is the role of a university? Do universities exist to provide graduates with marketable skills in their chosen career, or is there a broader remit to improve student's cognitive abilities, regardless of whether an employer will value a particular skillset?

 

Was about to reply on the other thread when this one got started.

All you have to do is look at what we do once we get a new piece of technology. We use it for porn.

But, once we're done with that, we use it to make and consume art.

The combustion engine is awesome. But you know what's even better? Putting it in a beautifully designed car and blasting some rock'n'roll through the stereo. The trades make stuff. The arts make it worth while.

Maybe the trades should be more heavily subsidized than the arts. They do go towards more basic needs. But its sad the degree to which the arts get disparaged.

 

My thoughts have already been summed up in the other topic, but since this topic was tailor-made...

Art has had a pretty interesting relationship with the government. Governments have ALWAYS subsidized art in some form. Whether it's today's National Endowment of the Arts or outright patronage, subsidizing it is nothing new. Should we? I'm not sure.

Art is the voice of a culture. The Village Idiot said it best:

I definitely agree with this. However, I'm more divided over having the government pay for it. What is art? It's subjective. Personally, I stare at something like this and go "How is this art?" Other people find meaning from it. What I consider to be art might be garbage to someone else.

It's such a general category, and I'm not sure if having the government pay for it actually ends up doing better than the age-old practice of rich people acting as patrons for artists and commissioning them to make stuff.

I think the government's role should be about what benefits the country materially. If (more) people are becoming wealthy, then we can afford to patronize the arts. Sudan doesn't have an art community; they're too busy trying to stay alive. The way we get art is by having more people with the income to spend on luxuries. Art is definitely a luxury, whether it's for mass consumption (video games, music, and movies) or for a reclusive billionaire who likes tempura paintings. Let's take care of necessities first so that we can afford luxury.

To do that, we need more people with valuable job skills. STEM fields, the trades, and other skilled technician jobs. Those are what's important. I think the art community will benefit just as much, if not more, from a more prosperous nation than it would if the government said, "We need art! Here's money to spend on art!"

 

Which is why poor people have no musical tradition whatsoever. Right?

There's not a biological need for art, but if you look at the ways people - even the very poor - spend their money, we definitely treat art like a necessity. It may well be some sort of psychological necessity that gives us the morale needed to take care of the other necessities.

 

The government should subsidize the arts for the same reason it pays for thing like public parks and public transport. They are public goods that are of enormous benefit to everyone, but are potentially going to undersupplied due to the tragedy of the commons/free-rider problem. We would all love to live in a world with a vibrant, thriving arts culture, but none of us wish to pay for it on an individual level. It's subject to the free-rider problem.

Arts provide an enormous positive externality in terms of cultural edification, and we would all be much, much worse off for their absence even if we are not consumers of the particular work in question (even if you never pick up Shakespeare, his existence is to your benefit).

It also is a career path with extremely high outcome variance that is often fundamentally unpredictable. At the age of 20, you know that if you are a capable financial analyst or engineer, you will have a somewhat reliable stream of future income. You can make no similar bet as an artist, as many artists tend to 1) fail or succeed financially largely based on luck and public whimsy, 2) even the most talented artists will often spend decades toiling in obscurity and poverty before becoming "big." Van Gogh died an unheralded pauper.


The reason you subsidize the arts versus more "useful" fields is that generally a lot of those more useful fields don't need it, and especially not at the college level. There is no shortage of private employers desperate to throw money at engineers, whereas the arts are perennially starving for funding.

For what it's worth, this is also why we fund science (in addition to military application). Most scientific developments are useless as such, and are several degrees of abstraction away from being marketable products. This means that absent subsidies, they're likely to be under provided relative to their benefit to society. One can't sell a Higgs-Boson particle, and coming up with billboard slogans for general relativity is tough. Many enormous breakthroughs such as the Internet would be unlikely to have been funded by any one corporation.

In a world without art, why bother? Beyond basic animal subsistence, culture is as good of a reason to exist as any other I can imagine.

Yeah, Africans just sit there and fling poop at each other in between wars.

 

In New York City, this is considered art.

 

I award you no points and may God have mercy on your soul. That's just one medium. Do you want me to find examples in the others? Because I'm sure that I can.

I'm not coherent enough right now to type out a thoughtful post, but I do want to add to MoreCowbell's Van Gogh mention with two more artists who never saw success in their lifetime.

Edgar Allen Poe
Herman Melville

As a current example I will throw in Cormac McCarthy who lived in abject poverty before he made it big.

 

Would Da Vinci and Michelangelo have flourished as they did without patronage (i.e., subsidies) from the wealthy of their day? Even genius and talent of their magnitude required supports to bring them to fruition.

 

I'll admit it - I was wrong about Sudan. That was thoughtless of me.

I'll respond to some of the other things later.

 

What is considered a practical or useful major? Very few degrees guarantee a stable career with a nice salary, benefits and comfortable lifestyle (if that's how our society is defining success and placing value on a degree). Having a business degree doesn't. Having a degree in a hard science is pretty worthless unless it leads to a life in academia and research. I think the only people who are "using their degrees" are graduating from trade schools and health science programs. Why are the arts being singled out in these threads? Getting a BS in physics or math is hardly useful. I know of several people with MBAs looking for a job. Why aren't we discussing cutting the funding of everything outside of trade schools or very specific grad programs?

 

I don't want to sound condescending, but anecdotes don't equal data. And I'm pretty sure the last thing America needs is fewer scientists and engineers.

 

You graudated what, 10 years ago? Perhaps there is some difference in employment statistics between then and now. Ask Aetius how he was able to just comfortably slide into a job after graduating from a top-20 engineering school. The arts majors who are currently unemployed are partially unemployed because they're arts majors, but mostly because employment numbers have been really shitty lately.





Business students end up in "related" fields because what isn't related to "business"? Saying someone works in "business" is almost like saying someone is employed.

Unless you are an accounting or finance major, the term "business" is so broad that it is completely useless, and their curriculum contains next to nothing that is of any direct use ("Oh, this 22 year old got an A- in a class in "Management," let's put him on the fast track!"), and even less in the way of rigor.

Omegaham and you have complained about people getting degrees for the mere sake of getting a degree. There is no better application of that complaint than undergraduate business programs.

Oddly, at least half the fields in this list appear to be "career aspirations" types of majors. In fact, expanding that list to 25, I see that industrial engineering has a higher unemployment rate than fine arts.

Almost no one really uses their undergraduate education in a meaningful way. Most undergraduate majors are litmus tests: were they smart enough to pass?

No one gives a shit about what math majors learn. Algebraic ring theory doesn't get much use outside of a classroom, and few people are interested in the proof of the central limit theorem. But people tend to give them jobs because they're convinced that they're smart.


The world needs more people who can do basic math, but probably needs fewer math majors.

 

Well, yes. If you want to be employed in Canada, studying things with mineral-and-petroleum applications out west is a good tactic.

But, for what it's worth, the Canadian UE rate is 7.3%, versus 8.2% in the US. And most of the eastern provinces have UE rates north of the US national rate.

 

You realize that this is a sort of circular logic, right? If large groups of people moved where unemployment figures were low, unemployment figures would no longer be low.

But more substantially.... people always say this without realizing that it's effectively impossible unless you either have large reserves of cash or a job offer waiting. How does one pay for the new apartment? Pay for transport? Pay for basic necessities? It's not like the landlord is going to spot you until you get a job, and the Canadian housing market (especially Calgary, since you mention the West specifically) is already inflated.

I generally think job-chasing with your major is a highly risky move, moreso than anyone gives credit for. You are making a bet about 1) what will be in demand 5 or 10 years down the road, and 2) your aptitudes. Most art students would make terrible engineers, and vice versa. Especially once their various predilections and talents are partially ingrained by age 18. I think most would be wise to look at what talents & interests they do have, and thereafter find the best application of them.