Are Federal Arts Programs Worth the Money?

Candidates haven’t weighed what works and what doesn’t.

O n Thursday, I wrote about philanthropy, which is how, mostly, we in America finance high culture. Americans are the most generous people in the world, with money we give in the many billions to support museums, theaters, symphonies, and dance and opera companies. The money’s tax-exempt, which helps keep high culture, by and large, free from the stagnation that comes with government largesse and control. Then there are the three federal agencies that support the arts. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS). Together they spend a bit under a billion dollars — less than 1 percent of arts spending. Do they have much of an impact? Yes and no.

I’ve followed the NEA’s grants to museums and exhibitions for years. The program is lame, and it gets lamer and lamer. A few years ago, before I started writing for NR, I was appointed to serve on an NEA selection panel. It was an eye-opener, and an eye-roller.

I’d seen its museum division’s discernment wither, and this had nothing to do with whether or not my museums got grants. The Addison Gallery, which I directed for years, wouldn’t take federal money, fearing the government might, one day, force it to disassemble its affirmative-action program. Intellectual rigor seemed not to be a consideration. Good, new art-history ideas seemed to be ignored. Grantees, I saw year after year, got money for outreach, mostly for school programs. I’m not against these programs. Rather, they’re soft scholarship — at best — and don’t move aesthetic or intellectual needles. And, for many years, grant winners tended to be well-heeled museums with big donor bases and professional grant writers.

Alas, what citizen panels see are vetted applications, staffers having sifted dynamite-infused ideas or ideas they didn’t understand, so what we’re left with is pablum. We got stuck on an application for a new children’s outreach program for the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield in Fairfield County in Connecticut. I know the place well. Ridgefield and the towns around it are among America’s richest. The program the museum wanted the NEA to fund was nice but innocuous.

“They should go out and raise the money from the locals,” I said. Always a diplomat, I didn’t say “bloated plutocrats,” “limousine liberals,” or “chardonnay socialists in gray flannel pantsuits.” Would the Aldrich be able to fund this program if it didn’t get federal money? Of course it could. For purely local programs, it ought to go to its ample donor base. I wanted the NEA to support good ideas and scholarship, not, as it seemed, art-making classes for kids dressed by Janie and Jack.

It was as though I’d filleted Santa, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy in front of the Ritz. “We don’t consider need,” Wendy Clark, head of the NEA museum division, said.

She’d served for years as head of the NEA’s literature division. She had no experience in the museum world. She was a culture bureaucrat and a Washington lifer. I learned that she — and her staff — had no idea how to discern whether a museum actually needed money. And they didn’t much consider quality, adventure, or ambition. They didn’t know how. They weren’t about the hard stuff. They were about the warm and fuzzy.

During the Covid mass hysteria and vacation from reality, Congress blew trillions of dollars. Federal arts agencies — the IMLS, NEA, and NEH — got hundreds of millions. The IMLS and NEH actually did some thoughtful, value-added things. The NEA, and I found this bizarre, sent checks for $50,000 to small- and medium-size past recipients of grants and $100,000 to big ones, few questions asked. At least on the museum side, they wouldn’t know a big idea if it fell on them.

Of course these agencies should consider need. For each application, the bureaucrats should ask whether a worthy program would happen without federal money. Sometimes, the answer is no. Often, it’s yes. Often a museum is going to do a project whether it gets a grant or not. If it gets grant money under those circumstances, it simply takes the cash it’s budgeted already and blows it on something else.

The NEA has, I know, lots of moving parts, among them divisions devoted to literature, music and opera, and theater. I’m not a critic in any of these fields, so I can’t judge the projects they fund.

Where the NEA makes a huge difference, at least for museums, is the Arts and Artifacts Indemnity. Created by Congress in 1975, it allows the feds, in layman’s language, to insure temporary loan exhibitions at American museums. If an indemnified Raphael on loan to an American museum goes down with the ship — Jesus, Mary, and Joseph forbid — taxpayers are on the hook. The current cap on taxpayer exposure at any given time, by law, is $15 billion.

This program has saved American museums billions of dollars in commercial insurance costs. A committee from the auction houses vets the value put on a work of art by its owners to ensure that it’s rooted in the real world of the marketplace. An NEA committee, mostly outside curators and museum directors, states whether the exhibition in question enhances the public’s understanding of art. The indemnity’s registrars vet the borrowing museum’s security and shipping plans. It’s all technically wonderful.

I’ve done indemnity applications. The program works well — so well that insiders worry that if congressional right-wingers understood how essential it is, they’d try to kill it. I don’t think that’s accurate. Paris 1874 and Bonnard’s Worlds, both of which I reviewed, Siena: The Rise of Painting, a show at the Met I’ll write about close to Christmas, and the Caspar Friedrich retrospective next spring are newly indemnified exhibitions. Let’s have a moratorium on Georgia O’Keeffe exhibitions as well as Matisse shows. They’re candy meant to attract crowds. Each has had so many shows. What’s there to say that’s new?

It’s not extraordinary for a single work of, say, Impressionism, or a Matisse, to have a $100 million value.

I have no problem with government benefits chaperoned by strings. There’s no such thing as free money when it comes to the Swamp, unless you’re an illegal alien, a student-loan deadbeat, or a wind-power mogul, which means you’re in the business of killing birds. But museums enjoying a federal indemnity should make the taxpayer-protected exhibition free to the public — believing as I do that museums such as the Met with vast numbers of good art in storage should also develop long-term loans with less blessed museums.

Sometimes, “share the wealth” makes sense. Currently, long-term permanent-collection loans between American museums don’t qualify for an indemnity, but they should. Wouldn’t a few of the Met’s hundreds of Impressionist paintings look great in San Antonio, or New Orleans, or Boise?

A few months ago, I profiled the National Endowment for the Humanities. The NEH and NEA overlap more and more, and it makes some sense to combine the two, but, historically, the NEH supports college and university research, archaeology, the classics, jurisprudence, and historic sites. It also supports public television and public radio, both of which I’d ditch, freeing them to embrace the pleasures and perils of private fundraising. The NEA supports short-term exhibitions and one-shot programs. The NEH supports individual scholars working on books. Congress blocked the NEA from supporting individual artists years ago, and rightly so.

I’ve always been impressed with the seriousness of the NEH. It’s like a university, except it hasn’t rotted from within, hasn’t been infantilized, and doesn’t facilitate Hamas fan clubs.

Both the NEA and the NEH have budgets of around $200 million. A chunk of that is pass-through money that goes, with few strings attached, to state arts commissions based on population. The budget of the IMLS is about $320 million. I can’t write too much about IMLS since I’m on its federal board, though we have no fiduciary responsibility and only listen and suggest. I will say that IMLS is the quiet miracle worker supporting libraries but also science, natural history, history, and children’s museums, botanical gardens, and archives. It focuses on Native American and Native Hawaiian museums.

Many of these museums and most of the archives are outside the Acela Corridor and have tiny donor bases.

One of IMLS’s biggest projects is expanding digital access, which gives archives worldwide reach. Digitizing and preserving digitized archives require an infrastructure that, for many small institutions, is new. IMLS helps there, too. Lots of its work is technical, but that work bolsters something that’s philosophical and patriotic. Libraries are probably the civic institutions with the most credibility. They’re probably the institution, given the collapse of the news business, that does the most to promote informed citizenship. A good library is the antidote to our contemporary version of agoraphobia. That’s the fear of the free market in ideas and knowledge.

The IMLS, NEA, and NEH have developed many partnerships driven by matching private money, giving more bang for the buck to federal dollars that support, say, historic-building infrastructure. Probably the most effective partnership is the Save America’s Treasures program, which involves these three agencies alongside the National Park Service and, since the program’s start in 1998, around 300 nonprofit historic homes, monuments, and gardens as well as conservation of objects such as Babe Ruth’s scrapbooks, a historic rocket or two, and Plimoth Plantation’s replica of the Mayflower.

This past year, money went to Washington Irving’s home, Sunnyside, in Tarrytown in New York and to Rudyard Kipling’s home in southeastern Vermont, where he wrote The Jungle Book. I hope the program jumps into the realm of church historic preservation. Many old churches with dwindling congregations own stained-glass windows by Tiffany, La Farge, and others. These cost a fortune to preserve, and raising money isn’t easy. It’s art. And who knows? It might save a soul or two.

The IMLS, NEA, and NEH have diversity, equity, and inclusion plans, since President Biden mandated them for all federal agencies the day he took office in 2021. These will, I hope, go out the door and to the dump on January 20, 2025.

A fourth federal arts program is this past Halloween’s phantom in chief. It’s the Cultural Programs Division of the Office of Citizen Exchanges of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the State Department. According to its minimalist website, it “brings the rich artistic traditions of the United States to foreign audiences through cultural exchanges.” It’s involved in the selection of the artist representing the United States at the Biennale in Venice, but what else does it do? “Where’s Jimmy Hoffa?” is likely a harder nut to crack, but this week at least this little, in-the-dark agency wasn’t talkin’.