Funding for which arts?

Jesse’s recent post, about how words like “art” don’t have universally agreed-upon, precisely-defined meanings, reminded me of a book I just read by one of my favorite bloggers, economist Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution. He’s gotten a lot of media and internet attention in the past couple of months for his e-book The Great Stagnation, but the one I’m referring to is an older volume called Good and Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding.

Good and Plenty makes the case that although the U.S. government ostensibly spends little on arts funding, compared to Europe for example, we also have huge de facto, indirect subsidies of art through copyright law and tax policies that encourage private giving. Those indirect subsidies are actually much more conducive to a thriving arts sector than Europe’s centralized funding, Cowen argues.

One of the many things I like about Cowen is his cheeky but serious way of challenging the ostensible reasons people have for their beliefs, or societies have for their institutions or laws. (This is something his friend and colleague Robin Hanson does even more persistently, by the way, over at another of my favorite blogs, Overcoming Bias.) The form of the argument is basically: You claim that the reason you do Y is because of X. But if you really believed X were the case, you would also do Z, which you don’t.

So in addition to the question of how we fund art, Cowen also asks why we’ve chosen to define “art” (for funding purposes, at least) to include certain things but not others. For example:

• What about fashion? Clothing design exhibits beauty and creativity just like sculpture, and a beautiful piece of clothing arguably has higher positive externalities than a beautiful sculpture (because the owner wears it in public, other people get to appreciate its beauty, unlike a privately owned sculpture which sits at home).
• What about sports? Many sports showcase stunning displays of grace and power, just like dance. And sports games, and seasons, have a lot in common with drama: protagonists, antagonists, triumph and defeat. “The drama in sports, of course, is real rather than staged, but presumably this should contribute to its aesthetic merit,” Cowen says.
• What about toys? “Most young children are deeply concerned with matters aesthetic,” Cowen says. “They are fascinated by colors, shapes, sounds, and textures… The toy presents the child with an aesthetic package, so to speak, which the child either loves or rejects. When children they love a toy, they are truly passionate about enjoying its aesthetic qualities.”

Yet our government doesn’t subsidize fashion, or toys, or sports (at least not for artistic reasons; local governments may fund stadiums and so on , but that’s for other reasons, like economic development). So that would seem to cast doubt on the reason people generally give to justify funding the arts — that they provide people with enjoyable and moving aesthetic experiences — since those reasons should also suffice to justify subsidizing things like sports and fashion and toys, which we don’t.

Of course, the big differences between the traditional arts and Cowen’s examples are that the former have (1) more cachet, historically, and (2) less commercial viability. But we still have to explain why we should spend the money to prop up the traditional arts when there are other sources of aesthetic enjoyment that don’t require any propping.