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Yes indeed, I was directly answering the parent comment, but the post is about "Who pays for the arts?" so you have a good point, I've read your other comments as well. Generally subsidising art properly seems like such a fundamentally hard problem. I think a good policy would be to balance how much is given to popular art, fringe art and academic art, and have very different criteria to judge their merit. I think they all have value, and I cannot see a better way of making decisions about "academic" art unless it is by their peers, however elitist that is. This can be counterbalanced by promoting some popular art, which is judged against its, well, broad popularity, a bit more democratic, but that has plenty of perverse incentives too. And what about "fringe" art? The truly innovative stuff. There is really no way to judge the merit of that by contemporaries, so perhaps we should prioritize helping people that can prove their commitment to an artsy lifestyle and have consistent output, whatever it is, as long it is not too derivative. But think about what actually democratic art subsidising would be, having elected officials only in charge of it: effectively propaganda for the party that is currently in power. There is a similar problem with funding science, which I believe is much more dangerous and has an enormous impact. You either have peer committees judging scientific merit by whatever criteria they feel is valid with no accountability, or you focus on performance metrics (citations, papers in reputable journals...), or again you have unqualified elected officials making rather arbitrary decisions based on public perception. They are all kind of terrible, it's such a hard problem. I guess the solution, again, is counter-balancing the terribleness of each option against the others, which is kind of what we are doing now. And it is terrible, but it kind of consistently works, quite inefficiently. But relative to what? Is there something better? |