Blowback for Nikki Haley

For those readers not on planet South Carolina, there was pretty big skirmish today over the fate of Arts funding. Newly-elected Governor Nikki Haley made these remarks in her State of the State address:

The reality is the role of South Carolina’s government in the year 2011 can no longer be to fund an Arts Commission that costs us $2.05 million. It cannot be one that funds ETV, costing taxpayers $9.6 million. And it cannot be one that pays taxpayer dollars to lobbyists, costing us $1.2 million a year.

When you release government from the things it should not be responsible for, you allow the private sector to be more creative and cost efficient. And you allow government dollars to go to the places and people they should.

The proposed elimination of the SC Arts Commission went before the state Ways and Means Commission today and a huge, grassroots call went out to artists statewide. The result? Nice try, Nikki, but not today. I've never been more thankful for Charleston in my life, the Chair of this Committee, Rep. Chip Limehouse hails from there. Rule of war # 1: know your enemy. Did she really think that a politician from Charleston would be the one to hatchet the Arts Commission and make national headlines if our state had become the single state in the Union without a government Arts agency?

But what I really want to address here is the second part of Governor Haley's remarks, the argument of what government should and should not be responsible for. It is popular mythology to suggest that when government turns over essential services such as utilities, transportation, health care and education to the private sector that the people no longer pay for it. In reality, few of these industries are viable in terms of making a profit, and so what ends up happening is that the government subsidizes whomever bought them. So, not only do we lose quality and pay higher rates for these services, but we are actually still paying for them with our taxes; only now those taxes are going toward private profits.

Beyond the fiscal fallacy of Keynesian economics, there is the very real moral question about the role of government in the welfare and protection of its people. Go to a mall or a gated community for a day and ask yourself if you really want to privatize law enforcement. Call your insurance company and while you're waiting on hold ask yourself if you really think that we should put firefighting in the private sector. We are only as strong as the weakest among us as a society. When we discard our poor, our old, our hungry and our disabled we are an impoverished, outdated, empty and crippled empire. There is no basis in human decency for the argument of no government and a completely unfettered market. What I find most ironic is that this argument so often (though certainly not exclusively) comes from people who claim to follow a prophet who lived with lepers (that would be AIDS patients today, people) and associated almost solely with the poor and needy.

As an artist I don't love the SC Arts Commission. I think they are a fat, bloated, self-serving behemoth. But to eliminate our only state Arts agency is a reckless and irreversible act. This state needs culture, critically so.

Some argue that the private sector should fund the Arts. Guess what? They do. They do so generously through grants, endowments, sponsored exhibitions and commissions. Virtually no museum show in the world could be mounted without the support of some corporate or private sponsor. The most elite of private sector deem the Arts to be of worth, and the governmental subsidies which keep them afloat are meager at best. Thus, the wealthiest among us are in favor of at least some government funding of the Arts. Moreover, artists have been state-sponsored for centuries. Artists we consider to be the greatest in history would never have survived if they depended solely on the market. Does that mean they were not great? Does financial viability determine the worth of all things? Or does a Great Society implicitly demand great culture and great art?

Some say the Culture Wars are back. I say they never left us. But I do know that when times are darkest, people need what good art has to offer the most. Art reminds us of who we are and what we can be, and sometimes what we have become.