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Some time ago here from this bully pulpit I suggested that the American government could afford to be a little more generous when it comes to public funding for the arts.
I mean, in two days we spend as much in Iraq as we spend in an entire year on all federal funding for arts and culture in America – that includes subsidies to museums, dance companies, folk music archives, inner-city writing programs, documentary film festivals, local orchestras…everything combined – even a little support for a certain weekly public radio arts & culture show broadcast out of New York.
Or looked at another way: the budget for just the National Endowment for the Arts is about the same as what a single Hollywood blockbuster costs to produce or no more than a really highly paid CEOs earns in a year.
And as I pointed out when I first made this argument, the British government can be our model because the British have done an amazing thing, the sort of thing that confirms our stereotypical view of the Brits as the great and wise guardians of civilization.
Three years ago, they eliminated the admission fees, in some cases nearly $20, at all government-funded national museums and galleries.
So I was curious about how the new free-admission program was working out.
And the news is very good. At the Victoria and Albert Design Museum and the Natural History Museum in London, for instance, visits have doubled – as they have even outside London, at the museum in Liverpool. In all, last year, 6 million more people went to British museums and galleries than during the year before the open-door policy began.
And this radical notion seems to be spreading. Last spring Hungary announced that all of its public museums would go free.
So how about this form of cultural largesse now spreading west to America?
I'm not much of an advocate of giving federal grants directly to artists to make art in this country that seems like more trouble than it’s worth.
But doesn't pretty much everyone agree that museums are grand and necessary institutions? And that they deserve and depend on government funds?
So here's a piece of compassionate conservatism for President Bush to borrow from his friend Tony Blair. The president can announce that under his proposal – let’s call it the 2005 Free American Museums Act -- admission to every museum in America would henceforth be free of charge.
Museums, the president could say, are literally “conservative” in the very best sense -- they cull the artifacts and stories from local and world cultures that are judged to be most excellent and most interesting, and conserve them. And this plan would make museums truly democratic at a moment when the Museum of Modern Art in New York has started to charge $20 for a glimpse of Picasso and van Gogh.
It wouldn’t be cheap to do -- relieving every one of America's 8,000 museums of the need to charge admission fees might cost a billion and a half, two billion dollars a year. But from political Washington's perspective, that would be a couple of billion dollars sluiced out deep into every state and every congressional district. And it would be a classy, big-tent gesture of magnanimous domestic vision that would generate great press as the Bush Administration’s “legacy” begins to be shaped.
A billion dollars or so? A pittance, relatively speaking. About what we spend in a week occupying Iraq -- or the combined cost of putting out a handful of Oscar nominees. I think we can afford it.
This is Kurt Andersen.
