(host) Is art a public good? This question seems to pop up from time to time when budgets are being considered and slashed, but it's usually framed around the idea of why is the government even paying for art. Specific stories enrage or galvanize people even more, like the NEA Four-- a group of four artists who in 1993 had their funding from the National Endowment for the Arts rejected for issues of "decency." Well, today I want to get to the bottom of when the government got into the business of commissioning art and why. So I'll be tackling the history of how the U.S. government got into the art game and how arts funding went from being a work-relief program to supporting innovative new work and international diplomacy efforts.

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(Describer) Title: Origin of Everything.

In its earliest inception, organized government funding for art in the U.S. was less about the quality of the works themselves and more about providing funding and living wages for artists in the 20th century. Although patronizing the arts wasn't a new concept entirely-- think presidential portraits or works that hang in government buildings. The first public agency in the U.S. that spent federal dollars on artworks came in the form of the Public Works of Art Project, or PWAP, in 1933. With unemployment during the peak of the Great Depression hovering somewhere between 20% and 25%, the government looked for ways to provide relief to out-of-work citizens, and that's when the debate about who could be considered a laborer turned its attention to out-of-work artists. FDR's appointee in charge of work relief, Harry Hopkins, supposedly once said of artists, "Hell, they've got to eat just like other people," which is probably the most plainly stated argument in favor of government spending that I've come across in my time doing "Origin." This early government initiative was a precursor to other more well-known New Deal-era programs like the Works Progress Administration, or WPA. Since the PWAP was geared towards giving employment to artists rather than supporting the creation of bold new works, the scope of the projects were somewhat narrow. Artists had to prove that they were in need of financial assistance, and then they were chunked into three categories: level one, level two, and laborer. With guidelines to paint images of the "American scene," they made works that were eventually displayed in government buildings across the country. The Works Progress Administration followed a similar model of sending artists out to work, but they cast a wider net than the PWAP to include journalists, musicians, writers, ethnographers, and historians, among others. Also started by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the WPA spanned from 1935 to 1943. In that relatively short amount of time, the WPA employed approximately 8.5 million people to provide services that ranged from opening and operating community art centers, recording American folk music traditions, taking ethnographies of rural communities, and painting public murals. The WPA provided funding to some of the most influential artists of the 20th century, including painters Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner, and Willem de Kooning. They also gave money to a completely unknown artist by the name of Jackson Pollock. And under separate umbrellas for writers, actors, and musicians, the WPA also supported luminaries like Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Orson Welles, May Swenson, Studs Terkel, Alan Lomax, and John Steinbeck, who actually worked for the agency and wasn't supported as a writer. They even employed a number of teenagers to get in on the act. But the goal of these 1930s and '40s projects was to use art to document American life and create new jobs. The creative process, in many ways was secondary to this mission. This documentation served to keep certain art forms in the forefront of the public consciousness, like folk stories and jazz music, in addition to creating a national identity. The question of what is distinctly American art was tied to the question of what does it mean to be American? In the WPA era, artists recorded oral histories of the last living Americans who had been born in enslavement and the folk music of the rural South. Artists depicted cityscapes, ball games, and field hands at work. And although some of the work now may seem less avant-garde or edgy, the capturing of quaint and depoliticized versions of colloquial American life was the driving force of the projects that received support. But the WPA wasn't all music and feel-good murals. It also drew split opinions from the public. A 1939 Gallup poll found that, when asked what they liked most and least about the New Deal, the WPA was the number-one response to both questions. So societally we're drawn to art, but also have conflicted opinions about who should be paying for it. After the end of the WPA, another president with lots of social plans and a three-letter acronym, JFK, started to look again at ways that the government could support the creation of new art. But this time, the initiative focused less on the labor of the artists and more on the artistic merit of the works. The National Endowment for the Arts was eventually created under President Lyndon B. Johnson and Congress in 1965. But discussion for the project had already been underway during the Kennedy administration. President Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy were invested in highlighting the arts and culture of the U.S. Their combined support for the arts also elevated artists of all genres and mediums to the forefront of the international scene. For example, president Kennedy was the first U.S. president to appoint an inaugural poet during his swearing-in ceremony-- Robert Frost in 1961. And JFK envisioned that the arts programs and agencies established wouldn't be temporary work-relief programs like their New Deal predecessors. Rather, he looked to provide long-term support to art of high merit. To that end, he appointed August Heckscher as a special consultant on the arts to lead the new initiative. JFK and Heckscher aimed to extend President Eisenhower's National Cultural Center Act of 1958. Heckscher's 1963 report, "The Arts and the National Government," outlined some of his ideas for how the new arts program would operate and how the government could pay for these initiatives. After completing this task, Heckscher resigned and Kennedy established the President's Advisory Council on the Arts. In his preface to the report, Senator Claiborne Pell wrote, "It is supremely important "that we fulfill our nation's destiny "in making the most complete and most effective use "of our creative and artistic capabilities, "both to assure our national wellbeing and to enhance the appreciation of our culture abroad." With these ideals in mind, it's unsurprising that Heckscher opened his report on the arts with an appeal to what supporting art meant to the image of the nation, rather than centering the struggles of individual artists to make a living, like FDR's programs had done. Heckscher wrote, "There has been a growing awareness "that the United States will be judged "and its place in history ultimately assessed, "not alone by its military or economic power, "but by the quality of its civilization. "The evident desirability of sending the best examples "of America's artistic achievements abroad "has led to our looking within, "to asking whether we have in fact cultivated deeply enough the fields of creativity." The earlier iterations of federal government- sanctioned support for the arts look to give unemployed artists a chance to make work that was circulated largely internally. This new phase in art funding looked to shuttling forms of American cultural production into international waters. Both Pell and Heckscher reference international audiences and controlling the perceptions of what the U.S.'s contributions were to the world, outside of military conflict. In this iteration of arts funding, art became a vehicle for the kind of soft diplomacy and cultural exchange that politicians and lawmakers were invested in during the Cold War. Historian Penny Von Eschen outlines an example of the government using art to influence opinions abroad in her book. Von Eschen details how from 1956 to the late '70s, Black jazz musicians were dispatched to mostly newly independent nations in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. They went to promote an idealized version of American democracy and to diminish international criticism of American racism. The musicians included Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington. Von Eschen notes, "The glaring contradiction in this strategy "was that the U.S. promoted Black artists "as goodwill ambassadors, "symbols of the triumph of American democracy, when America was still a Jim Crow nation." So FDR's art agenda was to give Americans hopeful images of themselves in order to control the narrative of despair that surrounded the economic downturn, whereas the arts initiatives of the 1960s sought to give the world a more favorable view of Cold War segregationist America in light of worldwide liberation struggles during the post-colonial era. But establishing the NEA made art part of the long-term political and public agenda in a way that other more temporary attempts to fund art did not. And in its history, the NEA went from a relatively small project to a much larger organization. In 1966, it spent almost $3 million. But in 2019, the agency is set to spend $155 million, which seems like a huge number, but actually works out to about 50 cents per person. I'm not covering every iteration of how and when the government spends money on art, but the narrative of when and why spending money on art began does tell us something about the shaping of national history and how art has played a role in that story. Although most debates around federal or state spending on the arts center largely on dollars and cents, the inclusion of art as part of the national and international agenda is often more to do with the ideologies of nation-building than it is purely art for art's sake. The question of the NEA often seems like it boils down to: "Who is this art even for?" especially in the wake of conflict around federal dollars surrounding artists who create controversial works, like Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano, or the NEA Four's Holly Hughes, Karen Finley, Tim Miller, and John Fleck, because, in many cases, public outrage or support is centered on the fact that arts agencies are spending government money on works that are, in theory, supposed to be part of the lifeblood of American cultural identity. And perhaps some of the kickback stems from the subject matter. But I'd speculate to say that some of it also centers on a feeling that art that lives inside of galleries and museums isn't always reflective of so many people's lived experiences. And some of our conflict around this idea stems from the fact that the lived experiences of so many of us don't neatly overlap and often even contradict each other. But I can't help but remember the original dictate from New Deal-era arts programs that said a suitable topic for government-sponsored art would be the American scene. And in some ways, contradiction, debates over identity and history, concerns about foreign engagement and diplomacy are all a part of the American scene. So outside of consideration about the merits of art within a society, the decision of how and when to create it is also a form of tracing larger historical movements and government policies. Accessibility provided by the U.S. Department of Education.

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