The Tuesday after the Kansas City Chiefs won the Superbowl, Tatiana Siegel announced that a piece she had written for Variety was available, talking about how a movie produced by Travis Kelce for Radiant Media Studios was going to be funded in part by Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). In brief, a producer of the movie, Mike Field, sold surplus tax credits he qualified for from green ventures he is involved with, and used that revenue to help fund Kelce’s movie. This piece set off a minor kerfuffle on X/Twitter, some of which related to Kelce’s cinematic and funding worthiness: why should Kelce make a movie, first of all, and why should Travis Kelce need help funding movies? Critics of the IRA’s primary mechanism of funding (the sale of tax credits to private firms rather than outright public spending) cried foul. This was derisking for Travis Kelce! Of course an administration fixated on private funding would use this law to greenwash movies by Taylor Swift’s boyfriend.
Setting aside Travis Kelce’s cinematic worthiness, there are two interesting questions at the heart of this. Why can’t the Biden Administration just give money directly to artists? Second, should we disregard novel means of funding the arts, or pursue new means to fund industries in a moment of identity crisis, if not total immolation?
Funding for the arts in the form of grants to states and non-profits has increased steadily since 2020. Recent legislation from the CARES act onward has included funding requests specifically for the arts. Members of congress who designed the CARES act specifically included $75 million in funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), 40% of which to be distributed as grants to state governments, and 60% of which to be distributed to non-profit institutions, to respond to challenges created by Covid, $75 million in funding for the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH), 40% of which was destined for state governments, and 60% of which was to be distributed as competitive grants to at-risk communities, and $25 million to be appropriated to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, $7.5 million to be distributed to the Smithsonian Institution, and $78,000 to the Institute of American Indian Arts, a public college tribal college that focuses on Native American Art. Businesses and non-profit institutions in the arts also qualified for the Paycheck Protection Act, and many workers in these sectors that were laid off qualified for expanded unemployment insurance; other legislation specifically targeted free-lance workers, by allowing them to apply for unemployment if they could not find work in the midst of the Coronavirus Pandemic. Since the CARES act, other legislation responding to Covid-19 has directly and indirectly supported the arts, more than doubling that funding in 2021 under the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) ($200 million in funding for the Institute of Museum and Library Services, $135 million for the National Endowment for the Arts, and $135 million for the National Endowment for the Humanities), and further increasing spending in 2023, with the IRA’s appropriations of $207 million each for the NEA and the NEH.
Though funding for these organizations have increased steadily since 2020, there is more space for funding in these industries, as rents have increased across the country and particularly in cultural hubs.
What about the creation of novel forms of support for arts and humanities institutions? One feature of the Coronavirus pandemic was an outpouring of novel forms of support for businesses and municipal governments in the form of back stops by the Federal Reserve, the US’s central bank. Under this program, the Federal Reserve committed to purchasing corporate bonds and municipal bonds from investors who feared that these institutions might default on their debt. The mere announcement of this program reduced funding volatility for corporate bonds and state bonds almost instantaneously. As a public backstop for the arts, these sort of measures would be an improvement over crowdfunding initiatives, under which private donations fill in for lost business, by creating larger buffers for cultural institutions. These initiatives could support either private capital for creative and artistic industries as well as municipal or federal bond initiatives for the arts, increasing the reach of these funding strategies.
There are more pedestrian ways supporting the arts and artists that are likely to benefit society as a whole. Grant programs exist for the arts; increasing the scope of these grants would be an excellent way of supporting the industries and institutions that give us joy, open our minds, and expand our horizons. Increasing unemployment support for freelancers would be another way to support artists. Particularly given recent layoffs in large media firms and institutions, more comprehensive support for artists would sustain their ability to contribute to our general welfare, as well as allowing them to cover the ever rising costs of living in the arts hubs of the US. More universal supports like comprehensive public health care and universal income grants would also go a long way to supporting artists, journalists, and anyone else in the country vulnerable to the industrial volatility clearly at work right now.
Novel approaches to supporting the arts – direct funding via Patreon or other crowd funding initiatives, backstopping of private and public arts spending, and (though they’re not my favorite) even block-chain tools like NFTs and more – matched with comprehensive and potentially boring fixes like grants to everyone, debt forgiveness, and universal health coverage would benefit everyone. Relieving funding pressure that economically and psychologically weigh on our abilities to flourish whether we are artists, journalists, or anyone else who is part of the rat race opens space for more experimentation at the individual and institutional levels. Comprehensive changes can exist alongside derisking strategies. In times of economic uncertainty, state and government officials should keep thinking and acting boldly to support the arts and those that make them, through direct spending initiatives and also through comprehensive plans like basic income. Who knows what artistic impulses may awaken if these measures succeed in being passed?
Nina Quinn Eichacker 