Governor Blagojevich’s new state budget mandates a 30% cut in funding for the Illinois Arts Council. While this decrease of an already small pittance may prove devastating to a small, ever-dwindling number of grant recipients, the cut does not come as a surprise. Nor should it stand as a new roadblock to the growth of the majority of artists across our state.
To put it simply, creative professionals and patrons in Illinois must prioritize their expectations of government officials when it comes to the creative and performing arts. The more fiscal involvement the government has in our creative pursuits, the more likely they will continue to attempt to police and profit from them.
Various measures are being debated on city and state levels that stand to help government cash in our burgeoning arts community. Unfortunately, many of these plans involve licensing measures that will adversely affect artists and venues, hypothetically to the point of collapse.
Illinois cannot have it both ways. If those in power do not care to support the arts, they should not then have the right charge admission by way of demanding extraneous event promotion licenses on galleries, musical spaces, and theatrical venues.
While arguments in favor of public arts funding can be made in the form of “But look at [fill in the blank European country]!” it stands to reason that no such model has existed for a tenable length of time in the United States.
The slow but steady erosion of the larger National Endowment for the Arts stands as a testament to the failures of our government to embrace works of imagination. Ours is a puritanical nation that has never been friendly towards aesthetic discourse. The NEA, which was founded a mere 42 years ago in hopes of opening America’s eyes to world-class art, stands as a failing testament to the myopically conservative nature of Washington. While the organization did fund a number of progressive artists in the beginning, its legacy is marred by infighting, failure, and a shift from aiding worthy artists towards a period of manufactured controversy with the end result of total castration in the form of family values.
In brief, Uncle Sam is not opposed to buying the country an inexpensive scoop of ice cream, providing that everyone can agree on sugar-free vanilla. In this admittedly hokey but useful analogy, the end result is that the country comes to the conclusion that dessert is boring and that public art programs are a snooze cruise.
Given the brilliance of our current administration, we’ll do better on our own, thank you very much.
The $7 million IAC cut amounts to less than 50 cents per year per resident of Illinois. I suggest that we all throw a couple of quarters in our neighborhood fountain while making the wish that for once members of our government should exercise the healthy, rather than conniving, aspects of their imaginations.