The arts advocacy machine is running in high gear these days. Presumably emboldened by their success in being included in the federal stimulus package, they have renewed their attempts to secure both increased federal funding and enhanced federal policy attention for the arts. I support the idea of an enhanced NEA budget, just as I advocate a larger budget for the National Endowment for the Humanities. But I think that arts advocates should be more careful about the arguments they use to support their position, and I would urge them to take care not to exaggerate their aims.

An example of the first problem (careless arguments) would be the letter Bob Lynch sent to the New York Times on 22 June. Bob is the president of Americans for the Arts, the most important arts advocacy organization in the country, and he has long been a forceful spokesperson for the arts community. But in my judgment he sometimes goes beyond what the data he cites will actually sustain. In his letter Bob replies to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s comment that the recent NAEP arts results indicate that we need to do better in arts education. This is surely correct. But Bob wants a major response – a “federal commitment” to make the arts “part of the core curriculum.” Why? “Research shows that students who study the arts outperform their peers who do not.” I know that that some researchers (and all arts advocates) make this argument. But the fact is that the argument that exposure to the arts makes kids smarter (and more successful) is at best unproven and quite possibly not the case. The most persuasive statement by a leading researcher on the problem is by Prof. Ellen Winner of Boston College, who says the “We don’t need the arts in our schools to raise mathematical and verbal skiils . . . We need the arts because in addition to introducing student to aesthetic appreciation, they teach other modes of thinking we value.” This is a large enough claim, and arts advocates should not insist upon going beyond it.

A post on 6 July by Michael Kaiser, the president of the Kennedy Center in Washington in The Huffington Post is an example of the second problem (exaggerated policy goals) argues that we “really need a debate over federal arts policy.” Kaiser is surely old enough to remember the last “debate,” and I for one do not care to revisit it. Kaiser goes on to complain that there is neither coordination of federal arts policies nor “any central governing philosophy or policy.” (This is a standard complaint of advocates.) He would like someone in the administration, presumably the new Chairman of NEA, to “provide leadership and coordination” especially so that the nine (there are probably more) federal agencies that fund the arts could “work in a common direction.” Surprisingly, Kaiser does not follow his own logic and support a Ministry of Culture, since it would “cost too much” and “put too little money in the hands of grassroots arts organizations.” I’m glad to know that the Kennedy Center professes to believe that such organizations “truly do the most important arts work in this nation,” but I doubt he really believes that. Most national arts advocacy is aimed at increasing the budget of the NEA, and I think we need to be clearer and more honest about why that is good for the country. I have said before and I will say again that, given the politics of the arts in the United States, it would be dangerous and ill-advised to centralize arts funding, not to mention to have a single, dominant arts policy, though I’m fine with a large and vibrant NEA.