Opponents of government support for arts and culture quite often cite the United States of America as an example of how things can be done differently. There, according to these people, no tax money goes to art and culture, and there is art despite this. Others point out that America does have government support for art, and that much of the top art in the US exists partly because of the support there is for it in Europe: the United States imports more than half of its top art from relatively heavily subsidised Europe.
With things going badly in the US, the last bit of money the government had left for theatre, visual arts and dance has also run out. And funnily enough, this leads to almost exactly the same discussion in the US as in the Netherlands: big institutions like the Metropolitan Opera in New York are hardly addressed and can easily cope with the decrease in subsidy. Victims fall in the region. Small theatre initiatives, a visual arts project with children from deprived neighbourhoods.
Biggest problem is that the National Endowment for the Arts, a kind of Fund for the Performing Arts in American terms, has to make major cuts.
The New York Times notes from the mouths of various stakeholders that things have now become crowded in the sponsorship market in the US too. And in the reader responses to that article, the same discussion as in Dutch newspapers is once again taking place.
We are not going to repeat those here.
Read the story in the NYT here.
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