On March 14, 2016, Secretary Jack Lew and Hamilton writer composer Lin-Manuel Miranda met in the Secretary’s office or as Miranda writes, “the room where it happens.” Photo courtesy of the U.S. Treasury Department.
At The Federalist, David Marcus explains the Left’s stranglehold on most art in America. He proposes that the applying the free market model to all art, as it is currently applied to stand up comedy, would create greater product diversity. He writes (abridged):
It’s no big secret that arts organizations in the United States skew incredibly leftist in comparison with the general citizenry’s ideas and attitudes. It is almost axiomatic that our theater companies and museums are operated by and support the art of people with left-leaning politics and social views. It is something we just take for granted, as if artists by their very nature will always tend to be leftists.
But leftist hegemony over the arts is not merely the product of some genetic feature of artistic types that makes them prefer Democrats to Republicans. Another significant reason for this is the not-for-profit funding model used by the majority of country’s arts organizations. In most cases the successful arts organization is not the one that reaches out to audiences and generates the most earned income, but the ones that can keep the free donated money rolling in.
Would moving the arts to a free-market model change them? Yes, absolutely. It would look and feel different, but art is a living thing. It is meant to change. Would moving the arts to a free model help break up the leftist hegemony? Here again the answer is likely yes.
There is one art form we can look to that is relatively untouched by the non-profit movement. Stand-up comedy exists almost entirely in the free market, and it is more or less the only art form that dares to mock the leftist shibboleths of identity politics and political correctness. Comedians like Jerry Seinfeld and Dave Chappelle regularly challenge the taboos of the left. The universe of stand up has room for the “unfunny” woke comedy of a Hannah Gadsby, but it also has Bill Burr taking aim at progressives.
The rest of our art, our plays, operas, ballets, and museum exhibits should reflect the wide range of American political and social views that stand-up does. Right now that is not the case. The best thing that conservatives can do to fix it is to stop giving. Stop feeding a system that we can blatantly see is a breeding ground for leftist ideologies. Let a new system emerge to create art that better reflects what America truly is.
Read more here.
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