The Big Idea: Publicly Funded Art
Art is how we make sense of ourselves. But the U.S. government, unlike many other countries, is investing in it less and less.
J. Patrick Patterson
pub•lic•ly fund•ed art
noun
1. creative work supported by government grants and agencies
Is art really a priority?
Beyond jobs and entertainment, decades of research links arts education in public schools to better outcomes in literacy, critical thinking and social-emotional development. When we defund the arts, we don’t just lose performances and exhibitions— we lose one of the primary means by which we understand each other. The arts are how a culture makes sense of itself.
Isn’t the arts sector already huge?
That’s actually an argument for more public investment. Arts and cultural industries contributed $1.2 trillion to the U.S. economy in 2023, about 4.2% of GDP, and employed nearly 5.4 million workers. Meanwhile, the National Endowment for the Arts has been shrinking for decades. Adjusted for inflation, the NEA’s budget has dropped from roughly $592 million in 1980 to $207 million today. In 2025, the Trump administration proposed eliminating it entirely and canceled hundreds of active grants overnight via email. The private sector won’t fill the gap on its own, which is why federal support is so important: Every dollar the NEA puts out is matched 9-to-1 by nongovernment funds. Everybody wins.
What’s it like internationally?
In Europe, postwar reconstruction included the arts as a pillar of civic life, right alongside healthcare, housing and education. Germany spends approximately $20 per person on culture annually and operates 83 full-time, state-owned opera houses. The United States, with about four times the population, has roughly six functional opera houses, and the NEA provides less than $1 per American. Ireland, with a population of around 5 million, has an arts council that, per capita, outpaces the NEA and recently instituted a basic income scheme for practicing artists. In France and South Korea, public arts are a cornerstone of national policy.
How can we save it?
Public arts funding has survived because advocates — including a surprising coalition of bipartisan congressional supporters — have fought back. But “saving” arts funding isn’t enough. The vision worth fighting for isn’t a slightly less underfunded NEA — it’s a genuine rethinking of art as a public good. That means federal, state and local government investment an order of magnitude larger than what we have. And it means a cultural politics that stops apologizing for beauty, creativity and expression.
J. Patrick Patterson is the news editor at In These Times. He has previously worked as a politics editor, copy editor, fact-checker and reporter. His writing on economic policies and electoral politics has been published in numerous outlets.
