News Reporter: Act Four: When it comes to the arts, the market doesn't always act rationally

Friday, 17 March 2017

Act Four: When it comes to the arts, the market doesn't always act rationally

Alyssa Rosenberg on culture and politics

Ward Chamberlin (L), former president and chief executive of WETA, with filmmaker Ken Burns at a WETA screening event for “The War” in 2007. (Cable Risdon Photography)

We’ve returned, yet again, to a debate about the virtues of public funding for the arts thanks to President Trump’s first budget. And so I figured it was time to revisit one of the canards conservatives like to trot out when we have these discussions: that private philanthropy or the market will step in to fill the gap left behind by the government. It may be true that charitable and governmental funding means that arts organizations don’t always market themselves as forcefully or effectively as they could, though this argument ignores the possibility that arts access, which is not always compatible with high ticket prices, might also be a public good.

I want to make another point, though: this fantasy relies, as most veneration of the market does, on the idea that when it comes to the arts, the market will behave rationally. There is plenty of evidence that this is not actually the case. Hispanics are consistently Americans’ most devoted moviegoers, but Hollywood is slow to produce films with Hispanic stars or set in Hispanic communities. Movies with black stars consistently over-perform, yet the entertainment industry has not exactly moved to stop leaving money on the table.

And as Ken Burns noted in a 2011 op-ed I found while writing yesterday’s column, “Each time a film of mine happens to reach a large audience, I am ‘invited’ to join the marketplace. Each time I patiently explain to my new suitor what I have planned for my next project – an 11-and-a-half-hour history of the Civil War, perhaps, or a 17-hour investigation of the history of jazz, or a 12-hour history of the national parks – I am laughed out of their offices, sent, happily, back to PBS.” If Ken Burns, a documentarian with one of the strongest track records in American broadcasting, can’t get the market working for him, something about capitalism is not working exactly as conservatives wish it should.