As policymakers in Washington gather to draft a new budget for fiscal year 2025, they could solve culture’s current financial crisis and radically reshape how we think about sustaining the arts. They could do this by tapping into abundant appropriations that already enjoy bipartisan support. To make this possible, first we need to stop treating museums, theaters and galleries like sacred spaces that exist in some rarefied realm of public life. And we need to start treating them — and funding them — like interstate highways, high-speed internet and other infrastructure projects, using money that’s earmarked to maintain the country’s infrastructure.
Of course, a shift to considering the arts as part of our national infrastructure won’t be easy, either conceptually or practically. The mechanics of reallocating a small fraction of federal infrastructure dollars for cultural institutions would have to be mapped out, advocated and then put into legislation. Certainly, some politicians will object to funding the arts as infrastructure, just as they object to funding the arts in different ways now. But other industries are already subsidized by the federal government directly, as with the farm subsidy, developed during the Great Depression, which supports agricultural corporations to the tune of more than $10 billion a year.
There is currently no significant infrastructure money available to arts institutions from public coffers. On average, about 15 percent of an art museum’s annual budget is funded by government money, according to the Association of Art Museum Directors. Federal funding for the arts is largely allocated through the National Endowment for the Arts, or N.E.A., a beleaguered and consistently underfunded agency. The N.E.A. provides funding only for exhibitions and projects, and for fiscal year 2024, its allocated budget is $211 million for the entire country, which is less than the amount allocated by New York City for culture for the same year.
The N.E.A. is also a constant target of party politics over questions of content and appropriateness. Bad-faith actors earn political points by identifying the most controversial art exhibit in the country and using it as a cudgel to make all funding untenable. Political backlash over several N.E.A.-funded initiatives, including a 1989 exhibit of the photograph “Immersion (Piss Christ)” by Andres Serrano, who had received a small N.E.A. grant, led to attempts to defund the agency.
That’s why we need federal infrastructure funding for facilities, salaries and other infrastructural needs that can be delivered directly to institutions through a separate grant system. Infrastructure funding is plentiful and appealing across party lines; in 2021, in a bipartisan bill, the federal government allocated $1.2 trillion to national infrastructure projects over five years. If even 0.5 percent of those funds — $6 billion, or $1.2 billion annually over the same length of time — were marked to keep the lights on and pay salaries at the physical facilities that incubate, develop and present culture across the country, it would radically reshape our national cultural landscape. These funds would benefit crucial venues across the country, from the Headliners Music Hall in Louisville, Ky., to The Queen theater in Wilmington, Del. — small and midsize venues and institutions that ensure a thriving cultural identity in every corner of America.