Many are the varieties of arts politics. Work displays a range of political affiliation and commitment. Artists self-organize to devise myriad means for getting their work into the world. Artists parlay their celebrity to access the public domain and to address various issues of the day. And yet it is often the uninvited controversy that attend to works—especially when public funding is involved—that frame the terms by which art is rendered into the domain of the political. Such episodes commonly consider art through the lens of moral indignation, and index art in order to ask that we not look at it, as if by avoiding the art we could come to sudden consensus around the values we hold most dear (begging along the way the question of who the “us” is, who proclaims consensus, and what establishes the hierarchy of value). Art, by these lights, has been pinned in a rather defensive posture, a condition sometimes framed as a culture war of the last several decades, but on longer historical view, certainly an abiding feature of the Republic.

Against this strain, considerable hope has recently been vested in the promise of a more hospitable climate for the arts in the United States. There is an impetus for an expanded role of national arts leadership on par with other countries and aspects of commonwealth. After some back-and-forth, the arts were considered worthy of being part of the economic stimulus package. The National Endowment for the Arts is slated for a $6 million budget increase to $161 million for 2010 (although proposals had been for as much as $50 million in additional monies). Encouraging signs these are, and the fruit of considerable effort. As with the controversies surrounding art, public attention revolves around these measures of economic efficacy, even as the actual allocations to the arts through these federal programs are not proportionate to art’s actual economic weight. Rather these indicators have symbolic value that stands for a national disposition toward the arts.

It is unsurprising that the arguments responsible for these gains would insert art into the nomenclature of economic development. Artists are workers too. Art-making is the most shovel-ready of endeavors. Investments in the arts have, at seven-to-one, higher multiplier effects than inputs to other industries. While art has suffered from economic illiteracy, its ready translation into this particular form of utilitarianism risks foreclosing a more fulsome conversation about the various uses of art, and leaves untouched the economics of artists’ remarkable productivity, which often comes at their own expense. Any longer-term expansion of the arts will quickly run aground if its specificity is lost, if artistic sensibility has no bearing on how we think about development, participation, dialogue, and social possibility. These critical and creative faculties must find their way into public discussion, if a fuller ground and grounding of the arts is to be part of our social and esthetic horizon.

From the perspective of countering the attacks on the arts, the impulse to show how art is just like other human endeavors, kinds of work, social goods, is certainly understandable. Art worlds will also be well served by answering the dual questions of how art is different and what difference it makes. Current expressions of artistic collectivity, collaboration and organization, break-open the seemingly straightforward opposition of commercial and non-profit spheres. On closer inspection both rely on a willingness for artists to discount the value of their own work, and a parallel conception of corporate governance. The myriad paths of artistic self-production—where creating work also creates venues and audiences—re-casts the question of who benefits from the arts, of what values people gather for, of where to imagine what sensibilities we may want to promote. This more general economy of the arts—the realm of possibility that we can grasp together but not fix or dismiss—drives a very ambitious program for how art and the world might be otherwise. TAP

Randy Martin directs the graduate program in Arts Politics at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.