Art for policy and policy for art

ABSTRACT

The intersection of arts and public policy is three-dimensional. A multitude of direct subsidy, regulatory, and support programs are advocated and managed as “arts policy,” but a wide variety of non-arts-targeted realms such as tax law, public education, public health, and urban development and housing programs importantly influence artists and their encounters with their audiences. These interactions, and the complexity and thorniness born of the difficulty of clearly categorizing the arts as either market or non-market goods, as well as our difficulty in their valuation, make a particularly good area for teaching about public policy generally. And finally, policy of all kinds is too important to be made without the insights and guidance of artists, whose job is to show us the society we live in and who we are. Our “Arts and Cultural Policy” course explores this landscape for students in both fields.

KEYWORDS:

• Art
• arts & cultural policy
• policy analysis

The arts and public policy intersect in three dimensions. As is well known, a multitude of direct subsidy, regulatory, and support programs, advocated and managed as “arts policy,” influence artists and their encounters with their audiences directly. Tax law, public education, public health, housing programs and other government—and nonprofit—behavior putatively directed to other purposes are also greatly consequential for the arts and culture. But we claim, less conventionally, that public policy of all kinds needs the insights and guidance of artists, without whom we cannot understand the society we live in, or even who we are. Our purposes here are (i) to share a course framework that other schools might want to adopt and adapt (ii) to illustrate how the art-to-policy bridge can carry useful traffic both ways.

Over four decades O’Hare and (more recently) Johnstone, have offered a course that introduces these interactions to a diverse enrollment, mainly structured around the conventional economic and political elements of “arts policy” but informed throughout by the “art-to-policy” connection. In the following pages, we describe the three main areas in which art and policy jointly create value, and then describe the course itself as an expansion of the standard policy-analysis model.

From art to policy and back again

Arts policy could be taught like a typical area course (health policy, environmental policy, etc.) by simply presenting the main ways policy affects the arts. The course mostly follows this path, but we think art creation and engagement have distinctive contributions to make to policy analysis itself, and we emphasize both directions on the bridge between government and art. In 1996, Murray Edelman analyzed such a bridge between art and politics (policy choice and public preferences) and found that “art is the fountainhead from which political discourse, beliefs about politics, and consequent actions ultimately spring” (Edelman, 1996). (The reader is advised to attend to Edelman’s work, too extensive and rich to summarize here). In our course, we extend his insights to policy analysis itself.

What does art have that analysis doesn’t? First of all, the experience of art is cumulative and very broadly sourced. Engagement with policy is usually linear and stovepiped, as when: we prepare our income tax returns without much thought about how much we paid last year, what the government is doing with our money, or the urbanistic consequences of taxing real estate. Policy analysis hews closely to the data on hand and a defined body of research. In contrast, the more art you have engaged with, the richer the next experience will be, and we draw on all our life experiences when we encounter and engage with art works. This embrace may be understanding references to other embedded works, such as Tom Stoppard’s use of Oscar Wilde in Travesties, La Boheme as a basis for Jonathan Larson’s musical Rent, or A’s music sampled on a track by B, but it might also be our own experiences of the world: the appreciation for a certain color, or place, the remembrance of a scent triggered by a sight. These memories are all part of our experience of new art, and this accumulation feeds the continued conversation in which each artist and audience member participates. Economists have modeled art engagement as a beneficial addiction, because the utility of each unit of consumption increases as more is consumed (Stigler & Becker, 1977).

Second, and following directly, art engagement is an active process. Neither vision—the physiological act of viewing—nor hearing is objective or passive, but subjective experiences, both individually and biologically (Hurlbert & Wolf, 2002), which do not result in all viewers “seeing” the same thing or a given thing the same way at all encounters. Physiology (how humans see, compared to other animals, such as range and detail, kinds of light and color), psychology (what we think we are seeing; our interpretation of what we see), and behavioral science (what and how we focus our attention and how this can almost literally blind us to what is actually happening before us (Chabris & Simons, 2010) are at play here. Seeing may be believing, but it does not, as it turns out, objective truth make, and neither does reading an excellent double-blind study report.

A third is that art is a context in which to see that economics, the “queen of policy science,” is not—as students are liable to wrongly think—about money, any more than carpentry is “about inches.” Certainly money is inseparable from art policy and the operation of art worlds: “Baumol’s cost disease,” whereby art becomes constantly more expensive relative to goods that benefit from productive efficiency gains, is not comprehensible without economic thinking (Baumol & Bowen, 1977). But economics is actually the study of all finite resources, and attention time is one of these; we only have 16 waking hours a day and a lifetime of days (Zeckhauser, 1973). The value created by an hour of attention to anything, that could have been directed elsewhere, depends not only on the object but on set, setting, and multiple dimensions of the viewer’s background.

These concepts inform our understanding of the arts and culture within our current economic system, and the valuation of other public or quasi-public goods. They also help us think about the development of culture and public opinion. If culture is a space where differences in human experiences are shared, enriched, blended, and negotiated to some sort of agreement about how we function in relation to ourselves and others in society, an understanding of how we percept, and how our attention to any given object creates value, is an important piece of the discussion, and artists have always been central to it.

Teaching arts and cultural policy

The next section describes the course in its current configuration. First we review its audience, then our pedagogy and a distinctive element of its overall framing and emphasis, and finally the topics we cover. Along the way, we offer the kind of discussion questions we use to begin class sessions, designed to generate useful discussion rather than point to single “right answers” in boxes.

Enrollment

At Berkeley, Public Policy 257/157 brings together (i) students from our music, drama, and art departments, (ii) graduate students in the Goldman School’s three public policy professional master’s programs (Public Policy and (mid-career) Development Policy and Public Administration), and (iii) liberal arts generalist undergraduates from varied majors minoring in public policy. Graduate credit (PP 257) requires graduate-level work throughout and an extra paper, but otherwise the difference between the undergraduates’ and graduate students’ experience and engagement is not notable.

The course sequentially explores the most important government policies affecting the arts, with art illuminating policy generally brought out passim. The goals of the enterprise include better actual policy in the long run, as the (i) “artists” (a group broadly including future arts professionals of all kinds like museum and theater administrators) are more effective in public advocacy and (ii) the other students (including future public officials, nonprofit executives, and philanthropists) are more aware of how all sorts of policy affects culture.

The course has other kinds of value as well: Arts professionals and public officials, who have distinct cultures in life and in school, should have more shared experience, and college is a place to provide that. For example, the course uses art in various media as policy source material, so students engage with work they would (generally) not otherwise encounter.

Any area course in a policy school should also teach or deepen students’ understanding of general policy-analytic methods and principles. This course explores, in its own context, several basic concepts with broad policy relevance, such as (from economics) marginal cost pricing, market failures like public goods, oligopoly, monopoly rents, and information asymmetry; and (more broadly) interest group influence, ethics and social justice, inequality, cultural preservation and appropriation, and freedom. We admit to a degree of counter-programming current trends of narrowly careerist higher education; in a way the course is to policy analysis as STEAM is to STEM.

The policy analytic model and arts criteria

Policy analysis compares how alternative programs score on various criteria, especially efficiency and justice. The classic “cookbook” most used at GSPP is A Practical Guide for Policy Making (Bardach & Patashnik, 2015); most of the students will have met it in one course or another and know the basic schema of identifying alternatives, specifying criteria, scoring the alternatives on these, and “confronting the tradeoffs.”

The social science tools of economics, political science, and statistical inference at the heart of policy analysis presumably apply to arts policy, for example properly understanding why allowing a full-value deduction from taxable income for artists donating their own work to museums would violate basic principles of fairness and efficiency. But while criteria like economic efficiency and social justice apply to arts policy, it has its own indicators of merit, and we unpack these in the first few weeks of the course by sequentially exploring the “jobs” and duties of (i) artists (ii) presenting institutions (iii) the audience and (iv) government using Howard Becker’s Art Worlds (Becker, 2008) as a framework and several works in different media as resources: Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest plus Stoppard’s Travesties; Wagner“s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg; two E.M. Forster short stories and Milton Babbitt’s ‘Who Cares if You Listen?’, Copley ‘A Boy with a Flying Squirrel’ and Jennifer Roberts” exploration thereof (Roberts, 2013); and web sites for museums and orchestras.

Discussion prompt: Art is seen as ineffable, unique, privileged and privileging, and enduring. Should the applicable criteria for arts policy be fundamentally different from criteria for (e.g.) housing policy, or criminal justice?

While detail and emphasis vary from year to year, the students usually agree that the core criterion for arts policy, along with their usual concern for fairness and equality and the respect for economic efficiency and practical implementation that they come to more cautiously is

more, better, engagement, by more people, with better art.

Obviously, this standard is multidimensional and includes no “prices” with which to commensurate its elements. But it serves its purpose in the course, and we refer back to its parts repeatedly. It is importantly different from criteria implicit in much art policy debate, such as “more income for artists”, “more art in museums”, and even “more art created or performed”.

Probably the most important part of this criterion portmanteau is its focus on art engagement, something much more complicated (and interesting) than “looking at” or “listening to,” and recognition that art happens inside the head of the audience member, who combines attention to a work with a prior lifetime of experience (including experience with other art) (Stigler & Becker, 1977). In this view, making art, possessing it, buying and selling it, and art-historical scholarship and criticism are subsidiary to the engagement they generate and improve. Of course we count amateur participation by Sunday painters, garage bands, and the like as high-quality engagement.

Discussion prompt: Health policy and national security are about life itself. Art would seem of secondary interest and importance—but why make life longer if it isn’t worth living?

Pedagogy

The course meets in plenary session twice a week for 80 minutes and in smaller discussion sections with a graduate student instructor/teaching assistant for an hour. A typical unit of the course is prompted by a reading and a couple of works of performing or plastic art (the course slights literature, mostly for reasons of time). We pose a couple of interesting questions in multiple choice form, often questions to which we don’t know “right” answers, and (usually) collect individual answers or choices by polling or clickers (Fies & Marshall, 2006). We display a histogram of the responses, note that (if we chose a good question) “people don’t agree,” send them into small groups, and then reconvene in “plenary session” for further discussion.

We invite visitors from the art world who have good stories and “street cred” to share their experiences with policy support, constraints, and the like.

Exercises

Exercises include a variety of challenges:

A museum field trip

Spend a few hours in an art museum of your choice and write a memo noting how you think it is doing “the presenting institution’s job” as we framed it a few weeks ago. What works? What could be different and should be?

The Oakland Museum of California has one floor each of natural history, history, and art, and we encourage students to compare its practice in each department.

A “group midterm” to groups of four or five

Choose a work by a living artist that interests you. Find out everything you can about its origin including any effects of public policy (interview the artist if you can) and present to the class what you learned, and why you think we should pay attention to the work.

A term paper

Analyze and critique:

• The influence of government policy on a specific arts institution, or

• The influence of government policy on a specific group of artists (e.g., photographers, choreographers), or

• The art policy of a unit of government (city, state, or—by special arrangement—a non-US country or province).

This project has three phases, topic proposal (3%), draft (17%), and revised as a final document (25%): The draft is extensively critiqued by the faculty and circulated to three other student “consultants” for advice and comment.

Some readers will recognize that this is essentially the traditional pedagogy of the arts, still in use after millennia (Schön, 1991). It cycles through three steps:

1. Professor assigns the students a task somewhat beyond their abilities

2. Students perform the task, preferably with everyone watching (cf: music master class and rehearsals, artists’ life class, architecture studio).

3. Everyone talks about what happened and how it could have been even better.

After each cycle, the students’ capacities have increased, so the tasks can be more demanding. The process is punctuated with occasional, short, “lectures” when the students are stuck or the faculty has come upon a real pearl, but didaction is left almost entirely to (i) assigned and importantly (ii) student-found sources of which we are unaware. This kind of teaching makes it almost certain that the students will learn things the faculty do not know, but the track coach can’t outrun any of his sprinters, so there’s no reason this should be a problem.

There is no final exam. We have sometimes set a midterm exam based on the reading for a small point value, and tell the students that its main purpose is to motivate everyone to keep up so we understand each other in class discussion. Our practice here is strongly influenced by our lifetime observation that grown-ups do not ask peers or friends questions to which they know the answer.

A substantial portion of student grades reflects class participation, assessed by the other students in a confidential survey. Scores from people who were in student’s midterm or study group, and who were clients or consultants in the term paper draft review, are weighted extra. This arrangement is as uncomfortable for all as any workplace performance assessment, but it obviates requiring attendance and enforcing laptop and tablet use rules. For more information on this protocol see (O’Hare, 2016).

Syllabus units

The course covers a great deal of subject matter in one semester, including how governments support the arts, the rules and conditions of the system, the provision of the arts as unlike other goods, arts and crime, and the use of art by governments. It could quite easily be a 2-semester course.

Economic support

In almost every country, governments at every level support the arts through direct provision and subvention. Many arts presenting organizations are in fact government agencies, staffed by civil servants and funded through the budget. To the extent that their expenses exceed earned income, the public funds that make up the difference are subsidies (or purchase of services?). Other arts presenters, like private nonprofits, and artists themselves, can receive grants and subsidies from governments, including, like the park land on which New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art stands, in-kind rather than financial aid.

In countries with a national income tax, gifts to arts institutions may be tax-favored. In the US this important funding stream flows under sec.501c3 of the tax code to nonprofit religious, charitable, and educational institutions, and arts institutions generally qualify in the last category. For a taxpayer in the 25% marginal tax bracket, for example, a gift to a museum of $1000, deductible against taxable income, only costs the donor $750 in the end, but the museum gets the whole sum and the government (in effect, all taxpayers) makes up the difference.

The actual incidence of this scheme is complex to estimate. First, most donors do not “itemize” deductions and therefore their gifts do not entail a public subsidy; itemizers tend to be higher income, and charitable giving to the arts and education relative to religion and social service is higher in this group. Second, the net effect on the arts depends not only on the tax expenditure itself, but also on the price and income elasticities of giving, the amount by which the “cheaper” gift induces more giving. Third, in the US at least, the tax authority does not collect data from which donor marginal tax rate can be matched to type of recipient. And such gifts, especially large ones, are usually conditioned, expressly or by wink and nod, on programming and other practices of the recipient institution (Knight, 2022). Where charitable support is important, as in the US, the wealthy have disproportionate control over presenting institutions merely by giving more, and where the income tax is progressive, as in the US, their influence is amplified by their control of more public funds per dollar given (Feld et al., 1983).

The foregone tax, called a tax expenditure, far outweighs direct government support in the US. This and other tax advantages, like exemption from the local property tax and sales taxes important in US localities, can be much larger than public deliberation recognizes (Feld et al., 1983). In fact, indirect support tends to be invisible to receiving institutions and the public at large. Donations from patrons are always acknowledged at their gross value in concert programs and museum donor walls, but the government share is never explicit. When O’Hare and his coauthors first explored this area, the US arts community was in the grip of a debate in which direct national government appropriations to the arts, like the budget of the young National Endowment for the Arts, was compared ruefully to the much greater direct arts spending of other developed countries. We found that when the tax expenditures were estimated and summed, “government support for the arts” in the US was actually about the same as in the European benchmark countries it was compared to.

Tax policy is not only about economics but can have important consequences for art itself. The imposition of a “cabaret” excise tax, on music performance where dancing was permitted, during World War II in the US made big-band jazz in ballrooms unprofitable and led directly to the development of small-group be-bop (Jarenwattananon, 2013).

Finally, arts presenting institutions and sometimes artists themselves (rarely audience members) are eligible for government grants, like those of the US National Endowment for the Arts. The most important policy issues with these programs are the conditions of qualification and application process, along with the selection machinery. The trials of the NEA in its early years occasioned by “scandalous” grants support a discussion of censorship and freedom later in the course (Borgonovi and O’Hare, 2004).

Discussion prompt: The US National Endowment for the Arts grant program was promised not to ever be a ministry of culture, an academy, or a censor. But it has accreted properties of all three: should government art support just be left to the indirect system?

Why are so many artists poor?

Employment law, workforce development, housing and land use development policies, and public assistance policies, as well as the distinctive economic structure of the art world and the psychology of artists and their publics, all collide in the examination of the artist as worker and the frequent precarity they experience (Abbing, 2008). The art world is a classic exemplar of a “winner-take-all,” highly stratified economy (Frank & Cook, 1996).

Discussion prompt: Do we have an obligation to support artists particularly, as opposed to other types of low-wage workers; why, and if so, how? Are these issues better tackled by addressing the needs of all workers experiencing precarity, or not? What are the distinctive challenges of artists’ housing, and defense of neighborhoods like New York’s SOHO from gentrification?

The class surveys some of the ways artists and arts institutions earn money, from grants and subsidies to the art market, to the policies and protections afforded to low-wage and gig workers, and we note the importance of the digital content economy breakdown discussed below.

Rules and conditions of the system

Arts policy is much bigger than financial transfers. Property rights, defined by law and exchanged under legal constraints like fraud statutes and the copyright law, are central to the operation of the art world. Almost all of these could be different from the way they are, and often should be; they are amended by legislation with some frequency, like the US duration of copyright that was extended by decades to benefit the heirs of the original owners of Disney characters (Lessig, 2005).

These property rights, for all art, are in a state of crisis as a result of the digitization of a large part of art engagement. A half-century ago, recorded music could only be acquired or accessed by purchase of a physical chattel, and if a record was playing in one living room, it was not available to the family next door or across the world unless they had bought their own copies. Now, all digital media, unlike an oil painting or a seat in a concert hall, is a non-rival good and listening to a song from your hard drive or Spotify leaves no less of it for everyone else. Basic economic theory shows that it should be available at a price of zero, like a sidewalk, with the cost of making it covered by other mechanisms. Society has solved this problem for many goods, like policing and parks, but not (so far) for digital content, and the results are quite damaging for artists and the audience. Similar challenges confront newspapers and literature, graphic arts with the rise of technology like the Google Cultural Project, and when everyone has a 3-d printer perhaps even sculpture (As interacting with an NFT (non-fungible token) involves no engagement with art, this analysis has little to do with them) (Cagé, 2016).

Discussion prompt: Public goods—technically non-rival and non-excludible—left to the market, will be undersupplied. What does this mean in practice for digital content, and how can creators be both fairly compensated and properly price-signaled how much, and what, to create?

This crisis is not only a matter of fairness or efficiency (assuring creators proper price signals of the value they create). Because performers below the highest star level can no longer support themselves with recordings, they are obliged to tour constantly, and this is not only bad for families and their quality of life but affects the art itself. For example, live performance only pencils out in large venues, but an arena is not a good place to enjoy a singer with a guitar or a string quartet. The music, accordingly, evolves to suit enormous venues with bad acoustics: louder, flashier, simpler, and less subtle (Serrà et al., 2012).

Art engagement goes on in an environment of both official, legal constraints and also an extensive web of sociological conventions. A person of wealth who would never post her name outside her mansion on Nob Hill, nor on her Maybach automobile, is happy to have it in the ballet or opera program donor pages; why? Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu, 1979) described how “highbrow” art and knowledge of art is ammunition in a stalemated war between the élites of money and of education, and the sociological capoeira played out among art dealers, artists, museums, and collectors (Shnayerson, 2019) is news to many students though consequential for engagement by everyone. We spend a day going through a recent program of a major opera company analyzing how donors are recognized and for what, what kind of goods are advertised, and what level of musical and other education the program notes seem aimed at. The trouble the Sackler family has got into for “artwashing” the drug peddling origins of its fortune is relevant here as well (Sherwin, 2019).

Stock-flow mismatches

Unlike almost any other goods, art accumulates even as it is used. Some work goes in and out of fashion, but museum storage basements (and private Zurich warehouses) overflow and new music keeps being written. For popular art, this is the normal state of affairs; kids today barely know who Richard Rodgers was and the music on the radio is all current except for the occasional specialist jazz or classical station. It was true historically for all music: written for and “used up” at next Sunday’s service and Saturday’s court dinner, it only accumulated as scores in libraries where Bach could learn from Vivaldi. But in 1829 Felix Mendelssohn arranged the first performance of the St. Matthew Passion since Bach’s death in 1750; ever since, new music has had to compete for audience time with all the music ever written (Turrini et al., 2008). This accumulation of great works is in near-tragic conflict with the fixed lifetime attention an audience can (or wishes to) afford any art, so it becomes increasingly difficult for any new work to acquire engagement, which can only happen by pushing something wonderful out of the repertoire or off the museum gallery wall (O’Hare, 2015b).

Discussion prompt: How much new music that will almost certainly never have a second performance should the government or an orchestra commission? Will the audience let the orchestra retire Mozart’s 40th symphony to make space for work by a composer who speaks to us from our own time?

The accumulation of music scores that might be performed is not very costly; libraries can pack all sorts of paper documents tightly on shelves. But paintings are another story, especially as they have gotten enormous in a contest reminiscent of the loudness trend in music, and sculpture is worse. Meanwhile, art museums have bound themselves through their directors’ association to never sell work except to buy other art. This situation allows us to riff on the late Robert Leone’s principle, “accounting is too important to be left to the accountants”, because at the same time, museum accounting does not show the collection in the balance sheet and few museums have even evaluated (in money) their collections. The amounts involved are quite breathtaking (but remember the “going concern” principle of accounting; these amounts are not liquidation values). O’Hare has estimated the value of (for example) the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago at about US$30 thousand million (O’Hare, 2015a).

Retaining all of it broadly cripples art engagement in several ways. The visual art world calls this issue “the deaccession debate” and is far from resolving it, or even confronting it realistically (Gammon, 2018). First, it ties up scarce resources storing art that will never be seen; the museum’s ratio of art to audience viewing time increases constantly and is already very high. Second, it obstructs effective management; what firm could be properly run if no-one could see what its assets were? And finally, it kneecaps administrative decisions that could greatly increase engagement in the museum and outside it. The museum field trip assignment invites the students to spend a few hours in the art museum of their choice, and to think about how everything they see (for example, number of works per gallery, or information on labels) could (should?) be different.

For example, selling the least important one percent (by value, not object count) to regional museums, city halls, post offices, or even private collectors would endow free admission (currently $24) to the AIC forever. Note that attendance at a non-congested museum is a non-rival good, like a music recording file. It would also allow these works to be seen (no major art museum displays more than 5% of its collection) (O’Hare, 2015a). This institutionalized dysfunction presents policy-analytic questions for governments that are responsible for proper care and use of a society’s cultural endowment, and for museums themselves.

Discussion prompt: Should a state’s attorney general require its nonprofit museums to value their collections, at least approximately, and include the results in its balance sheet?

Art and crime/art as crime

Many artists have historically had romantically picaresque lives, often tragically so. We begin a unit on art and crime with a slide showing portraits of Janis Joplin, Caravaggio, Christopher Marlowe, Spade Cooley, Jimi Hendrix, Oscar Wilde, and a few others with the question “what do these artists have in common?” We can then discuss what aspects of the art world make drug dependency, violence, and self-destruction so (seemingly) common. Crime in the art world also includes art that is intrinsically criminal, like graffiti (vandalism), forgery, and fraud, or vicious (libel and slander).

The class also examines censorship and pornography. We consider the political dissident artist, constrained by government policy directly because of the content of their art as critical of a regime or specific policy, a unit for which we can choose from many examples of silenced or exiled artists. Still another involves the role of the audience and the institution as arbiter in decisions about the dissemination of an artist’s work: “cancel culture,” and its effectiveness as an economic tool or a social one. It includes artists behaving badly, power abuse, drugs, violence, and bad politics, racism and nationalism. How are we to deal with the “problematic artist”?

Discussion prompt: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is a century and a half old, and about a world five centuries and an ocean removed from ours. Its author was a misogynist and anti-Semite, a poster boy for the Nazis (Ross, 2020). The music includes a lute, but not even one guitar. Can it figure as evidence in, or illuminate, a serious conversation about art policy today—how?

This unit considers offenses against health like industrial hazards from chemicals and particulates for plastic artists, careless stunt planning and animal abuse in cinema, and of course the racism and sexism that pervade all the arts. Especially interesting, and a window into government workplace regulation more broadly, is the epidemic of deafness among musicians and their audiences resulting from traditional hazards like sitting in front of the brass section or merely playing a viola next to your left ear for thousands of hours, and new ones like attending concerts where volumes are cranked higher and higher to reach an audience deafened by the vicious circle in which amplified concerts lead to overloud listening devices which cause further hearing loss (University of Iowa Health Care, 2022).

Discussion prompt: Should government regulate hearing safety at performances as it does in industrial workplaces?

The last example presents a case of art being changed by external factors, in this case technological. Because of the logarithmic psychological response to sound energy, loudness was the most expensive quality of music when only acoustic instruments were available: to sound twice as loud as one violin requires 20 trained professionals (this is why there can be a violin concerto). But electronic amplification has made loudness free by merely turning a knob, so it is now the cheapest musical quality (among, for example, harmony, intonation, rhythm, ensemble, etc. which remain expensive) and by the relentless logic of the economic law of demand, it has become the most common means of emphasis and salience.

Art is itself an arbiter of criminality and vice: when a work of art is designated as criminal or is seen to have a role in influencing criminal behavior; when it is a work by a criminal, or when its execution or creation results in harm (perceived moral harm or actual, physical harm). One of the principal mechanisms in the great public health success of the last half-century, the reduction in tobacco use, was the displacement of smoking in TV and movies from a ubiquitous actor’s tool and indicator of suavity and cool to a mark of low character.

Discussion prompt: Do artists have special responsibilities to improve virtue in citizens through their work?

Art as a community-building resource

Wagner’s opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg serves several purposes in the course, of which one is to illustrate how an arts organization can be central to a community’s integration and define its identity. It can also ground discussions of how, and whether, fiction can be illuminating, or even evidence in a discussion of real policy and social values and of the relationships—substitute and complement both—among connoisseurship, innovation, tradition, virtuosity, naïve encounter, and amateur participation. Non-fictior̥nal examples include community projects like the murals in San Francisco’s Mission district, Brazilian choro circles, and samba blocos for carnaval.

The role of the arts in community health (in healthcare and in the justice system, for example) is one where research indicates its positive impacts on healing (State of the Field Committee, 2009), on recidivism rates (Brewster, 2014), and other social benefits. Its pointed usage as a tool in community-building has support from many US State-based arts councils and philanthropies, whose programs in the arts now span categories such as Arts In Corrections, and Reentry Through the Arts. This recognition and utilization of the arts in specific applications is an interesting development in the understanding of “community arts,” with implications in how holistically communities utilize the arts, either as a starting point and builder of a sense of community, or in treatment of some ill.

Recognition of the power of the arts to achieve such results has been helpful in obtaining more support for arts programming in some communities. Once again, we look to our class goal of “more, better engagement, by more people, with better art” to understand the policy implications of such programs, in addition to “arts for art’s sake.”

Education and audience development

If our goal is “more, better, engagement, by more people, with better art,” what policy alternatives would best realize it? We look at the role of arts education in audience development both in school from early childhood to … well … this course.

Arts education is edifying on several levels, with greater economic, societal, and individual development gains attributable to a school experience rich in arts education (Catterall, 2009). But the primary merit may be in its role as cultivator of demand. Arts education creates demand for the arts, to the point that it might deserve an official warning: “Caution: the content of this course is habit-forming!”… By building familiarity, a vocabulary to describe their experiences with works and works of art themselves, and a desire for further exploration, students who experience the arts will continue to appreciate them and seek out new arts experiences as they age: beneficial addiction. And arts education not only builds an audience, it also produces arts and culture workers.

Via the school system, students have an opportunity to access different kinds of art. As such it might be an equalizer, independent of a student’s upbringing. But the arts are only defined as a core academic subject in 29 States. While 44 States do offer arts instruction in the K-12, and 50 states as well as DC have adopted arts education standards, their provision varies dramatically across states, cities, and regions with funding formulas and local priorities, resulting in a variety of inequities.

Students in lower income areas are receiving fewer or very limited arts instruction or experiences (Rabkin & Hedberg, 2011), and inconsistent offerings proliferate, like middle schools without instrument classes while the high school band requires command of an instrument to join. And while arts are part of many official State educational requirements, there is no “stick” to enforce their offering, should a school not offer them.

Implementation is an area of some pedagogical and bureaucratic difficulty, as well, in the face of (for example) (i) competition for student class time between the arts and subjects like math that appear to have more career salience, and (ii) the allocation of art learning between history and appreciation of the work of others, and hands-on learning with paint and musical instruments.

Philosophical and pedagogical debates persist on what is taught, how it is taught, why, and by whom. Do we teach the arts in order to inculcate specific arts skills, such as the ability to read music or understand a scene? Do we do so toward creating new artists, or because we value these skills in a general education? Do we teach the arts and their appreciation because they enhance our understanding of other subjects and increase our ability to function more highly? Should arts education be about attention to specific details, the ability to work together with others, a way of looking at the world through a different lens, or the development and training of the generally “creative” mind? However, much of these debates boil down to bureaucratic concerns and issues in implementation, such as a lack of resources: instruments, or space, staffing, and instructional time.

What do world-famous examples of very high-level after-school student achievement like the Venezuelan El Sistema program and the Barcelona Sant Andreu Jazz Band imply for arts education in the schools, private or public? Are being able to draw a presentable portrait of a person, or sing a simple melody from a line of score, basic skills like being able to write a literate sentence?

Use of art by government

Governments not only affect the arts and culture from “outside” but also use them as policy instruments. In this unit of the course, we examine the ways the arts are utilized, and to what end. We look at cultural diplomacy, propaganda, and other ways in which governments explicitly or obliquely attempt to shape policy and society by advocating or requiring certain forms of art or cultural exchanges.

The use of cultural diplomacy and propaganda has a well-documented history in the United States and elsewhere. The class examines examples spanning the 20th and 21st centuries, looking at the subsidized export of American dance, visual art, music and theater during the Cold War, to more recent examples. Samantha Power, in her role as the US Ambassador to the UN, brought fellow UN delegates to Broadway shows such as Hamilton, and to plays that centered LGBTQ+ protagonists in an attempt to humanize their portrayal to representatives from countries who currently criminalize this community.

The use of the arts as a method by those inside government and across governments (as well as, of course, those outside) to influence behavior is seen in such varied examples as Brazilian Augusto Boal’s usage and development of theater techniques as a method of capturing and expressing both the voice of the people and decision making processes in government. It’s part of the way government opponents tell their story, for example lawyer and Belarusian opposition government council member Andrei Kureichick. With his concurrent career as a filmmaker and playwright, he has launched a global journalistic storytelling movement revealing the chilling details of Aleksandr Lukashenko’s crushing of democratic government and people’s protests. It has galvanized artistic communities and their audiences from the US to Hong Kong in support for democratic government. The effort now includes a second Worldwide Theater Project, distributing new works by Ukrainian playwrights to be produced around the world, to both share the stories of people affected, to fundraise for that government’s fight against Russia, and for humanitarian assistance.

The arts are used as a tool by government to shape society and to express preferences for certain ways of being and doing. Of course this enterprise has worked for good and ill; the Soviet and Nazi German governments ignorantly suppressed and exiled their most creative artists and yoked producers of kitsch to political aims. We examine the Trump Administration’s use of an executive order to favor certain types of architecture and public art, and the Biden Administration’s subsequent reversal of the order. We also look to several other modern governments which have attempted to overtly shape society via the arts and culture, such as Shanghai (Xu, 2021) and Singapore.

While many of these instances and examples may be criticized as propaganda to various degrees, what’s interesting here is that these are examples not just of the arts as part of a deployed communication strategy, but as instrumental to the formation or cultivation of specific policies, government processes, and ways of getting things done (Edelman, 1996). These are examples of the government usage of arts and culture deployed as both soft power (persuasion by moral or cultural influence) and hard power (coercion and economic inducements). There is room here to contemplate the value individuals, societies, and governments place on the arts and culture, both spoken and unspoken.

Discussion prompt: Can a government be an impresario, a producer, a critic, or an angel without damaging art and corrupting itself?

Art in social change movements

No survey of the role of the arts and culture in public policy would be complete without study of the use of the arts in social change movements. Building on the concept of the “artists” job” from the beginning of the course, we examine the artist’s influence and place in society and culture, and the use of art in service of causes and social movements. Myriad examples of the arts in protest movements from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Woodie Guthrie to Shepard Fairey reflect the importance of the arts in social change making and framing fundamental societal debate (Edelman, 1996). We also examine why this should be so: the wiring of the human brain is such that the arts can often shift perceptions and beliefs more effectively than fact-based messaging (Japhet & Feek, 2018). We are wired to learn from storytelling (Speer et al., 2009) and for the collective, synergistic work of sharing and engaging through this form (Stephens et al., 2010). Drawing from recent neurological research on the behavior of the human brain in response to storytelling, to the work of Marshall Ganz (Ganz, 2009) in building social movements, we look at examples of the arts’ impact on social change, and the why and how of it with examples like Dorothea Lange’s and Lewis Hine’s Depression photography.

Policy making process for the arts

A question of great interest, for arts students in particular, is: “How is policy toward the arts made, and how do I put my oar in?” Some arts policy is specifically targeted at certain issues in the arts worlds, while others are influenced in major areas by pieces of legislation which were not thought of as arts policy, such as employment law. Especially interesting in this context are policies that are almost certainly bad for artists and for engagement generally, but have been advocated by the art community, like “resale royalties” legislation that transfers risk from rich collectors to poor artists and money from poor artists to rich ones and rich collectors. We take a look at some of the processes in the US at the national, state, local level. What difficulties have been encountered? What were the inadvertent impacts of some of these policies? What arguments and justifications were used, and to what effect? Is focusing on the economic impact of the arts (i) able to encompass an accurate measure and (ii) helpful? How could we do better?

Discussion prompt: Do artists (and their spokespeople) know what’s good for them? Who does?

Conclusion and outcomes

Through its scope, core concepts, and pedagogy, this course explores the three main areas in which art and policy jointly create value. We think many of our colleagues could teach a course like this, and that our framework invites a lot of adaptation and variation, especially in the selection of art that students are invited to meet.

Our belief is that art creation and engagement have distinctive contributions to make to policy analysis itself, and we emphasize the connections between government and art. The course expands the standard policy-analysis model. We believe that the topics of “arts policy:” direct subsidy, regulatory, and support programs, as well as tax law, public education, public health, housing programs and other government—and nonprofit—behaviors, are of key concern to any policy student, but that public policy of all kinds needs the insights and guidance of artists, without whom we cannot understand the society we live in, or even who we are. It is with this conviction that we share our course model.

A semester course is quite packed with the content described above. We hardly cover literature, and arts management (is a museum director an educator, a scholar, a financial manager and fundraiser, a lobbyist … ?) is too little explored. The platform economy and NFTs are mentioned in our section on digital art but need more attention, as do the implications of the use of Chat GPT and AI image generators for artists and audiences. Popular art, especially the music our students mostly listen to, gets short shrift (Wagner, but not Kanye West) mainly because they don’t need us to introduce them to it and we’re not qualified to do so; our examples are almost all highbrow art (including jazz) plus the occasional country number or commercial artwork, including Taylor Swift, whose legal efforts on two fronts (regarding ticketing, and copyright) make for an excellent case study. Some of the most interesting provocative, political, or inventive art today is coming from east and South Asia, and we hope to expand our tool kit to include more of this. We are considering how this could be two stand-alone semesters if resources permit and demand exists.

Arts policy is a lot of fun to teach, and we learn from it every time. It seems to pay off for the students as well (of course, co-teaching with the likes of E.M. Forster, Richard Wagner, and Caetano Veloso, it’s hard to miss!); we asked alumni of a few years ago to reflect on their experiences of it. An undergrad said:

Surprisingly, the Arts and Cultural Policy class that I took my senior year ended up being one of the most influential in my career trajectory. It did not count for either of my two majors—History of Art and Conservation and Resource Studies—I took it only for my personal interest. Thank goodness I did! I’d just come back from a summer internship in the education department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art when I took PP157, and I was energized to find a position working in a museum after graduation. This course felt very “practical” in preparing me for this next step.

In the course, I was fascinated by the disconnects between wealth, expertise, and influence in the arts and culture world. I loved learning about how different policy frameworks—especially in the tax code—could influence the flow of resources to different organizations and causes. (Coyle, 2023)

An MPP graduate student, now the deputy director of the Children’s Creativity Museum in San Francisco, remembers:

I’d been a performer and theater-goer most of my life but had yet to work full-time in the cultural sector, though I aspired to do so upon graduation. I most vividly recall our class conversations around the notion of the arts patron. It seemed “old school” to me at the time but having now worked in nonprofits for nearly 20 years, I see that the concept is alive and well. Prominent philanthropists, nonprofit Boards, and government agencies continue to bolster arts & culture organizations to a large degree—and nonprofits, in turn, spend a great deal of time and resources on the cultivation and stewardship of these essential relationships. (Greenbaum, 2023)

The GSI/TA from a more recent year:

The Arts Policy course changed how I understood my own development as a musician, and through that, how I understand the dynamics of broader American society. Most of my early experience in jazz bands and orchestras run by nonprofits was shaped by how tax deductions for charitable donations allow donors, rather than the government, to allocate public funds. I see this dynamic repeating itself across any domain where nonprofits are doing something that could or should be the state’s responsibility, from environmental advocacy to homeless outreach. The art world provides some of the most obvious and jarring examples of this system’s consequences. (Buchholz, 2023)

The study of cultural policy and the arts is an important component of public policy education, due to their multiple levels of intersection and the complexity of their interactions. It is our belief that this study also enhances the overall approach to policy analysis and policy analysis education.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15236803.2023.2254631

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jean Johnstone

Jean Johnstone specializes in Arts & Cultural Policy, education and workforce development issues, and international comparative cultural policy. She teaches the Arts and Cultural Policy class at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. She consults on projects related to this work, recently including the California 100 project, which develops forward thinking policies for the State of CA for the next generation, and for the Economic and Workforce Development Department of the City of Oakland.

Prior to this work, Jean spent 7 years as the Executive Director of Teaching Artists Guild, a national organization dedicated to supporting and advocating for artists working in participatory settings. She worked in partnership with County Offices of Education, the Dept. of Education, philanthropies, and statewide on national policy councils for arts, education, and labor issues. Prior to this Jean was an actor, director, and teaching artist. She has lived, worked, and trained in Hong Kong, Moscow, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

She holds a Masters in Public Affairs from the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, and both her B.A. and Post-Graduate degree in Theater Arts from University of California, Santa Cruz.

Michael O’Hare

Michael O’Hare trained at Harvard as an architect and engineer, Michael O’Hare came to U.C. Berkeley after teaching positions at MIT and Harvard’s Kennedy School, and “real-world” employment at Arthur D. Little, Inc., Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and the Massachusetts Executive Office of Environmental Affairs. His research history has included periods of attention to biofuels and global warming policy, environmental policy generally including the “NIMBY problem” and facility siting, arts and cultural policy, public management, and higher education pedagogy. O’Hare was the principal investigator for Berkeley’s contract research for the California Air Resources Board for implementation of the Low Carbon Fuel Standard, and published most recently on fuel policies for global warming reductions, and the importance of time and uncertainty in relating fuel carbon intensity to warming policy.

He has been editor of the Curriculum and Case Notes section of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, was an associate editor of the Journal of Public Affairs Education, and has published frequently on quality assurance and best practices in professional teaching. He is a regular faculty member of the school’s mid-career executive programs, and has had visiting positions at Università Bocconi, the National University of Singapore, and Université Paul Cézanne (Aix-Marseille).