>>4209>Funding for art is a weird one, since it's naturally going to stifle art i think. Art should expand in all kinds of different directions, and i think funding for the arts could actually restrict art by encouraging artists to stay within convention in order to be considered art/artists and receive funding.This depends on who is making ghe judgement call on what gets funded.
Ultimately, the point behind funding of the arts is the recognition that market forces can be just as constraining on artist and creativity as the need to appeal to the market discourages risk taking.
Thus, funding for arts that would be more expensive than just like, painting (such as film for instance) is there as a relief from this fundamental creativity stifling pressure that comes from the market itself.
Take for instance a movie like Paris is Burning. A documentary about late 1980s ballroom culture. It was a documentary funded by a government endowment for the arts about the LGBT competitive fashion competitions that were particularly popular with LGBT kids of color. Many of whom were deeply impoverished.
That documentary would go on to have a permanent place in the national film registry 25 years later, but in 1987, who would have funded that privately? Who exactly was the documentary
for ? Who would have been the key demographic for that?
It's considered an important and influential documentary that chronicled an underground culture in America at the time and exposed an important perspective. And at the time no investors would have been interested in the project because the (assumed) audience for it would be too small for any private investors to care. The film didn't have any audience until it hot critically praised and won some film festival awards, and
that was when it found a consumer base,
after the film was already made, the audience that wanted to see it were not largely LGBT, but people interested in an interesting and well made documentary about LGBT culture amongst young LGBT people of color. Plus, it made the topic more commercially viable amongst documentary consumers.
That's essentially what government funding of the arts is supposed to do. It encourages innovation in a market where the interes
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