When state funding diminishes

Grant McCracken gets it exactly right here:

But $975 million is not the real cost. No, the real cost is much higher This is because when we fund culture this way, we actually diminish it. The opportunity cost is, in other words, phenomenal. I reckon this cost is roughly equal to the Pirates, Spiderman, and Oceans trilogies combined, but then I'm a trained professional working in the controlled circumstances of a New England laboratory. (Don't try these calculations at home.)

Sure, it sounds paradoxical. Spending more gets you less? Funding culture dismantles culture? But dynamism teaches us, that cultures are like marketplaces, the less you intercede the more they flourish, the more you intercede, the less they do.

[. . .]

I'm not saying that Canada could have established it's own cultural ascendancy, if only the state had spent less. I am saying spending more virtually guaranteed its present obscurity on the world stage. (And before someone writes in to complain about all the great music coming out of Montreal, let me point out this was made without state subvention too.)

Armies fight the last war. States embrace the last idea. There was a time when the model of state sponsorship worked. My travels in Europe might as well have been a tour of opera houses, each more glorious than the last, extravagant evidence that cities and states tied their identities to the musical accomplishment of local sons and daughters. (The Paris house, I was interested to note, was funded by private subscription.)

The state is no better at predicting the direction of artistic endeavour than they are at picking economic "winners". Most state spending on cultural items disproportionally benefits the economically better-off, too. How many folks working ordinary office jobs go to the opera? Listen to classical music? Watch the ballet?

Artistic welfare for the rich? Isn't that just as morally questionable as economic grants to wealthy firms? You can't even really say that it's the struggling artists who benefit from this kind of spending . . . it's the already successful ones who garner most of the return.