Cultural Democracy: The Arts, Community, and the Public Purpose

5. Donation and Deduction

Audience and corporate sponsorship signage at the National Folk Festival. Photo by Phyllis O’Neill. 5 Donation and Deduction Historically, the arts have depended on patronage from large institutions: royalty, religion, the aristocracy. Most of the world’s major ancient monuments —the Egyptian pyramids, the Great Wall of China, India’s Taj Mahal, Machu Picchu of the Inca—were built by the state. Religious temples and shrines, including Europe’s medieval cathedrals, Cambodia’s Angkor Wat, majestic mosques throughout the Middle East, dozens of Hindu shrines in South Asia and Buddhist statuary from India to Japan, attest to the centrality of the role faith has played in supporting the grand flourishing of art. The artists and craftspeople engaged in the creation of these global treasures live on as exemplars of the communities they depicted in their work. Often, their efforts are the most enduring legacy of their civilizations, attaining an immortality that far exceeds that of their patrons, who are often forgotten or neglected. Who gets the press today— Donation and Deduction / 109 Michelangelo, or the pope who hired him to paint the Sistine Chapel? Mozart, or the Archbishop of Salzburg? In Europe, beginning with the Renaissance, this patronage system gradually passed from the church to wealthy aristocrats who could commission artists, architects, and composers to create monuments to themselves, or simply provide elite entertainments. The cultivated appreciation of music, theater, and fine arts became an important marker of status. High art was for the refined tastes of the educated upper classes; popular entertainment was for the masses. Such pretensions to the cultivated life came to the New World with European colonists and were exemplified by founders such as Thomas Jefferson , who built his Greek revival home at Monticello and played chamber music in his spare time. America’s cultural elite knew that they were the masters of a wild and untamed continent that could scarcely aspire to European refinement, but they were determined that the new nation’s culture would one day compete. Europe’s high-art traditions of opera, symphonic and chamber music, neoclassical sculpture, and figurative painting were assumed as the ideals toward which American artists might strive. Gradually, a supporting system of elite training facilities—art schools, conservatories, ballet studios—emerged to further this goal. Meanwhile, the Industrial Revolution was producing a class of wealthy Americans who aspired to the pretensions of Europe’s nobility. American heiresses married down-on-their-luck English aristocrats, exchanging wealth for titles. Vanderbilts and Carnegies turned Newport into a veritable subdivision of faux European country estates and then went on to build universities and libraries to foster an appreciative clientele for their vision. This was, and remains, a vision that excludes most of the world’s cultural output. Popular entertainments such as traveling theater troupes, barn dances, or epic poetry recitations were left out of the equation. Ethnic folk traditions, including those from Europe, were scorned. Art of any kind from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, or Latin America was not even considered (except the occasional Chinese porcelain vase, displayed as an exotic curiosity). And Native American culture was most unwelcome: European Americans were still in the process of annihilating Indians. The culture of most Americans was systematically excluded from the academy and from the halls of public art. This bias is so entrenched in our institutions that it is still part of the received tradition in every school. Ethnomusicologists today are fond of pointing out that European “classical” 110 / Cultural Democracy music accounts for less than 5 percent of the planet’s musical output but still receives over 95 percent of the attention in American universities. In 1913, with the inception of the federal income tax, a system was put into place that effectively ensured that elite cultural patronage would dominate the evolution of American public culture. With the income tax came the idea of the tax deduction: those with wealth could avoid paying it in taxes to the government if they donated to “charity.” The idea was to encourage private patrons to assume some of the social burdens of the age. Many social ills—urban slums, homelessness, illiteracy, inadequate health care—resulted directly from the primitive capital accumulation of the early industrialists. Government was—and remains—reluctant to assume these burdens. The tax deduction was deemed a mechanism for encouraging the wealthy, who had gained tremendously through industrialization, to bear some of its costs. It has...