What happens when the arts get defunded?
Plus, a question of to be or not to be.
Hello. Since we last spoke, I have:
Seen Egon Schiele: Living Landscapes at the Neue Galerie (which closes January 13) and Edges of Ailey at the Whitney (which closes February 9).
Watched Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) at Film Forum.
Watched Amadeus (1984), The Substance (2024), The Piano Teacher (2001), and Nosferatu (2024) at home. (The latter of which is one of my WGA member privileges). You can follow me on Letterboxd if you would like.
Read the Merve Emre-edited Djuna Barnes collection I Am Alien to Life. You can follow me on Storygraph if you would like.
Onto the news:
2025 is not looking great for arts institutions in search of funding. As The Art Insider recently reported, governments all over have been trimming the arts from their budgets; we previously spoke about Berlin’s €130 million cut to cultural spending, but there have also been recent cuts in the U.K. (particularly in smaller municipalities) Scotland, Finland (which we recently praised for its literacy rates), and, of course, the U.S.
This leaves countless cultural and educational organizations in difficult positions—having to reduce hours of museum admission, cancel performances, and cut programs altogether. Critics of arts and humanities funding have argued that such institutions have become overly reliant on dollars that are taken for granted, leading to unwise spending. But the reality is that even with government funding, many arts organizations and ecosystems struggle to maintain the infrastructure that allows them to survive. At a midsize arts institution, about 40% of a budget goes to staff salaries and things like office space, logistics, etc. that aren’t typically covered by prestige-seeking donors or government grants, Laura Raicovich and Laura Hanna wrote last year in the New York Times op-ed “To Save Museums, Treat Them Like Highways.” Their argument is simple: “We need federal infrastructure funding for facilities, salaries, and other infrastructural needs that can be delivered directly to institutions through a separate grant system.”
It’s a good argument, though one I can’t realistically see being adopted anytime soon in the U.S.; if a country like Germany, which has historically supported its arts ecosystem is making such large cuts to its cultural sector, what can we hope for amid the soon-to-come second Trump administration?
It’s not yet entirely clear. Last time Trump was in office, he famously tried to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, but was blocked by Congress, which has shown bipartisan support for arts funding, Elizabeth Blair recently reported for NPR. Of course, that support isn’t humanitarian in nature: There is plenty of data that shows that arts infrastructure, like local theaters, have positive economic impacts on their communities.
Decreased government support means institutions will have to figure out a way to make up costs—and as we previously discussed, most haven’t really nailed that just yet. At the very least, in the United States, nonprofits have tax advantages and a culture of philanthropy that’s not as common in countries that have historically seen greater government support for the cultural sector, Richard Morrison, a critic for The Times of London, noted to the New York Times in the fall.
And when there’s less to go around, that can impact an entire cultural community—even when funding efforts are well-intentioned.
In Austin, the local government made reforms to its arts grant program that aimed to benefit marginalized groups. A great and commendable prospect! However, two years after those changes were made, today, larger, more established arts institutions in the city are struggling after seeing their funding drastically decrease; a lack of clarity around what the grant-giving board meant when it said it was looking to support “diversity” has made the application process more cryptic for many, and it has seemingly failed to consider applicants—not just who they are, but who they support—holistically, Richard Whittaker reported for The Austin Chronicle in October: “The greatest concern among the arts community is that the process was laser-focused on administrators—both staff and the board—at the expense of audiences and artists.”
Now, institutions that have historically supported the production of work by marginalized artists—such as production companies and theaters—are dealing with drastically reduced budgets due to their not having a board that is made up of historically marginalized administrators, which means there is, in effect, still less support for those marginalized artists. And some grant applicants, like Zilker Theatre Productions, have also found their funding inexplicably decreased since the reforms, despite their seemingly meeting certain diversity measures. “As a Hispanic woman, [it] feels like, once again, I’m being told I don’t count, and neither do our board members, and I take that personally because we have a diverse board,” board president Lisa Muir told the Chronicle.
A lot of this would be solved by embracing Raicovich and Hanna’s proposal to build federal support for arts infrastructure that allows institutions to keep the lights on without having to spend all their time applying for grants or asking for donations. But as we see this kind of governmental support decrease in many parts of the world, it appears likely that challenges will only increase across the board.
Still, there are some bright spots in 2025 yet: Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs has received an increased budget for the year ahead, and in September, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced up to $80 million in capital funding available for nonprofit arts and cultural organizations. It’s clear that a bigger, cultural transformation is needed to create a sustainable cultural ecosystem. But we will take such small wins.
Increasingly, museums are introducing “quiet hours”—time slots that are intended to be more accommodating to guests who have sensory needs, MuseumNext reported. Some, like the National Museum of Singapore, also adjust lighting during these hours to reduce stimulation.
The rising popularity of fantasy—or romantasy—novels has had an unfortunate cultural impact, as some academics and readers are increasingly noting the misappropriation of Welsh and Gaelic culture in popular series by authors such as Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros, the BBC reported. “There's a pan-Celticism sort of situation that has developed in fantasy, where everybody thinks that all of that can be thrown in together—that's Gaelic, Irish, Welsh, Manx, Cornish, the lot—and it just becomes one big amalgamation and anybody can pick anything they want out of that pot,” says Professor Dimitra Fimi, a lecturer in fantasy and children's literature at Glasgow University, of this so-called “Tolkein effect.”
A Renaissance artist gets his due. A restoration of Italian painter Cimabue’s painting of the Madonna, La Maestà (1280) has revealed that the painter may have developed artistic techniques that were previously attributed to his pupil, Giotto, The Art Newspaper reported. The newly restored painting—which some experts consider the “founding act of Western painting” due to its naturalism, perspective, and three-dimensionality—will be on display at the Louvre later this month in an exhibit dedicated to the artist running through May 12: A New Look at Cimabue at the Origins of Italian Painting.
Rumors of the death of the literary man have been greatly exaggerated, finds Vox. Writer Constance Grady tried to track down a much-quoted statistic that women drive 80 percent of fiction purchases in the U.S.—and came up empty-handed. What she did find: Men do indeed read less than women by several measures, but not to such a degree that qualifies the many headlines that have emerged on the matter. The reality is that there is such a pervasive image of women being fiction readers far more than men; just think of all the hustle bro content that shills self-help books or those apps that give 15-minute summaries of books for people who can’t be bothered to read altogether. But this is far from a new phenomenon, Grady writes:
Novels have been considered feminine frivolities since the Victorian era, when women first emerged as a major book-buying market in Europe. Novels, which were about fantasies that had never occurred and frequently dealt with love and marriage, were thought to be most proper for women, whose sphere was the home. Men, who would have to take on the strictures of the outside world, were thought to be better suited for journalism and nonfiction, which would prepare them to take action.
It may be time for us to move on to a new story.
I do not particularly like the work of artist Jeff Koons, but I appreciate the nuance he has in considering the question of AI in art. He recently told The Guardian that he uses AI as a brainstorming tool—basically, to better visualize something he already has in his head—but not as an “agent” of creation. “I believe very much in this process, this biological process, and the senses: the sense of sight and touch and feeling … I don’t want to be lazy in the back seat,” he said.
That’s not to say he’ll never use AI—he brought up how photography changed the world of visual art, but didn’t eliminate painting altogether. But he remains confident that AI, no matter how it develops, will never fully replace artists.
Modern dance in China is growing in popularity, and a new oral history project, Planting Seeds: American Dance Festival and Modern Dance in China, aims to make it take hold even more. The New York Times reports on the history of the Guangdong Modern Dance Company, and how Chinese modern dance had to develop under the radar, especially after the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, but expanded “during the ‘reform and opening up’ period” of the 1980s. The piece notes how founding company member Shen Wei appeared on Dance Smash—essentially China’s So You Think You Can Dance—in recent years and how the show has led some modern dancers to “became celebrities with millions of followers, like pop stars,” says Emily Wilcox, a professor of Chinese studies at the College of William & Mary, who worked on Planting Seeds. It’s interesting that the U.S. hasn’t seen the effect; here, dancers are more likely to become pop stars (see: Tate McRae).
Planting Seeds is pretty academic in nature; it contains more than 21 hours of video interviews documenting the relationship between the American Dance Festival, dance educator Yang Meiqi, and the Guangdong Modern Dance Company. After seeing Edges of Ailey at the Whitney (which is great), I do think it’s in our best interest to invest in these kinds of oral histories, especially with an art form as ephemeral as dance. Records are important for history and preservation—but they also lay the foundation for the future.
Here is a question first posited by French mathematician Émile Borel in 1913: could an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite amount of time type the entirety of Shakespeare’s works by chance? Is it to be, or not to be? A new study, reported on by the NYT, gives us an answer: “It’s not happening,” says Stephen Woodcock, a mathematician at the University of Technology Sydney. Glad we settled that! ▲