I wrote this column back in 2012 when the NEA was under fire during a presidential campaign.  Now it’s timely once again

In the wake of my column last week on Presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s intention to cut the National Endowment for the Arts, I’ve been asked several times whether I thought there was any way a conservative could support the NEA. Many politicians are quick to place it on the chopping block, and in general it seems like one’s position on the Endowment—and toward public funding for the arts in general—is something of a litmus test for both sides of the political spectrum. If you’re a liberal you must support it and if you’re a conservative you must oppose it. As is the case with all the other reductionisms our politics seems bent on encouraging, this one contributes nothing of substance to understanding the issue of public funding for the arts.

I usually respond to the question by first noting the difference between conservatives and libertarians. Public spending on the arts is rightly anathema to libertarians, but arts policy is a topic on which the distance between the two camps is significant. How conservatives think about the NEA should be linked to how they think about contemporary culture, and about the great art from the past that has come down to us.

Each generation is responsible to see that familiarity with those great works of art is preserved and passed along to the next. Popular culture, shock art, and the celebrity-and-money-driven art market undermine the public’s perception of art, devaluing it into a cheaper, more transient, and ultimately far less meaningful currency, drained of transcendent capabilities. Wisely spent, government money has the potential to counter this, even though I’ll grant that in the past it has sometimes worked in the opposite direction.

Part of the problem is that the question at the center of public funding is rarely asked openly and is lost in the uproar that accompanies the occasional controversy: “Who ought to be the central beneficiary of arts funding, the American artist or the American people?”  A conservative might answer “the American people.”

In order to justify taxpayer support, not just to conservatives but to anyone, what the arts provide to society must be more than individualistic or crassly political in nature. When the NEA conceives of itself as the nation’s premier evangelist for great art, it will design programs that can arrest a national drift into isolated and self-centered individualism, because that’s what contact with great art does. Consequently, the Endowment sometimes operates as though the best use of government funds for the arts is to awaken an appreciation for the best art ever made in those who would be the next generation of artists, patrons, and aficionados. After all, it was none other than Walt Whitman who said that “to have great poets, there must be great audiences, too.” It’s no coincidence that when the NEA does this, its support in Congress tends to rise.

Exposure to great art has the capacity to remind people of their common humanity and less of their individuality.  “How much larger your life would be,” wrote G.K. Chesterton in 1908, “if your self could become smaller in it.” Such is the gift that great art offers to an aimless, selfish society. It provides a touchstone of community, taking note of those things that are similar, not different, in all people.

To the degree that the Endowment functions this way, with this task as its mission, public spending can also encourage a wider appreciation of the power of art to bring people together instead of push them apart. That’s the sort of project it seems that conservatives could get behind.