Author: Kevin V. Mulcahy and C. Richard Swaim

Publication Year: 1981

Media Type: Book

Summary:

The essays in this text explore various issues in arts policy making, examining ideology and the arts, the government as a patron of the arts, and aspects of public culture. Like wilderness areas, the environment, and in an earlier time parks and schools, the arts now have vocal constituencies among local community leaders and national opinion makers.

Abstract:

The essays in this text explore various issues in arts policy making, examining ideology and the arts, the government as a patron of the arts, and aspects of public culture. Like wilderness areas, the environment, and in an earlier time parks and schools, the arts now have vocal constituencies among local community leaders and national opinion makers. The issue raised along with this growing public support are by no means resolved, nor are the available solutions universally accepted. But the recent well-publicized attack on public culture by the Reagan administration (with proposed budget cuts approaching 50 percent) and the spirited counterattack by various cultural interest groups (successfully reducing these cuts to 25 percent) testify to the political significance of arts policy.

This text - a collection of original essays - defines the field of arts policy and explores the various issues involved in arts policy-making. The authors point out that the issues raised - in particular challenges to certain basic assumptions about high culture, standards-setting, eastern and urban cultural hegemony, regional and institutional funding patterns, the composition of program evaluation panels and the national councils, etc. - are similar to those raised in all public policy areas. The consensus is that the arts world has discovered, among other things, that public support is a mixed blessing; that politics, i.e., questions about what is in the public interest, always follows public money, and that resolutions of these questions will occur in the public arena, not in board rooms or opera boxes. (Book cover).

CONTENTS
Chapters are analyzed.
Contributors [biography].
Index.
Each chapter contains notes [bibliography].

Arts & Intersections:

Categories: Community Development