Beauty and the Buck

Arts advocates want the state to spend $250 million on culture, arguing it's an

investment in a strong economy. Since when do the arts mean business?

By Thomas M. Keane Jr. | September 18, 2005 | Boston Sunday Globe Magazine

Walk a typical street in Italy and one can't help but be overwhelmed by its wealth of public art: statues, friezes, and churches of extraordinary beauty. Yet the place is an economic backwater - growth was a paltry 1.3 percent in 2004 (versus 4.4 percent in the United States), and average incomes are a fraction of ours. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley, dull and utilitarian, is a source of unparalleled innovation, the nation's top location for venture capital investments, and home to corporate stars such as Google and eBay.

With a proposal for Massachusetts to spend up to $250 million rehabbing cultural facilities across the state included in a legislative package that aims not to promote the arts but to stimulate the economy, it seems fair to ask: Does investing in the arts really boost economic growth? "The arts mean business" is a near mantra among arts advocates as they lobby legislatures for money. A slew of economic studies appears to support their position. A 2002 report by Americans for the Arts suggested that the arts contribute $134 billion annually to the US economy, creating 4.9 million jobs and - in a stunning and widely repeated assertion - generating $8 in tax receipts for every tax dollar spent. Local organizations such as the New England Foundation for the Arts and Massachusetts Advocates for Arts, Sciences, and Humanities make similar arguments.

An 8-to-1 return? Far better than most investments, that strains credulity. Perhaps we should just give school kids paintbrushes and forget about math and science. The seemingly outsize impact of the arts rests upon what economists call a "multiplier effect" - the notion that each dollar spent cycles through the economy, having the effect of many dollars. Take baseball, for example. A hitter spends a portion of his millions tipping, um, dancers, who then use that income to buy certain enhancements from plastic surgeons, who then use their money to . . . you get the idea. The money rolls over and over. The problem with the claimed multiplier effect for the arts is that it's true for virtually all economic activity. A multiplier effect doesn't justify government subsidies for baseball players - nor for the arts.

It is true, as advocates also claim, that the arts attract tourists. Yet, as Italy shows, an economy based on tourism - with its low-paying service-sector jobs - is nothing to brag about. Moreover, it's the same claim that one can make about almost anything, from historical sites to convention centers to natural resources. Indeed, there's a danger - as clearly happened with Boston's failing new convention center - that with every state spending money to attract tourists, these efforts simply offset each other.

Still, advocates argue, arts and culture exert some unique influence on economic growth. If so, it's hard to find. Last year, an analysis of 240 American cities by Harvard economist Edward Glaeser concluded that the number of artistic people in an area has no correlation to its economic success. In fact, any causality is likely the exact opposite of what advocates claim. Support for the arts doesn't produce economic growth. Rather, strong economic growth creates enough wealth so that the arts can flourish.

Why, then, such an emphasis on connecting arts with economics? The arts have usually been at the short end of the budgetary stick, an extravagance that was readily cut in tight times. By recasting art and culture as economic goods, advocates neatly reverse that. If doing so involved some deception and wishful thinking, one could always rationalize it as being in a good cause.

There's a danger here, however, in that advocates allow us to lose sight of the real importance of the arts. Art isn't supposed to be good for a balance sheet; it should be good for the soul. Moreover, if one follows the logic of "the arts mean business," then what defines good art? Profit? Popularity? It may well be that the best art is that which is offbeat, groundbreaking, unsettling, or even offensive, works whose economic effect is trivial or negative. Money shouldn't be the standard by which we judge artistic merit.