Diplomat Nikki Haley Says Emergency Aid for the Arts Doesn’t Help People. Here’s Why She’s Dead Wrong

As Congress moved to pass a record-breaking economic stimulus
package amid the terror, chaos, and carnage of the United States’s
ongoing coronavirus crisis, Republican politician and
fundraiser Nikki Haley took a moment out of her
day to stoke the fires of conservative attacks on art
support.

Specifically, Haley, who served as Trump’s foreign UN ambassador
until 2018, Tweeted to denounce the tiny emergency bumps given to
the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the
Humanities, public television, and the Kennedy Center as
irresponsible.

This type of culture war posturing is as predictable as it is
contemptible right now. Before Armageddon hit, I had just published
a piece laying out a long
response to renewed attacks on the NEA. The idea that arts
funding is “welfare for elites” is an old, old talking point—but it
persists because it serves a purpose: to distract from giveaways to
corporations and rich people by framing the real problem as lazy
cultural elites living off the fat of government subsidies.

Haley’s concern trolling is somewhat pathetic in the context of
a $2 trillion federal aid package in that the measly amounts of
stimulus awarded to our already anemic government art agencies is
so small as to really only matter symbolically. As my colleague
Eileen Kinsella reported today, arts
groups got less than 5 percent of what they say they needed.

The American Alliance of
Museums had floated a $4 billion budget—ambitious but
justifiable given the absolutely unprecedented crisis faced by
closed museums. “We estimate as many as 30 percent of museums,
mostly in small and rural communities, will not re-open without
significant and immediate emergency financial assistance,” they
wrote.

House Democrats had included $300 million for the National
Endowment for the Arts and another $300 million to the National
Endowment for the Humanities. In the final tally, it was whittled
down to $75 million each.

To give you a sense of how inadequate this is: New York’s
Metropolitan Museum alone said it would lose $100 million, and have
to lay employees off. Across the country, museum layoffs have
already begun. “The majority of organizations don’t have a plan B,”
Zannie Voss, the director of Southern Methodist University’s
DataArts resource told Julia Halperin and Javier Pes in their article about the
crisis faced by museums.

“How many more people could have been helped with this money?”
Haley asks. Well, the people who work there are real people.

Let me give you an example that might hit a little close to
home.

In Haley’s home state of South Carolina, Spoleto Festival each year brings opera,
theater, dance, and chamber, symphonic, choral, and jazz music to
all of Charleston. The pandemic has forced the festival to call off its May opening
already. “This is truly heartbreaking for our artists, volunteers,
staff, and audience,” Spoleto wrote on social media,
“however, to continue plans in the face of #COVID19 would be
irresponsible.”

The economic impact to South Carolina has been over $1 billion
in its 40-year history, according to the former head of the
festival, M. Edward Sellers. It has also employed 20 full-time
staffers and more than 600 seasonal employees in the past 30
years.

Those are real jobs and real
people who are having a chunk of their livelihoods stripped from
them, through no fault of their own.

Sellers, it so happens, was making his case in an article
for the Post and
Courier three years ago defending the National
Endowment for the Arts. “I can say that Spoleto would not have
started were it not for the NEA,” he wrote. A $35,000 grant got it
off the ground. It receives funding now from the South Carolina
Arts Commission, which also receives support from the National
Endowment for the Arts.

And if similar grants can see similar arts organizations through
a horrible, scarring time, isn’t that worth it? Or is the
temptation of sneering point-scoring too great, even in a
disaster?

The post Diplomat Nikki Haley Says Emergency Aid for the
Arts Doesn’t Help People. Here’s Why She’s Dead Wrong appeared
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