THE ARTS: The New Century—Toward Recovery

National Review, Jan 24, 2000 by Paul Johnson

One thing I predict with confidence is that early in the new millennium, state subsidy of the arts will largely disappear. And it will happen quite suddenly. There is a parallel here with government-to-government cash transfers to poor nations, which, from the 1950s to the early 1980s, were conducted on an enormous scale and seemed one of the fixed geopolitical facts of life. It took a long time for Western governments to realize that such aid had the sole result of keeping incompetent governments in power. But once the penny dropped, the practice ceased, and any assistance is now hardheaded and left to, or channeled through, the market. There will come a point, probably sooner rather than later, when we will decide that the arts too must be left to the market and the vagaries of individual taste. Then they will be free to flourish.

Mr. Johnson, the English journalist and historian, is the author of, among many other books, A History of the American People. His forthcoming book is about the Renaissance.