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Guest Editor's Introduction

With the U.S. presidential political season in full swing, it is hard to ignore the rhetoric that pits one candidate’s ideology against another’s. Despite the differences, there is a commonality—each candidate is constructing a vision for the future based on their interpretation and analysis of the past. Similarly, during the 2011 Social Theory, Politics, and the Arts Conference, presenters examined complex issues facing arts and culture through historical, political, and theoretical lenses in order to help us understand our future. From those proceedings, researchers envisioned new directions for arts and culture in the future. The articles selected for this edition of The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society examine the past and offer potential pathways for our future. Just as in 2008 when then presidential candidate Barack Obama ran on a campaign of “Change,” this group of authors suggest that this is precisely the word that can be used to describe what is needed in the current arts environment—both in the United States and abroad. After years of the field lamenting the lack of public funding for the arts in the United States, Michael Wilkerson (Indiana University) argues that in fact, “there is plenty of money in the arts.” The author contends that contemporary and historical models of U.S. arts funding—including direct public money appropriation and income tax deduction incentives—lack two primary requirements that a new funding model should embrace: reallocation of funds and a user pay model. First, the author calls for a dissolution of the distinction between for-profit and nonprofit arts industries. Citing the fact that money is abundant in the “entertainment” industries of film, television, and music, the article suggests a redistribution of this wealth to subsidize the nonprofit “arts.” Furthermore, capitalizing on the concepts of art taxes used in some locales, the author conceptualizes a far-reaching national user-tax system that taxes all users of “arts” or “entertainment” and redistributes those funds to the nonprofit arts sector through a federally managed fund for arts and culture. While grand in its scope and difficult to imagine fully implemented, Wilkerson asks us, as a field, to reconsider the boundaries we have drawn around our ideas of funding models for the arts in the United States.