Public Culture and the Public: a Review Article

T HERE HAS BEEN a veritable explosion of literature on public policy and the arts in the past five years. While the effect of the blasts has not exactly ignited a firestorm of interest among political scientists, students of public policy-making and public policy-makers have become increasingly aware of public culture as a political and administrative issue. What is perhaps politically most significant about public culture is the speed with which the arts have become ensconced in the policy-making process. Less than twenty years ago a discussion of public support for culture would have been conjectural or historical; public arts agencies today are institutionalized dispensers of governmental patronage. What was once done by churches and courts is now done by administrative agencies in both the United States and Europe. If we do not have a federal "Department of Cultural Affairs," our network of arts agencies constitutes a cultural establishment. The best-known of the arts agencies is the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), which along with its less-glamorous sister agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), was established in 1965. In the late 1960s, Congress established the Corporation of Public Broadcasting (CPB) as a conduit for federal funding to support public radio and television. (CPB, however, is prohibited from directly producing programming; that is a job for the Public Broadcasting Service and its member stations.) NEA, NEH, and CPB were each funded at about $150 million in 1980 and together make up the bulk of the cultural establishment. The federal government is also involved with the arts through lesser-known agencies such as the Museum Services Institute; various programs supported by the Department of Education, National Park Service and National Science Foundation; works commissioned for public buildings by the General Services Administration; the museum system supported by the Smithsonian Institution; the National Archives and Library of Congress; and the overseas cultural exchanges sponsored by the International Communication Agency. Some of the significance of public involvement on artistic production can be seen in two New Yorker cartoons. One of a few years ago shows a writer being visited by one of the Muses who whispers apologetically; "I don't have any inspiration today but