Necessary and Appropriate?
(This article was originally published elsewhere on July 14, 2014)
An interview with myself, in which I talk about the National Endowment for the Arts.
Q: All right, Mr. Kahn, let me see if I have this straight. You are a practicing artist, and you believe that the National Endowment for the Arts should be fully privatized. Is that correct?
A: Yes, it is.
Q: What exactly do you mean by “privatized” in this context?
A: The NEA should receive no more taxpayer funding. It should sever all ties with all government entities—federal, state, and local. The head of the NEA should be chosen by a process that is purely non-governmental, with no official involvement by the President or Congress. The National Medal of Arts could continue, but only as a private award selected by people with no official connections to government at any level, and presented in a setting that would not be associated with government.
Q: Are you a wealthy artist who has no need of grants to support your work?
A: On the contrary—I'm a starving artist married to a starving public school art teacher. I offer prints of my works for sale at print-on-demand web sites. I've sold a small number of these prints, but I definitely don't have a lot of income from my art. I also have no idea whether or not this will change. I'll add that my art is within the general range of art that the NEA claims it attempts to support. My pieces are visual works, and they are made in a fairly experimental digital and algorithmic context.
Q: What is your central objection to the taxpayer-funded NEA?
A: The problem is easily visible in the US Constitution itself—specifically the Tenth Amendment, which reads, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Now contrast this with the “National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965” as amended in 2010. Chapter 20 of the United States Code, Section 951 (“Declaration of findings and purposes”), paragraph 2, reads: “The encouragement and support of national progress and scholarship in the humanities and the arts, while primarily a matter for private and local initiative, are also appropriate matters of concern to the Federal Government.” In paragraph 5 of the same section, there is this text: “It is necessary and appropriate for the Federal Government to complement, assist, and add to programs for the advancement of the humanities and the arts by local, State, regional, and private agencies and their organizations.” And in paragraph 7, we see this: “It is necessary and appropriate for the Federal Government to help create and sustain not only a climate encouraging freedom of thought, imagination, and inquiry but also the material conditions facilitating the release of this creative talent.”
Where in the world does Congress get these ideas about such governmental actions being “necessary and appropriate”? Certainly not from any place in the Constitution itself. The enumerated powers of Congress are quite explicitly spelled out in Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution, and none of those powers even remotely resembles the activities described in the statute that is at issue here.
I'm an artist. I'm also an American citizen. I'm never enthusiastic about the US Congress barging into areas where it has no constitutional authorization to go, no matter how good the intentions may be. The Tenth Amendment should be consistently applied.
Q: What steps are you planning to take in connection with this issue?
A: The first step is right here: placing this piece of text in public view, and encouraging the widest possible variety of people to participate in a totally free and open discussion. I look forward to seeing everyone's responses.