Government Funding For The Arts

Essay by Anonymous UserUniversity, Bachelor'sA+, January 1996

download word file, 3 pages 3.4

Downloaded 128 times

The National Endowment for the Arts is a government sponsored foundation.

The duty of the National Endowment for the Arts is to foster the growth of the arts evenly through the national, state, and local levels of the country. With all of the budget slashing that is now taking place the arts is the first place that people look to take money from. This not only happens on the national level but also in our schools. Many people don't see the arts as important. It is the most important thing that our society has.

Art, in each and every form that it comes in, shows us who we are. Our pictures that we paint, our songs which we compose, our theater for which we write, act, and dance for, our buildings which we design, as a whole, explains our culture. Future historians will look back at these things and judge us by our accomplishments in these areas.

When we look back in history, we recall it through the greatest past achievements in art: the Sistine Chapel, the great pyramids of Egypt, Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, and the works of Plato. Shouldn't we be able to show feats just as

grand?

Most Americans do agree with me. In 1992, a study called the 'Americans and the Arts VI' was conducted; it ended with these results:

* 60% of the people support the federal support of the arts.

* 63% of the people support the state's support of the arts.

* 84% of the people regard art as a reflection of life and times of a nation.

* 75% of the people think that the government can be helpful to artists in funding their work and in helping them gain recognition.

* 69% of the people would raise their taxes $5 a year...