Some people believe that government funding of the arts is necessary to ensure that the arts can flourish and be available to all people Others believe that government funding of the arts threatens the integrity of the arts Write a response in which you d

The arts forms an exceptionally important aspect of any society, bringing people together, expressing key sentiments of the time, and creating an impression of today's society for future generations. However, the arts is also a highly competitive field with minimal funding that is unequally distributed to favor the more popular names in the field. This makes it more difficult for the more impoverished or underprivileged sectors of society to get involved in arts, and thus shuts them out of the cultural narrative. A naive solution to this issue calls for government funding of the arts, so art can become more accessible.

On the face of it, government funding is a sensible solution. Funding school or community art programs, like painting or writing classes, is critical to making it feasible for everyone to learn and benefit from the arts. If the government can go even further and universally subsidize supplies, even better. However, funding bodies that contract particular art pieces or oversee museums have a great degree of control over the nature of art produced, which creates a serious issue where government funding on the arts could threaten its integrity by unduly influencing what is created. Since the government is typically more representative of its more affluent and privileged citizens, rather than making arts more accessible, this will actually limit the freedom of the arts! For example, governments are already able to regulate what kind of content can be found in television or movies by including age ratings or completely banning some of them. This is important, to an extent, because it protects children from being exposed to gory horror movies like the Human Centipede. But, it also means that media representing marginalized groups, like the LGBTQ community, often gets additional, unfair restrictions placed on them depending on the particular government. One only has to think of the fact that Love, Simon, an innocent, LGBT teenage coming of age movie was banned or rated R in multiple countries. If governments were funding the movies, such a movie could never have been made at all.

Furthermore, arts funding in today's world has changed significantly from the past. Podcasts are a growing medium that is primarily funded by Kickstarters or Patreon campaigns, which are crowdfunding websites where you can pledge your favorite shows a certain amount of money. This removes the issues of biased funding or advertisements from larger corporations and instead gives the funding power in ordinary people's hands, which allows the creation of much more represntative and diverse media that better responds to and preserves the cultural consciousness of the society. Additionally, these new, emerging types of media and funding are avenues that the slow government response would be unable to keep up with. Thus, relying on government funding would not only limit the content, but also the innovativeness of the arts.

Finally, a lot of artistic content is now generated by online creators. Be it jokes on the twitter, or cute cartoons, or a self-made youtube channels, artists from all fields have a lot more options today, which allows them greater freedom of expression than government funding could. Additionally, there is a large amount of diversity and dissent generated on these platforms, which is crucial to promoting a greater speed and flexibility in our evolving society. No government will be funding meme creators, but they are a valuable part of the online identity of our modern society, especially for the youth. Thus, government funding for the arts would curtail the evolution into these new mediums.

Thus, government funding for art programs and supplies is important to creating platforms for people to learn and grow. But governments should not be funding particular artists or art pieces, because they are not always representative of the interests of individuals in society and would limit artists in both form and content. Today, several alternatives to source funding exist, and so the art funding issue can be alleviated through other, less restrictive and more representative options.