On subsidizing art

Recently a professor at a course focusing on venturing suggested that one reason that Finnish start-ups weren't really huge on the international level was that the current mechanisms for supporting venturing and entrepreneurship in Finland were too much of what you'd expect in a European welfare state. The government was shoving money into start-ups to just keep them alive, barely. But because of the level of support, you didn't have the survival of the fittest effect kicking in, which in turn meant that eventually some internationalized start-up would show up and be a lot more lean and mean and would put the Finns out of business, because they weren't in a shape to put up a real fight.

I also recently (well, a year back) had an interesting discussion on how Finns subsidize art at a governmental level with a family friend of ours. In a typical Finnish fashion, the discussion took place in sauna. His view was that the current mechanisms for subsidizing art are sick and that they should be scrapped and the tax rates cut accordingly. Then private people could invest the "extra" money into whatever art they wanted, if any at all. I didn't really agree with this notion in its entirety. But I've been recently reading Chris Anderson's excellent book on long tails, and a thought occurred to me which helped me understand what Jussi was in fact suggesting.

If you consider long tails and how the internet has allowed the democratization of distribution and connected supply with demand on a global scale and as such helped a massive amount of small niches to be born, it's intuitive to see that the age of hits, as we previously knew it, is over (Anderson demonstrates this situation in the music industry). Maybe fine art that is subsidized by the government is another ill thing about our society in Finland? Some people who have a big degree and are vocal enough about silly little things decide what is good art and what is bad (ok, I'm being very provocative here, but play along). They, in turn, spread the support for different artists based on different criteria. And one is what sort of network of connections the artist might have.

Is this really the optimal scenario? Maybe the expensive, massive art forms that need state subsidization have lived beyond their best before dates? Maybe the only reason we have opera is because the rich demand that we lug along the legacy relics? Why not let the masses themselves decide what sort of art they want instead of forcing something on them? It might be that previously it was impossible for artists to efficiently reach all the people in the world, but that's changing now (just like Anderson is suggesting in other long tail examples). In this sense more people should be able to get together and appreciate similar niches and as such it might not be a good thing any longer that galleries, opera houses/production companies, etc. control the bottlenecks. And that states in essence help keep these status quo institutions in shape by pumping money into them.

Granted, it would appear that quite many of today's art forms are tied to time and place and are presented as performances. And performances may be a lot more difficult to distribute via cheap internet connections. But maybe this is because the art forms have not changed at the same rate as other parts of society. And maybe this is why the Finnish government keeps pumping money into an art society that is based not on democracy, but a very tight system of control that is enforced by tightly knit groups of friends doing favors for each other. This isn't democracy, it's more along the lines of an aristocracy or oligarchy.

I don't know if this was the reasoning behind Jussi's argument, but it's how I've interpreted it. And as always, I think it helps to provoke an interesting discussion. I have to admit that I know very little of the world of fine art, but it seems like a bunch of snobbery and as such the resources that are shed into it might be better off used for other things? Like improving public transportation, fighting poverty, etc. Even according to Maslow fine art is at the top of the hierarchy of needs and can only be enjoyed when the needs below have been satisfied. And with the current form of things, I doubt that very many people can say, even in Finland, that they have the other levels satisfied.