NPR Gives Us Another Look At Failure In The Arts

Do you really want "real" culture?  Not the government-published "statistical" variety?

You will get it once you eliminate ministries of culture and subsidies to the industry, and, simultaneously, eliminate capital gains taxes and regulations restricting entertainment mergers.

It also helps to let casinos flourish

Perhaps the word "casinos" is startling. For many, culture appears far removed from casinos.  Yet the two are historically intertwined, especially with opera and ballet.

Gambling saloons supported the great Italian opera houses, from Naples' St. Carlo to Milan's La Scala. These were vast halls of roulette and faro-tables adjoined by the theatres.  Rossini, the most famous composer at the time, got 200 ducats a month as musical director of San Carlo, but received 1,000 ducats as his share from the house tables.

His entrepreneurial impresario, Domenico Barbaja owned the opera-casino complexes and installed gaming tables in La Scala, in Naples, and at Palermo. The gambling revenues also paid for new operas and ballets.  A remnant of the profitable opera-casino combination survived only in Monte Carlo after authorities closed down the casinos. They did so fearing that the crowds at the entertainment complexes would start revolutions since it was the only place they could congregate.

Imagine what would happen to movie theaters today if government decided to prohibit the sale of popcorn and soft drinks, which bring in a significant percent of their revenues and profits.  Most would close.

Yet people would want to see movies, just as they wanted to see operas and ballets then.  Government began to subsidize both, and we live with these arrangements to this day.  Entertainment complexes must sell more than one thing to be commercially viable.

But as governments became the "patrons," "culture" gradually declined or died.

Consider how communist countries produced "culture." Bookstores were full of volumes by Lenin, Stalin, Marx, the Ceausescus and an army of party-paid scribblers. They had orchestras playing politically approved music and museums that displayed paintings of revolutionaries with red flags in ridiculous poses. Their movies depicted boys and girls dreaming about crops rather than members of the other sex...

-Article by Professor Reuven Brenner. He holds the Repap Chair at McGill's Desautels Faculty of Management.

Read full article: Forbes, March 10, 2011