Artists Need Lobbyists

Why shouldn't artists follow the big business model and get "real" representation in Washington?

There is an excellent new book out entitled Censoring Culture that is a series of essays about the arts and censorship edited by Robert Atkins and Svetlana Mintcheva. A couple of the early essays focus on how much artists in the USA have lost in the last couple of decades in terms of government funding. And almost none of this government funding goes directly to individual artists; most goes to non-profit agencies and foundations who then may distribute money to individual artists, but this percentage is about 3%.

So here's my new idea about how to get our culture to sit up and pay attention to the arts... We Need Lobbyists! All big businesses put a substantial amount of money into hiring people who wine, dine and try to influence government officials to give money to their contituents. Powerful lobbies include: tobacco, pharmaceutical, chemical, oil, gun... the list goes on and on.

While some might find lobbyists distasteful in their pervasiveness, I think artists need to follow the big business model to be taken seriously and to get the funding. Artists need to approach art like a business that needs money and partners and this is the model available to our culture - why not use it?

Check out Censoring Culture...As artists we need to rethink how we communicate and how to advocate for ourselves and for the future of our discipline!