Four years ago, as Donald Trump prepared to be sworn in as the 45th president of the United States, his incoming administration faced a serious hurdle: booking any big-name artist to perform at his inauguration. Several artists declined or pulled out of the event; whereas Barack Obama had Beyoncé, the Trump team eventually secured country artists Lee Greenwood and Toby Keith, whose rah-rah patriotism and jingoistic lyrics fit the bill for an agenda the New Yorker writer Andrea K Scott called “America First, Art Last”. The performances drew middling crowds (ones flatly denied by then White House press secretary Sean Spicer) dwarfed the following day by the Women’s March, which drew a bevy of A-list stars to protest the Maga president.
The combative, mutually bitter relationship between Trump and most artists and creative organizations has only deepened since. Though the Trump administration – called a “worst-case scenario” for arts groups – has largely failed to dismantle the federal arts programs it promised to defund, the Trump White House has been largely hostile to the arts, from Hollywood stars to political comedy down to local arts programs in cities, towns and rural areas across the country. Support of the arts, broadly construed, has understandably not been at the forefront of a rancorous and bruising 2020 election, as the economic crisis and ongoing pandemic imperil everything. But with Joe Biden’s election win, however unacknowledged by the current president, it’s worth looking ahead: what would a Biden administration mean for the arts?
First and foremost, handling the coronavirus pandemic which has grounded most live performances to a halt, shuttered Broadway and theaters across the country, and tipped millions into unemployment. The Covid recession is the most unequal in modern American history, ensnaring society’s most vulnerable – including all but the biggest name artists – in prolonged, stagnating financial hardship. Without coronavirus under control, most efforts to resuscitate art economies are for nil.
Once in office, Biden will undoubtedly call a cease-fire on executive attempts to destroy the cornerstones of federal arts programs: the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), long a target of the conservative culture wars since the late 1980s, and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which supply funds to programs and institutions ranging from the Met, to regional theaters, to art classes for rural preschools.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
