M is for Minister of Culture

Let's not

In 2009, if you were an arts or arts-adjacent sort, you might have received in your inbox this:

Quincy Jones has started a petition to ask President-Elect Obama to appoint a Secretary of the Arts. While many other countries have had Ministers of Art or Culture for centuries, The United States has never created such a position. We in the arts need this and the country needs the arts--now more than ever. Please take a moment to sign this important petition and then pass it on to your friends and colleagues.

This petition is really easy to sign. I will take just a minute of your time.

I can’t find the exact wording of the petition (the links are gone, obviously), but you get the gist. The Washington Post wrote about it here:

A call for President-elect Barack Obama to give the arts and humanities a Cabinet-level post -- perhaps even create a secretary of culture -- is gaining momentum.

By yesterday, 76,000 people had signed an online petition, started by two New York musicians who were inspired by producer Quincy Jones. In a radio interview in November, Jones said the country needed a minister of culture, like France, Germany or Finland has. And he said he would "beg" Obama to establish the post.

Listening in New York, Jaime Austria, a bass player with the New York City Opera, and Peter Weitzner, also a bassist, took his suggestion to heart and started the online campaign.

Depending on how you define culture, the portfolio could cover many areas, supporters say. "We are not quite sure, especially in this environment, what the secretary of the arts could provide, but foremost is advocacy for arts education and awareness of the financial rewards the arts bring to a community," said Weitzner, the host of a chamber music series at the Brooklyn Public Library. …

"Whether you call it a minister of culture or not, it would be wonderful to have someone with a policy role to coordinate arts education, cultural diplomacy and support for arts organizations. Those activities are not coordinated but divided among many offices," said Michael Kaiser, president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

"We need a voice that looks broadly," said Robert Lynch, president of Americans for the Arts, a national lobbying group. He is advocating a senior position, not necessarily a Cabinet post. "We are calling for a person at the executive office level who understands there is a National Endowment for the Arts, but also understands the arts portfolio in the Education Department, the State Department -- and in addition to the nonprofits arts, is looking at cultural tourism, broadband access and trade through records, movies and videos."

Last month, 15 organizations joined Americans for the Arts in petitioning the Obama-Biden transition team to stop the fragmentation of cultural policy. The establishment of a Cabinet office would take the approval of Congress. A dedicated office in the West Wing would be up to the president.

It didn’t happen. But why did anybody think this was a good idea?

Mr. Weitzner thinks this position would be an “advocate” for the arts, but not much of one, if “awareness of the financial rewards” is an indication.

Mr. Lynch would be all on board with that, since his Americans for the Arts is about nothing if not “economic impact.”

A common theme here seems to be “coordination.” But what exactly needs coordinating? It’s true that lots of different organizations are, or were, involved with things that are arts-like: Education, State, FCC. But it’s not clearly said what is being lost from uncoordination. Would it be good to have State Department cultural attaches being in the same org chart as the (soon to be deceased) Department of Education? Food production requires transportation, but it is actually okay to have separate departments of Agriculture and Transportation, though of course they ought to talk to each other.

Well, other countries have a Culture Minister, don’t they? Sure, but what they do varies from place to place. Up north, there is a national arts funding body, the Canada Council, but also a Minister of Canadian Heritage. But when you look at its activities and involvement in policy, it is mostly about keeping Canadian arts and entertainment producers afloat in the face of competition from the US (I’ll return to this later in the series). But that’s hardly a thing anybody thinks about in America. European countries each have very different ideas about the nature of their national culture and heritage, and what things represent policy domains, and so we can’t just say “why can’t we have a culture minister like France does?” Because the United States is not France.

And an important question to ask is: whose interests would the Secretary of Culture represent? The arts have producers and consumers. When it comes to policy and legislation, producer and consumer interests might diverge: Should fair use provisions in copyright for students and researchers be expanded or curtailed? Should limits be placed on foreign ownership of domestic media? Should there be legislation to mandate higher payments to music producers by streaming services? There isn’t a clear manual on what it means to “advocate” for culture (with the exception of directing more general revenues to arts subsidies). Producers generally have the edge over consumers when it comes to currying influence in government (this is the outcome of Mancur Olson’s Logic of Collective Action): is the Department of Agriculture more likely to listen to you, going to pick up eggs and milk at the Piggly Wiggly, or Archer Daniels Midland? So to whom would a Department of Culture listen?

The major reason the US has never had a Secretary of Culture is because it has never been possible to imagine what such a person and a line department would accomplish. There’s no appetite in the US for a greater federal government presence in promoting some version of American culture, except for when arts people think “there’s a cool president now, and his culture secretary would do cool stuff.”

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And that gets us to the biggest problem. Sometimes, your president is not very cool at all.

When the Law and Justice Party was in power in Poland, it used the Culture Ministry to pursue all manner of nationalist, “culture war” ends. See also Hungary (although its government has its supporters in the US). I don’t think the people who asked President Obama for a culture secretary were in favour of anything these parties in Poland or Hungary were doing, but when you invite the creation of such a department, the risks come with that territory.

Consider the people we have seen in the last few weeks in Washington nominated for positions in Cabinet. And then ask: who would have been the choice for Secretary of Culture? Use Pete Hegseth and RFK Jr as your hints. I don’t think we would be looking at an equivalent of Andre Malraux. More like this.

And … this arose whilst I was starting to write this post

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What would a culture secretary do? The new administration is already using the Department of Education, which it wants to eventually get rid of anyway, to pursue all sorts of Trump goals even though education is for the most part administered at the state and local level. But there’s Title I funding as a weapon, and all the federal granting agencies as something to hold over universities. Does anybody think a Secretary and Department of Culture would be any different? (I’ll return to some of these questions in the next post, the letter N…).

It’s nice to have funding agencies, if we can actually manage to keep them (I have real doubts right now) and, if we do, keep them at least somewhat independent of the administration (ditto). But the US has managed to go seventy years with a federal arts funding agency and no Secretary of Culture - there doesn’t need to be one.

In the past two weeks, no one has sent me a petition for the creation of a Culture Secretary, and even if one day we do have a president the art world thinks is extremely hip, they ought to remember why there were no petitions in 2025.