Do consumers know enough to assess the true value of art? A study of beliefs and attitudes toward the NEA

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/pa.1654
• Published date: 01 May 2018
• Date: 01 May 2018

SPECIAL ISSUE PAPER

Do consumers know enough to assess the true value of art?

A study of beliefs and attitudes toward the NEA

Gary Ottley |Richard Hanna

Marketing Division, Babson College, Babson

Park, Massachusetts, USA

Correspondence

Gary Ottley, Babson College, Malloy Hall, 231

Forest Street, Babson Park, MA 02457, USA.

Email: gottley@babson.edu

Contemporary society tends to ascribe economic value to works of art, often neglecting the

inherent cultural and social value of art in favor of an aesthetically driven conceptualization of

“value.”The largest single financial supporter of nonprofit arts and arts education in the United

States—the National Endowment of the Arts—is charged with supporting arts of all types, and

not just those that the general public decides are of aesthetic or monetary value. This paper

compares how the government of the United States funds nonprofit art initiatives through the

National Endowment of the Arts, with how members of the American public perceive the

importance and value of art being funded. It provides evidence of beliefs held by the general

public about the inherent role and value of the arts in contemporary society. It also offers

suggestions for how marketing principles and techniques might be engaged to reduce gaps in

the public's knowledge about the arts.

1|INTRODUCTION AND CONTEXT

Works of art have been produced and “consumed”by humans for

centuries, as evidenced by cave paintings and other found objects from

the earliest signs of man. Today, we continue to celebrate art—or at

least, its more obvious and commercially viable manifestations. But

what value do the citizens of a country place on the arts and on art

as an institution? We place art in museums for any and everyone to

look at and “consume.”We pay to see plays, presentations, and

exhibitions curated and judged by experts to be worthy of financial

compensation. Modern society and cultures are defined, at least in

part, by the art they produce, and deem “of value.”Yet, contributions

and support for the arts in the United States tends to be lower than

in many other nations (Gummow, 2014).

Prior to 1965, the United States had no policy concerning the arts.

Unlike many other developed and developing countries, the United

States has never had a Ministry of Culture or anything similar—until

the establishment of the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) in

1965. Since then, the NEA has fostered and supported the creation

of art and art culture in the United States, emphasizing connections

to state and local art initiatives (Kammen, 1996). It is the official arts

agency of the United States government and the single largest financial

contributor to the arts in the United States. As such, it is subject to

scrutiny and critique by the population that the United States

government serves. Because it attempts to fairly allocate funds to

various forms of art and art education, it has, since its inception, come

under fire for the types and forms of art on which it chooses to spend

taxpayer funds (Bauerlein & Grantham, 2009). Yet it persists, despite

efforts to actively defund and disband it.

The overarching purpose of this paper is to reconcile how

members of a contemporary society ascribes value to the arts, with

how their government allocates funding and resources to their

development and promulgation. We do so by comparing how the

government of the United States funds nonprofit art initiatives

through the NEA, with how members of the American public perceive

the importance and value of art being funded. Through a small study,

we provide evidence of prevailing beliefs held by the general public:

about the role and purpose of the NEA and its funding; about how

NEA funding compares to other government‐funded arts programs in

other countries; and about how the NEA allocates public funds in the

execution of its mandate. We use these commonly held beliefs as

proxy indicators of how the general American public values the arts—

and specifically, which arts.

In this paper, we first briefly describe the mandate of the NEA and

the role it plays in the promotion and celebration of art. Then, we use

Bourdieu's theory of the artistic field to frame a review of how human

society ascribes value to art. Following this, we present the method

and results of a survey of interested consumers of art, which was

designed to compare NEA fund allocations with their personal views

on what constitutes “value”in the world of the arts. We end the paper

with a discussion of the study's findings and implications for going

forward.

DOI: 10.1002/pa.1654

J Public Affairs. 2018;18:e1654.

https://doi.org/10.1002/pa.1654

Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pa 1of8