Obama on the Arts

Barack Obama is the sole candidate to provide a white paper on the arts. His position proves lacking in specifics and overly focused on education. To this end, the paper recommends that once elected President, Obama will:

• Expand public/private partnerships between schools and arts organizations
  
• Create an "Artists Corps"
  
• Publicly champion the importance of arts education

Fair enough, but what about championing the arts themselves? These priorities sound as though they have been cut-and-pasted from a subsection of a white paper on education. Perhaps that's to be expected and, sure, many artists are employed as public and private instructors, so a boost to arts education means jobs for artists.

Obama's further positions more directly address the role of arts in his vision for the nation. Specifically, as President, Obama will:

• Promote cultural diplomacy
  
• Attract foreign talent
  
• Provide health care to artists

The last item will be of great interest to artists—as well as curators, gallery owners and assistants, and thousands of others who must provide their own insurance or, more often, go without. (The paper does not pledge that Obama's health care program caters to artists in any specific way.)

The last item in the paper, however, gets specific:

• Barack Obama supports the Artist-Museum Partnership Act, introduced by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT).

The Artist-Museum Partnership Act would allow artists to deduct the fair market value of charitable contributions of works of art as opposed to the cost of materials.

Free of charge I'll list two more concrete goals that come to mind—one that might be achieved simply with the President's support and one that represents a more ambitious charge:

• Support a return to the old tax rules to ensure partial giving. A change in the tax code in 2006 put restrictions on the practice of fractional giving, whereby a collector gives a fraction of (or interest in) a piece of work to a museum. For tax purposes, a collector may only deduct the lesser value between an artwork's purchase price and its later worth. For the collector to take the deduction, a museum must have physical claim to an artwork for a portion of the year matching the interest in the piece (e.g., a museum holds a 25-percent partial gift for a quarter of the year). Furthermore, if the gift isn't completed in 10 years' time, the IRS recaptures the deduction-plus-interest for the duration. Finally, when calculating the estate tax, the IRS collects on the greater amount between the purchase price and the work's later worth.

  These changes have essentially put an end to partial giving over the last two years. As President, Obama should re-incentivize this important mechanism for placing private art in the public trust.

• Support the creation of a Department of Culture. Nothing would do more to promote cultural diplomacy and attract foreign talent than to join the world by creating a proper ministry of culture. And in fact, recent experience has proved that the United States cannot afford to act without one. The disastrous looting of historical artifacts from Iraqi museums and sites might have been avoided if there were an official organ advising the President on the cultural situation of nations and regions that also represent strategic U.S. interests. To the extent it behooves relations for the New York Philharmonic Orchestra to play Pyongyang, it behooves the nation to seek out and sanction similar opportunities. And by all means, a Department of Culture could guide policy

  A Department of Culture would likely aggregate responsibilities now held by the Department of State and the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities. It would be much more than the sum of its parts, a signal to the nation's citizens and peers. With the creation of a Department of Culture, the President could announce an ambitious plan to correct a serious oversight: the lack of Arabic speakers ready, able, or willing to work in government. A Department of Culture, created and endowed by a President with a serious approach to global conversation, could start to do the job that Karen Hughes by her lonesome couldn't do.

Posted by Kriston at March 3, 2008 2:42 PM