The Ten First Steps that Barack Obama could take to renew the arts review

After Bush, Obama has a lot of cleaning up to do. There is now an economic crisis and should people start worrying about the Arts? I found this article on the Art Newspaper online: Even in the midst of the current economic crisis, there is a palpable feeling of optimism in the American art community. It’s not that the credit crunch hasn’t caused significant of a century. As we approach the transition of power, I believe that we will finally have an administration that will take the steps necessary to re-establish serious support for the arts in the United States.
During the hard-fought months of Barack Obama’s campaign, he and Joe Biden announced a set of platform goals that may lead to an overall cultural strategy. But in the meantime, the steps they could take to help renew arts in the US are:

1. Support the tax code amendment currently in the works that would give artists tax incentives for donating their work to public museums, and fully restore the tax incentive for gifts of appreciated property to museums and other non-profit educational organisations.

2. Re-establish a programme employing artists in a wide range of cultural institutions.

3. Revive and rebuild the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, de-politicising their processes, and providing them with budgets necessary to support the American cultural community. Nothing less than annual appropriation of $750m (as opposed to $290m today) is needed.

4. Create an independent study of the operating expenses of our museums and libraries, and then fund the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) sufficiently, so that the core costs of our museums and libraries can be properly met. (The same should be done in support of reinvigorating the infrastructure of our institutions of music, dance and theatre.)

5. Invest in art and music education for all school pupils, and ensure that these efforts are coordinated with the increased spending in direct artist support, as well as renewed institutional infrastructure and programme support.

This of course is only five of the ten steps. check out more on the
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