This development is two weeks old and is still the most important thing happening in the American arts and culture world right now.
On June 12 2024 Gov. DeSantis vetoed $32 million in arts and cultural grants from the state budget. For the record, that’s all of Florida’s state funding of the arts and culture sector for 2024-2025. Zero grants. Zero dollars. That’s not a drop in funding (the $32 million was already a cut); that’s an annihilation.
WHO GETS HURT
Over 600 companies and facilities are affected. We’re talking theaters, museums, festivals, studios, zoos and aquariums, botanical gardens, educational programs, book fairs, residencies, awards, telecommunications, and on and on. Mind you, this is the state that has Miami, which has become a top art mecca in America and beyond.
The biggest impact will come to smaller businesses and organizations. A large multi-million dollar art museum may not get to expand or put on some of that programming they were hoping for, but a small cultural organization will be devastated. They will have to make cuts to staff, programming, and likely infrastructure. They will have to spend their energy finding funding just to stay alive.
HOW THE HURT WILL LOOK
Arts and culture are an economic driver beyond themselves, so this veto also affects the economy around cultural nodes. Hotels, restaurants, shopping, tourism…anything culture adjacent. This is, in fact, why most cities invested in cultural offerings to begin with: it sweetens the value pot. Sprinkle a little public art here, put up some murals there, send the symphony and museums a check (but not too much) to keep things spicy. But it’s not because most of these civic and business leaders care about art and culture. It’s because it makes people think they care about art and culture. And then one day you look up, and your arts district is a commerce strip.
Also, the timing sucks. Organizations were informed of what funding they could expect months ago, so people planned around that funding. They booked spaces and people and services in advance. Now, after all that paperwork and figuring and meeting, they don’t have the money to do what they thought.
Worse, it’s affecting all of them at the same time. Florida is about to see the largest fund drive ever. If you thought NPR was annoying a few times a year, imagine an entire state asking everyone they can for money at the same time.
WHY IS THIS HAPPENING
If people realized how little money the arts relies on compared to every other item in a state’s budget – not just Florida; almost every state – then they’d see how easy it is for DeSantis to cut.
Florida’s 2025 state budget is $117 billion. The arts cut of that was $77 million, which was only .06% of the state budget. NOT EVEN 1%. Then Florida legislators cut it to just over $32 million. Then DeSantis vetoed it altogether, down to zero.
That’s not a business decision. That’s not a “I’m bad at numbers” decision. That is him launching an offensive battery against the spirit of his state.
People need to keep in mind that DeSantis is a rich white supremacist leading the charge in a culture war. Bravo to all of the administrators being interviewed by the media about this who are managing not to say that out loud. I’ve been boycotting Florida since 2012, so I can. DeSantis doesn’t care about the same things the average person cares about. He is a general in America’s ongoing and eternal culture war, and Florida is the front line. He’s not making a business decision as much as he is staking out a military offensive. He has been making sweeping anti-intellectual cuts to education and anything education adjacent. The arts is education and intellectualism and political activism-adjacent in his mind and in the paperwork that many of these organizations submit for funding every year. Frankly, this cut was always coming.
Welcome to the culture wars.
DeSantis doesn’t care that nonprofit arts and cultural offerings and audiences generated $151.7 billion of economic activity (2022). He doesn’t care that 2.6 million people work in those sectors. He doesn’t care about losing $29 billion in taxes. He would rather lose that money and be able to keep people from making anything he doesn’t like and that might slow down an ultra-conservative agenda. It’s censorship, and we already know he doesn’t care about free speech. To him, this cut is a small price to pay to cripple 600 perceived enemies of the state. And that’s how he and many conservatives perceive cultural work: as the agenda of an encroaching foe. These actions are only mistakes if you believe DeSantis cares about the well-being of random people and investing in intellectually sound citizens. Conservatives have been willing to shoot themselves in the face this whole time in the interest of power and control.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN OUTSIDE OF FLORIDA
If you think it can’t happen here, understand that Florida has been riding high in the rankings of arts funding for a while. In a blink, it’s at the bottom of the list.
Columbus isn’t a tourism hub like half of Florida is. More people travel here for sports than arts and culture, hands down. Many times over. So if you think it can’t happen in Ohio, think again. Ohio is the king of figuring out what it can get away with and still claim it’s Number One.
WHAT IS THE DANGER IN NOT CHANGING COURSE?
I know that there has been an announcement that a bunch of local organizations in my city (Columbus, Ohio) are getting a bunch of recovery money from the state. It’s also why you’ve been seeing so much talk about public art and the like; money was on the way. I’m not here to rain on anyone’s parade. I’m glad that money is hitting some of those groups. That said, Florida is only an outlier for now. Columbus sits in a sea of red state. So I have some thoughts about what risks lie in such largesse.
1. Homogenization
Context is king, by which I mean technology dictates form, resources inform creation, and support dictates legacy. You don’t want to see the art that gets made under the banner of preservation by the state, especially when it’s not the state, but capitalism via the state. Development using the state as a front for more capitalism makes art by committee, or democratically vetted art, or expensive-but-soulless art, or calls things art that aren’t art.
2. Lack of originality and quality
People largely don’t know what they want until they get it. You want your platforms and venues to have as much agency as possible so that the kind of work that defines culture – not just art, but ideas, histories, values and experiences – can generate organically.
3. Reliance on funding subject to political whim
Right now, Florida looks like an anomaly. But a lot of the things that DeSantis has done in recent years have popped up in Ohio. Attacks on DEI, critical race theory, or anything that smacks of non-normative culture were launched a few years back. Places of learning have become public enemies. In Florida, there has been a straight line from cuts in the education sector to arts and culture. This was always a possibility, and DeSantis finally pulled the trigger on it. Other places will follow suit.
4. The culture sector is not prepared for an all-out culture war.
Statistically, the arts are still niche. Just look at how it’s supported nationally, regionally and locally. We get confused because once you start talking about money in the millions and billions, people tend to glaze over. But funding for the NEA in 2022 was.003% of the national budget. In dollars, it’s a lot of money, but as slices of the pie of society goes, it practically doesn’t exist. And that’s the largest platform for arts funding in the country.
The arts are important, but we must constantly be advocating for that value with everyday people, not just when it’s time to fill out grant applications.
All of this probably sounds like I’ve been building a case against city/state funding. Not exactly. While I think an overreliance on such funding is asking for trouble in the long term (see Florida), it is an unavoidable pot. You likely can’t build and maintain large institutions on ticket sales or donations alone. At some point you’re going to enter into a relationship with the Arts Industrial Complex (AIC) of your city for any number of resources. Some of those will be great (access, networking, influence, top of the list recognition). Some of this will be challenging (censorship, strings, constantly being tapped for optics but not agency). Some of these connections will be direct and some will be behind closed doors. It’s not for me to say what anyone’s organization must do to succeed outside or running parallel to such systems. It’s not because I don’t enjoy the challenge; it’s because every city’s machine is different. There are patterns and similar value systems, but nuance takes time to navigate.
That’s enough for now, I think. Let’s see where things go.
Scott Woods Makes Lists 
I read this post with a tightening in the pit of my stomach…because whatever happens in America is bound to happen here in the UK. In fact I know that it has already begun. We have what are called Local Authorities-people in the UK refer to them as “the council”. We pay a tax to them based on our home property value (owner occupied and rented). This particular tax came into being in the Thatcher era (80’s) and was referred to then as “the Poll tax” although we were already paying ‘rates’ but pre Council Tax every household paid the same amount no matter how many adults lived in a property. Nowadays, all adults (over 18) have to pay Council Tax, even those “in benefits” such as Universal Credit. In the states you refer to this benefit as Welfare. This is a long explanation but I hope it helps with understanding the similarities and differences from across the pond. A couple of days ago I heard that a town in the North of England had practically slashed its Arts Budget to zero. My own local authority (Thanet District Council) is also considering serious cuts to the Arts budget. Both areas are blaming COVID and the Cost of Living Crisis. I think it is interesting that they are choosing/have chosen the Arts budget to savage in this way. In my area, I believe that they do not hate Art per se but it feels like an easy target, in spite of the arguments that suggest the Arts are good for mental and physical well-being. So I feel Florida’s pain – I visited Miami many years ago and loved the art and art deco architecture. I fear that we in the UK have much more pain to come.