September 8, 2026
This was originally composed 11 years ago and I just did not publish it however now that a solid decade has passed with the Royals doing abysmally, the Chiefs winning more than one Super Bowl but then abandoning KCMO for KCKS and both of them about to cost the public BILLIONS of dollars for the sake of new stadiums and associated public infrastructure improvements as well as dramatically shifted traffic patterns and at times extreme congestion, the basic gist of this post still rings very true and the phenomenon of a grievously miseducated public that views the arts or even reliable access to the arts as some sort of elitist unneeded luxury while access to sports - which by any metric cost at least as much to a huge sum more than the arts for either the patron or the participant - has got to be addressed as it represents a fundamental imbalance with the psyche of society and the ongoing worsening behavior of the public after the pandemic. This in turn plays right into the sports mindset of victory no matter what even though the things that actually build and maintain a thriving society have nothing to do with "victory" as such and everything to do with finding meaning, finding the 'why', making inferences and being able to grasp the truth of a situation all of which is exactly what the arts are for.
Liberty, Missouri
The Kansas City Royals are in the World Series for the second time in two years which is very remarkable considering how abysmal they were from 1986 until 2014. So, that's a very neat turn around. And it is that turnaround that has sparked this question: why do we subsidize sports? Or perhaps more accurately, why do sports get 100 times the grants of all the arts combined?
Make no mistake, the sports leagues like Baseball (MLB) and Football (NFL) - both of which are non-profits just like American Ballet Theater or your community college - receive hundreds of millions of dollars in support every year from John Q Public (that's you) in the form of immense stadium construction, improvements, and other incentives to keep a sports team franchise in a given city. That money comes from the public's coffers. And then there's all the corporate sponsorships given to the teams in exchange for a placing of the company's logo somewhere on the field or associated with the team. In reality all that works exactly like the grants given to arts organizations like a non profit ballet organization or a local symphony, the only difference is in the enormous scale. And most people always hesitate to fund arts grants by any sort of minuscule sales tax increase or whatnot, but they never look at the funding given to their local sports teams in the same light even though it is precisely the same thing but done on a massive scale that dwarfs the arts.
In fact, it makes one ask whether or not the arts would be as big a cultural element as sports are if they were given that level of support, at their inception neither the MLB or the NFL were nearly as pop-culture central as they are today, that did not happen until the massive stadiums got built and public resources started being used to promote them started. Clearly, the MLB and NFL never paid for the super stadiums they play in or other major perks they get, politicians did all that for them because it "promotes public satisfaction" with that city. Ask for anything like that for the arts and a dismissive, "we don't have the money for that" sort of answer is what you get. It is a very curious bi-polar sort of arrangement, sports get enormous public support (i.e. grants) but somehow the public and politicians don't consider that a grant, whereas arts organizations get pennies on the dollar in comparison and have to justify every little bit of support because we can't strain public finances or expect the public to want to pay for big grants to arts groups don't you know.
Every study ever done points to the arts providing serious boosts in the economic vibrancy, livability and desirability of an area in which a decent arts scene is happening, but that gets washed away by the perception that sports are the "big time" and so almost any chance that comes by earns serious regard if not large check writing by a municipality. So let's ask another question then: will any sport or sports team improve your life? If the Royals take the World Series, no one in any other industry or business will get any raise because of it, no one is going to find happiness in life after game 7 is over no matter who wins. The only thing that happens is we somehow switch on our "people" mode as opposed to our "person" mode and think that we are in the big time by whisking ourselves along in a temporary media blitz that sort of comes by way of your local team being in the World Series or Super Bowl. This is eerily similar to the mob mentality that allows large groups of people to suddenly go from law abiding citizens into violent rioters that destroy their own surroundings because they are "celebrating" or "protesting". One thing that the arts do not seem able to do is cause a person to switch on their "people" mode and become susceptible to mass persuasion or mass behavior like that of a mob, angry or otherwise. And that makes me for one kind of think better of the arts.
No comments:
Post a Comment