Some people believe that government funding of the arts is necessary to ensure that the arts can flourish and be available to all people. Others believe that government funding of the arts threatens the integrity of the arts.

The statement above presents the contrasting views on whether the arts should be funded by the governments. In what follows, the spectrum of views will be discussed, and in the end, my position will be delineated.

The opponents of government funding of art, raise the issue that any governmental participation would compromise the purity of art, and makes it more as a political advertisement rather than art. Arts to be funded by the governments need not to trespass the red lines of the government, and such limitation and direction is what makes the art distance from purity. These people further reason that if the art is worthy, it would weave its way to flowering without any need of extrinsic force. Many of the great artists like Michael Jackson have risen without any federal aid. He began singing in the clubs and kept working on his music to the point that he get renown as the king of the pop. Therefore, these people do not agree with the government funding of art.

However, the blind spot of this view is that all the forms of art cannot thrive on their own, and need a financial help to fulfill. There are certain kinds of arts which take a long time to be produced. If not financially helped, such arts may wane. To illustrate this view, consider a weaver of the Persian carpet in Iran. Unlike the singing, this format of art requires so much time and its popularity is not as catching as the pop music. Furthermore, the machine made carpet is a serious threat for those delicate hand-made Persian carpets. The task takes a long time to be done. Governmental aids, in terms of loans, help a weaver artist to persevere in her or his long term of seating and weaving, sometimes taking a full year of working. Otherwise, the art, which is also the national emblem of Iran, would decline.

Finally, as we see, we cannot turn a blind eye to those arts which needs governmental backing to flourish, and at the same time, we cannot compromise the integrity of art by funding the art to serve the interest of each government. The solution is to strike a balance and keep the government funding in a balanced distance from the art. Here the impartial art institutes can mediate between the government and the artists to provide funds for arts. By this approach, not only the arts with a long time of production would be preserved, flourishing of other kinds of art, like music, would also be facilitated by such a support.

In short, governments are needed to “indirectly” participate economically in the arts, in both preserving the art and flourishing of it. This will neither compromise the integrity of arts, nor does leave the arts without any support.