I wish I could say you would only see something so absurd in San Francisco, but I happen to know that such idiocy happens throughout the United States at all levels of government.
The U.S. pours enormous resources into the arts and culture, and the argument for doing so has a surface plausibility. After all, if you step back and take a look at the vast sweep of history, aside from the rise and fall of empires and various earthshaking events, what we actually know of and recall from history is the arts and architecture.
These are the enduring markers of civilization. During wars, we plan on how to save great works of art. You probably first heard to the Taliban not because they were barbarians, but because they destroyed those statues of Buddha, which we all rightly thought of as a crime against humanity.
When we see activists attacking the great artworks of civilization, we react viscerally, because the damage they are trying to do is far greater than just destroying a “thing;” it is an assault on civilization itself.
Unfortunately, the impulse to promote greatness that motivates us to fund the arts is the foundation for a con. Art is not something a bureaucracy can create or support, and the effort only winds up subsidizing crap.
If you have noticed those weird sculptures outside government buildings, they are the result of programs that require spending some percentage of the spend on “art.” The product is what I call ‘art droppings,’ which are like pigeon droppings, only you can’t wash them away.
Worse, though, are the grants given to arts organizations, which are basically graft, like this:
JC! It has got to be exhausting fighting the white supremacy within the circus community and acrobatics
Thank you BIPOC Acro Collective Care Ecosystem (aka BACCES) and San Francisco for being dumasses and continuing to show us the ideocracy in California 🫶 pic.twitter.com/Sb4b2lESLm— Chris Simonelli (@NightHawk_PiP) August 20, 2026
Seventy-five grand to advance equity in circus arts.
Huh? What?
As you can see, the recipient BACCES has a record of great accomplishments, which includes cramming all the right buzzwords into a name. BIPOC. Collective. Care. Ecosystem.
Acro? Apparently that stands for acrobats, I think. We are decolonizing acrobats.
San Francisco apparently is plagued by racism in acrobatics, and thank God the city government can scrape together a few dollars to do “capacity building” to address the problem.
“Capacity building,” of course, is just another term for giving money to support people who do nothing useful, and in a place like San Francisco that just means handing out spending money to these otherwise useless people.
This is, in fact, the sort of thing that arts spending tends to go to. I remember that during my brief stint in government I did research for a committee that wasted money on art, and a few things became clear: one, no legislator gave a damn because it was “free money” and didn’t affect their constituents; two, the big arts institutions supported throwing money at stupid projects because it built an activist constituency for the funding, which means that they can send annoying brownshirts to get legislators to up the budget to get some peace and quiet; three, when nobody watches the money, it goes down a rathole.
We spent money on sending failed artists to Paris. We funded arts in North Dakota because Minnesotans sometimes go there. We sent money to NGOs that did, as far as anybody knew, absolutely nothing but write grant proposals.
If you were lucky, you would never hear from any of them again, but alas, every two years there are new funding rounds.
The feds do this. The states do this. The counties do this. The cities do it.
Every dollar is a scam.
Don’t get me wrong. I like museums that contain art. I think that a culture without art is not a culture worth having. As ineffable as the return on art is, it is what will survive a millennium from now from a long-vanished culture.
But you can’t do art by committee, and that includes funding it. Institutional art generally sucks. Art that is celebrated by the “arts community” generally sucks. And when you create a slush fund for art, you get lots of sludge.
Like BACCES.
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