The big news this week was that Britain is Investing £1.57 billion in the Arts (about $2-B USD), showing that even a dysfunctional government can figure out a way to save culture (wouldn’t that be nice here?…). Boris Johnson announced major grants and loans (predominantly grants) “to protect Britain’s world-class cultural, arts and heritage institutions.” Read about it from the UK gov’s website here.
 
But as the NYT reports, Germany is giving 1 Billion Euros, France is giving 5 Billion and even smaller countries like the Netherlands have given 600 million. Looking at this can make a US citizen cry because we’ll never see something like this here. But here’s the thing – Britain’s investment came after a concerted effort, and was never a sure thing. From the NYT: “The British package was met with surprise by the country’s theater industry, which had been running a coordinated, celebrity-led campaign for weeks in a bid for support as theaters announced major layoffs.”
 
Over here in the US? We get Gal Gadot’s disastrous video of Imagine. Where’s our movement to save the arts? Pretty much nowhere to be found. Jesse Green, again at the NYT, wrote a scathing piece about the lack of activism by the American Theater world, saying its leaders have been clueless and absent, adding: “But the American theater’s biggest failure is the one that renders it helpless in an existential crisis like this. In allowing itself to be cast as just another industry — a role it does not even play very well — it has disowned its true identity as a public entitlement.” But he should be calling out the entire field of the arts. In America, there hasn’t been any real/concerted effort to galvanize the public to support the arts. In fact, most arts leaders gave up, before even trying.