This week public radio stations across the country are holding out their hats for donations from their local communities. They are emphasizing the fact that a microscopic portion of their budgets come from federal funds and making a case to the public that their current financial model is a very democratic form of funding. I would agree in that the public decides just how much the services are worth to them and, in theory, donate accordingly. Yay capitalism!

Since I have been listening to public radio for many years and could not imagine it disappearing, I give. The monthly payments barely hurt and I feel a sense of ownership whenever I turn on the dial. Our local station, driven by the need to please the public instead of their sponsors, tryuly listen to the demands of the people and we almost always see some kind of change to their lineup, their website or both in the months following the drive. For the consumer, this is a type of immediate gratification you rarely find these days.

Public television stations follow the same model and it must be working for them as well considering that they have no plans of altering the way they generate funds.

Both of these forums have hit upon a winning formula, in my opinion, which would translate well to a number of other areas which depend more heavily on Uncle Sam or their state and local governments to stay afloat.

What average citizens often do not realize is that most of the major metropolitan orchestras, playhouses, museums and historic sites in the U.S. were started by private individuals. These individuals saw a need for the arts in their local communities and jumped into action. They raised money, contributed some of their own and got these institutions off the ground. The same holds true for artists, musicians, playwrights, poets and the like. They found private individuals to help fund their pursuits, or took an even more novel approach by creating the product first, out of their own pockets, and then looked for buyers.

We progressive conservatives should not blindly oppose the National Endowment for the Arts or any other local variation. The NEA does a LOT of good work in communities, the most important of which is their work in schools promoting the visual and performing arts.  We find art to be a vital component of American culture and it would be a very dull world without it, but we must question the wisdom of using public funds to pay for the creation of art on a regular basis.

Publically funded art, not by school children or for some sort of civic memorial, but simply for the sake of creating art, is a concept ripe for corruption and ridicule. We have all heard the anectdotal stories of artists receiving grants to create grotesque paintings or some sort of abstract jumble of metal that leaves taxpayers scratching their heads and wondering where their money went.

A new progressive conservative approach to the arts would continue to follow the public radio model. Call it pay-as-you-go art, the goal for artists should be to not rely on governtment funds but to seek out public support by appealing directly to the public for funding. One suggestion for success in this endeavor is to create a product the public wants to finance. Am I saying that you can no longer cover a canvas with baby food and call it art? No. But maybe you should lower your expectations of a check coming in the mail for “Gerber Peaches #6″.

The reason I applaud public television and radio stations operating on this model is because they had the courage to take a chance. They believed they could create a product that would be so appealing to the public that they could rely almost exclusively on donated funds to not only stay afloat, but to thrive. So many other organizations are unwilling to take this risk and so they remain firmly attached to the public grant system or to some sort of governmental funding.

This attachment to government funding also breeds a certain malaise among the leadership of these organizations. This is no different than the malaise we have seen in many countries that experiment with socialism. Simply, when people don’t have to compete for resources, innovation and drive are the first things to disappear. Public radio and television stations fight for every dollar they take in and listen to their contributors, while those on the government teat usually maintain the status quo.

Early progressives were fierce supporters of the arts and we maintain that this should still be among our highest values. What we are asking though is that the makers of this art earn our support first. Start out small, work on your art at night and on weekends like millions of other amateurs, and take your need for funding to the public. If you have made a product worth supporting, the money will come. Just like it has for public radio for several decades.