The bridge is yours.

-My decision in the Tournament of Books is up!

-One of the best things I’ve read on the season premiere of Mad Men.

-Which real world villains would you like to see Iron Man take on?

-Brazil’s arts agency benefits from a tie between bread and roses.

David Bowie suggests copyright is over, or near enough:

I see absolutely no point in pretending that it’s not going to happen. I’m fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing. Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity… So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left. It’s terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what’s going to happen.

I don’t really think this is true. There’s no question that we need a good, smart, comprehensive look at both copyright and patent law, but I doubt we’ll entirely eliminate either.

And I think “music itself is going to become like running water and electricity” is the kind of thing that people say, along with occasionally arguing that content should be free, that really merits more serious and critical examination. Given the opposition to public funding for the arts (at least above current levels), I think we’re unlikely to see a scenario where people are willing to pay tax dollars or a small fee each month to create utility-like backing for artistic creation. Maybe we’ll see more non-profit fellowships, but probably not enough to make up for the total collapse of a music market in a world without copyright. On the other hand, metered-usage models like Spotify may provide a way forward for people to pay to access a service rather than for individual tracks, which might mean we end up with a more electricity-like approach to music consumption. But of course that model requires someone to have copyrights in order to get paid.

And while labels may be irrelevant for someone like David Bowie, and while tools like Kickstarter may help people get the capital they need to record the tracks that will make it possible for them to make a living out of touring, I still think that labels will continue to exist in some form even if the relationship between them and artists shifts over time. I think it’s possible that the roles of labels and managers and publicists will collapse into each other, much in the same way I’m told agents now often do a lot of the initial heavy lifting in the book editing process.

Remember Emma Sullivan, the Kansas school student student who tweeted, jokingly, that she’d been mean to Gov. Sam Brownback, noting “#heblowsalot”? The one who apparently so freaked out the Governor’s office that they reported her to her high school principal Regina George-style? Apparently, she’s vexed with Brownback because he eliminated Kansas’ public funding for the arts, forcing the state to sacrifice funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and shutting down the state’s arts agency. Apparently, Brownback doesn’t want to risk interfering with the delicate mechanics of the marketplace of ideas, unless the marketplace assigns an uncomfortably high value to the idea that he’s a less than awesome governor.

Mitt Romney’s staked out the entirely predictable position — based on both his record as governor of Massachusetts and his moderate position in the pool of Republican candidates — that federal arts funding should be cut in half.

I’ve written this before, but it’s worth saying again: if you start your discussion of dramatically cutting the federal budget with the arts, you’re probably not particularly serious about cutting spending in the first place. Cutting $155 million in arts and humanities spending, which is what we’d lose if Romney managed to pare down the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities, or $310 million if both were eliminated, is almost laughably negligible, considering the federal government’s other obligations. And that smallness is precisely why conservatives frequently go after arts funding — and also, I think, why they fail. The assumption is that the arts don’t have much of a constituency, or they’d have more funding and more clout, so they’re a safe target, unlike, say, military spending. But that funding ends up spread out fairly widely, and attracting constituents in unexpected places — rural lawmakers, for example, in districts where the arts are fairly dependent on public funding can be pretty fond of it, even if they don’t have a lot of high-roller arts patrons among their constituency. And those folks who support the arts themselves tend to appreciate additional government support for their pet projects, or opera companies.

Other candidates who are still trying to stake out positions to the right of Romney will inevitably call for total elimination of these programs. Michele Bachmann already has. And we’ll keep spending time on a debate that we already seem to have a consensus on: that we won’t spend a huge amount of money on the arts, but we’ll try to make sure there’s enough funding for everyone to get a little beauty and enrichment. Instead, we’ll keep fighting the culture funding wars, forgetting that there are all kinds of government waste.

It’s a matter of public record that I thought the last season of Glee was a travesty. So it’s almost surreal to see them get an issue right (with the standard minor factual errors that Hollywood always seems to make about the political process). Semi-contrary to what was promised in the pre-season news, Sue Sylvester is running for Congress, and channeling Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, who this year destroyed his state’s arts agency, meaning Kansas can’t get National Endowment for the Arts funding, which she’s decided to make her central campaign platform:

You know what’s getting me down in Western Ohio? The arts in public schools. Why? Because America is failing. China is on our ass, people. This isn’t the 1960s anymore, when jobs were plentiful…The arts are expensive, and we can’t afford it anymore…I will suspend all public school arts programs and reject all federal and state funding for the arts until every student reads at or above grade level.

Now, obviously a member of the House can’t turn down arts funding on behalf of their state. But otherwise? Economic and competitiveness insecurity? Check. Treatment of the arts as if they’re a luxury? Check. Folks responding to these kinds of attacks by whipping out arguments about the efficacy of the arts rather than their intrinsic worth? Cue Mr. Schue, who comes back at Sue with “The arts help kids do better in school. Kids in the arts record the lowest instance of substance abuse,” before retreating further by explaining that he really just needs job security because he wants to start a family with…a woman he hasn’t slept with yet. I mean, this is Glee. It would be too much to expect full-on emotional coherence.

But still, it’s Glee actually setting up a season-long arc that makes sense — for the first time since the first season, the Glee Club actually has an imperative to perform to survive, and the stakes are larger than simply disbanding the club. If they can stick with it longer than an episode, and come up with tactics more convincing than Will glittering Sue (if nothing else, the show should get credit for showing how silly glittering someone is as a way to make a point), the show will actually be contributing to an ongoing national debate about state and federal arts budgets. Which is rare for any show, much less one as schizophrenic as this.

It’s always laughable when Republicans try to demonstrate how serious they are about cutting spending by going after the relatively minuscule budgets of the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. But it’s also a reminder that what Republicans oppose isn’t all funding for the arts — it’s just funding for some kinds of projects.

Among the things included in the defense spending that until the debt ceiling deal was such a sacred cow? Support for a wide array of military groups and the United States Armed Forces School of Music, which essentially represents the direct purchase of art by the U.S. government. I’m sure there are good arguments to be made for the existence of these musical groups, including unit cohesion and service pride, preservation of musical traditions, and really awesome covers of Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep”:

But if you don’t think government should support the arts, it probably shouldn’t matter if the artists are servicemembers or starving.

I sometimes feel like a broken record, repeating over and over that slashing arts, humanities, and broadcasting funding is part of the way Republicans are credentialing themselves for national races in 2012 and beyond. But I’m not going to stop, particularly when Texas Gov. Rick Perry, the latest and to my mind one of the most formidable entrants in the 2012 primary race, is doing precisely that. The Texas Tribune reports that Perry recently sent a fundraising appeal on behalf of Citizens Against Government Waste, singling out the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, along with bigger-ticket items like federal travel and rail subsidies, as things he believes should be cut.

The funny thing about singling out federal spending on the arts as proof that you’re serious about cutting federal spending is that it actually demonstrates just the opposite. All the things on Perry’s list are fairly small-ticket items that have passionate but somewhat isolated constituencies. There are good reasons federal employees travel, but federal employees aren’t very popular right now, so it’s easy to target them. In an era of minimalist government, it’s an easier soundbite for opponents to make federal funding for the arts sound silly than it is for advocates to explain how public funding stimulates private giving and spurs arts-related growth. Cutting every item on Perry’s list would net us a measly $57.59 billion in savings. That’s not courage or tough decision-making. It’s bullying by budget cut.

With arts and public broadcast issues percolating on the edge of the race for the 2012 presidential race, I thought it made sense to look at where the declared and prospective candidates for president have stood on arts issues throughout their careers. Their views on everything from arts education to intellectual property rights to support for local artistic traditions say a lot about how they value culture — but also about how they think about the role of government.

Now that we’ve run through the Republicans, it’s time to look at how one last candidate approaches arts policy: the incumbent President Barack Obama. Obama didn’t take on arts issues much during his tenure in the Illinois state Senate, but as a candidate and as president, he’s pursued a fairly wide-ranging arts policy that’s met with mixed success because of the pressures of the recession. I’m not including a discussion of internal changes by the National Endowment for the Arts here, though I’m a fan of the Our Town program, because I want to focus on the things that Obama’s made significant priorities:

2008: In his presidential campaign platform, Obama supported the Artist-Museum Partnership Act, which would have let artists deduct the full market value of works they donated to charity on their taxes, rather than just deducting the cost of the materials that went into the work. He also committed to expanding cultural diplomacy through public-private partnerships and to make it easier for foreign artists to get visas to come to the U.S.; to increase funding for the National Endowment for the Arts; and to add block grant funding that would support arts education through the Education Department (he cited the Mozart effect in stump speeches). At the time, this was considered one of the more comprehensive platforms a candidate had ever offered on the arts. The question is, how well did he live up to it?

2009: The stimulus bill Obama worked out with Congress included $50 million in arts funding, including $20 million in funding that went directly to state governments. The National Endowment for the Arts was supposed to use the funding specifically to bolster arts non-profits that saw their budgets shrink in the recession. In the normal budget process, the NEA got its highest budget in 16 years, $167.5 million, and the Education Department got $38.166 million for its Arts in Education program.

When Obama adjusted restrictions on travel to and from Cuba, he made it easier for cultural programs to take Americans to Cuba and for Cuban artists to make it to the United States.

But the administration’s cultural efforts became a minor political kerfuffle when the NEA’s Yosi Sergant encouraged artists to work with the Corporation for Public Service on projects that would highlight the administration’s public service efforts. Sergant eventually left the NEA.

2010: Obama made good on his cultural diplomacy promises in a number of ways, allocating $1 million to help visual artists create public art works in 15 countries as pat of a new smART Power program; increasing the State Department’s cultural diplomacy budget 40 percent in 2010 to $11.75 million; sending Stanford professor Clayborne Carson to Israel to put on a production based on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s writing.

At the same time, he proposed consolidating grants programs for education, leaving some advocates worried that arts programs would have to compete against science and literacy programs for funds. And the administration proposed cutting NEA funding by $6 million in is fiscal 2011 budget, both moves that drew criticism from arts advocates.

This year, U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator Victoria Espinel presented Obama and Congress with the first national strategy on intellectual property law and copyright violation, which includes improved interagency cooperation, targeting of websites that distribute pirated material, and better economic analysis of the impact of intellectual property law and violations on American firms. That same year, at the Export-Import Bank, Obama gave a speech in which he promised vigorous IP protection: “Our single greatest asset is the innovation and the ingenuity and creativity of the American people…It is essential to our prosperity and it will only become more so in this century. But it’s only a competitive advantage if our companies know that someone else can’t just steal that idea and duplicate it with cheaper inputs and labor.”

2011: An Obama-commissioned study argued that creative classwork has an “unambiguous place in the curriculum,” though it acknowledged that there needs to be more research to quantify the impact of arts education on achievement. Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s made the case for keeping arts education even in a recession throughout his tenure in the administration.

And on the copyright front, the Obama administration helped broker the deal that got Internet Service Providers to start providing warnings to users who are caught downloading content illegally.

It’s clear the president and his wife enjoy the arts, and they’ve hosted lots of cultural events at the White House — though his stance on copyright allies him more with content producers than with consumers. Obama has called for tax reform, and it would be interesting to see, if comprehensive efforts happen, if he includes artists’ tax credits, the one item in his 2008 platform that he hasn’t really addressed while in office. Whoever the Republican candidate is in 2012 is, they may be able to rally support by attacking the existence of the NEA (it’s dubious any of them would break with him on IP issues), but it remains to be seen if any of them will match Obama for a sense that arts policy isn’t just a matter of funding.

With arts and public broadcast issues percolating on the edge of the race for the 2012 presidential race, I thought it made sense to look at where the declared and prospective candidates for president have stood on arts issues throughout their careers. Their views on everything from arts education to intellectual property rights to support for local artistic traditions say a lot about how they value culture — but also about how they think about the role of government.

Of all the lawmakers I’ve looked at in this series, far and away the biggest surprise to me has been the record of Pennsylvania’s former Republican Senator Rick Santorum. I never would have expected that Santorum would be a fan of the arts, much less one of the Republicans who bucked attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts and went out of his way to seek federal financial support for the arts in Pennsylvania. But he is. Though Santorum’s more conservative on issues of copyright and intellectual property, and he’s supported various federal decency efforts, that perspective on the arts remains a surprise, and compared to some of his competitors in the Republican primary, frankly a welcome one:

1991: Santorum voted with House Republicans to ban the National Endowment for the Arts from supporting projects that could be considered obscene.

1995: During fights over funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, arts advocates lobbied Santorum, who was generally opposed to the idea that a few pieces of controversial art were grounds for dismantling the agency. He defended public broadcasting programs, even as he insisted that government support wasn’t critical to their survival, saying, “I have my share of ‘Shining Time Station’ puzzles for my 4-year-old and my 2-year-old…I have a bunch of this stuff – Mr. Rogers, a wonderful man…who does a tremendous show.” He supported cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but not in direct funding to local broadcasters.

1997: Santorum publicly backed NEA funding, saying, ”The arts foster a strong sense of community and bring new ideas and cultures to many individuals and families all over the nation. Elimination of such programs would create a cultural vacuum that could not be easily filled.”

1998: As the fights over the NEA’s existence faded, Santorum’s spokeswoman said he was unlikely to support measures to axe the agency or make further deep cuts in its budget. That won him criticism from conservatives, though his problem in Pennsylvania was generally being regarded as too conservative rather than too moderate. At the 2000 Republican convention, Pennyslvania Republican activist and former RNC member Elsie Hillman actually cited Santorum’s stances on the arts as proof that he was a moderate, rather than a hardcore conservative, something that was hurting Santorum’s reelection prospects. That same year, though, he voted against a Clinton budget that would have provided $1.75 million for an arts and science education center in Pennsylvania.

2000: Santorum tried, and failed, to bring forward legislation that would have created a universal ratings system across the entertainment industry, rather than the varying and voluntary systems that existed at the time and that exist now (interestingly, the GAO study I cited earlier in the day suggested that most parents assume there is a universal ratings system rather than a patchwork of codes). He’d bring up the issue of ratings again in 2004, publicly supporting an industry-backed effort to designate an Entertainment Ratings and Labeling Awareness Month.

2002: Santorum weighed in on copyright issues, suggesting that it was a mistake to change patent law to let generic drugs get to the market more quickly on the grounds that it would stifle innovation. He also called for investigations into peer-to-peer networks on the grounds that they made it easier for minors to access pornography.

2003: Santorum cosigned a letter along with a number of his Republican colleagues encouraging the administration to seek stricter enforcement of World Trade Organization rules on China to curb, among other things, software and content piracy. (In more contemporary news, he doesn’t appear to have a position on the PROTECT IP act.)

2005: The arts may not have been enough of a priority for Santorum to get him to vote for an overall budget, but he wasn’t above accepting funding for projects in his state when he thought they’d support the economy as well as the arts. When the Department of Housing and Urban Development allocated $4.3 million to convert an eyeglasses factory into an arts and education center, Santorum said, “This loan guarantee will provide resources needed to make capital improvements to the building and strengthen the local economy. The projects that are benefiting from this funding will ensure that Reading remains a great place to live and do business.” The following year, he and Sen. Arlen Specter secured $300,000 in federal funding towards a $35.9 million capital campaign to fund a August Wilson Center for African American Culture.

2006: Santorum was a cosponsor of the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act, which jacked Federal Communications Commissions fines from $32,500 for each violation to $325,000, with a cap of $3 million in fines for a single broadcast day.

Given that Santorum’s been out of office for some time, and competitors like Michele Bachmann have staked out positions to the right of him on social issues like equal marriage rights as well as federal arts funding issues, it might be worth asking if Santorum still holds to his old support for the NEA, and to figure out where he stands on PROTECT IP. If you get the opportunity to pose those questions, feel free to steal them — just report back here.

With arts and public broadcast issues percolating on the edge of the race for the 2012 presidential race, I thought it made sense to look at where the declared and prospective candidates for president have stood on arts issues throughout their careers. Their views on everything from arts education to intellectual property rights to support for local artistic traditions say a lot about how they value culture — but also about how they think about the role of government.

Rep. Ron Paul’s a libertarian, so it’s no surprise that he’s not fond of government funding for the arts. But true to his libertarian principles, he’s shown that he’s uncomfortable with government regulation of the arts more generally:

1997: Predictably, Paul was in the midst of some of the debates over the existence of National Endowment for the Arts after he returned to Congress in 1997. “It is clear that there is no place in the federal budget for the NEA, the NEH or the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,” he said after President Clinton asked for an increase in NEA and CPB funding in response to Congressional cuts the previous year. Later that year, he voted to disband the agency altogether.

2001: In a profile, Paul used the National Endowment of the Arts to illustrate his vision of the Constitution’s limits on government functions in an interview with Insight on the News: “If you say, ‘What we must do is cut back on the National Endowment for the Arts,’ instead of defending the constitutionally correct position that there should be no National Endowment for Arts, you have conceded. The Congress made a feeble intellectual attempt in 1995, but it failed because, all of a sudden, the constitutional principle spelled out clearly in the 10th Amendment was ignored. The 10th Amendment says: ‘The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.’”

2004: Paul was the only Republican to vote against a bill that increased the ceiling on Federal Communications Commission indecency fines from $27,500 per incident for companies and $11,000 for individuals to $500,000, complaining “I’m convinced that the Congress has been a very poor steward of the First Amendment.”

2007: Paul may not believe that the federal government should fund the arts, but that doesn’t mean he dislikes them. He cosponsored a resolution that expressed the House’s support for music education as part of a balanced curriculum.

Support for arts education shouldn’t necessarily be interpreted one way or another, unless the candidate in question is Mike Huckabee, for whom it’s a top issue. And other than that simple resolution, Paul’s views on the arts are straightforwardly libertarian.