Mitt Romney started the primary campaign by suggesting that federal arts funding should be cut in half. Now, in an interview with Fortune Magazine, he’s gone a step further, and has said that as president, he would entirely eliminate the subsidies for PBS, and for the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. That shift in his position might be more devastating to the people who benefit from those subsidies, both as employees and as audiences for the work supported by them. But it’s a move that, rather than clarifying Romney’s views on the proper scope of government, move him deeper into a dodge that reveals the fundamental unseriousness of beating up on the arts.

Talking about cutting arts funding is a diversionary tactic, both in terms of the amount of money that would actually be saved by doing so, and in terms of a philosophical discussion about what the proper funding of government is. The arts are an easy thing to toss to the crowd because you can cherry-pick an example of something that was funded by the NEA or NEH that will sound silly to someone, even if it has tremendous value in terms of preserving folklife traditions or ensuring access to arts and culture to rural communities. Arts funding is a way at getting at an interesting question. Should the government perform functions only that we believe shouldn’t be allowed to be controlled by private interests, like control, regulation, and deployment of the armed forces? Or should it step into voids left by private enterprise and personal charity when there are important functions that don’t appear to be supported by the market? That’s a real conversation, and scapegoating arts funding is a way of avoiding it.

And the profound unseriousness of going after spending by targeting programs with small budgets and without constituencies that are perceived to be powerful (or as is the case with Amtrak, something else Romney has proposed cutting funding for, with constituencies it’s politically valuable to rope-a-dope with) is really something that Republican politicians should be held accountable for. There are a lot of conservatives who enjoy the credit for talking about shrinking government but don’t actually want to be held responsible for taking things away from people, and the arts are a convenient space for them to stake that particular ground. It would be awfully nice if Paul Ryan’s addition to the Republican ticket forced Romney out of that space and into an honest debate about what shrinking government would mean. But it strikes me as more likely that Ryan will get pulled into this sliver of territory that lets conservatives talk and talk about spending, without actually having something meaningful, and difficult, to say.

The New York Times reports that, in the first year that National Endowment for the Arts’ Arts in Media grants were open to gaming and web-based projects, those projects ended up winning funding ahead of established PBS programs:

Among the PBS programs receiving significantly less funding are “Live from Lincoln Center,” which was granted $100,000 last year and nothing this year. The Metropolitan Opera received $50,000 to support its national “Great Performances at the Met” telecasts, $100,000 less than last year. WNET received $50,000 to support other “”Great Performances” productions and the same amount for “American Masters,” compared to $400,000 for each last year.

“The PBS NewsHour” will receive $50,000, half that of 2011, for arts segments; independent documentary series “Independent Lens” will get $50,000, down from $170,000, and documentary series “POV” will receive $100,000, down from $250,000.

WNET, however, did receive $75,000 towards production of a new series, “The Electric Animation Festival,” and its companion Web site, and PBS received $50,000 to support the creation of mobile apps for its arts initiative. A number of other individual documentary films and smaller programs also received funds, as in years past, as did NPR, and numerous public radio productions.

Opening up the grants to more kinds of media projects makes a great deal of strategic sense for the NEA: it lets the organization meet arts consumers where they’re at, makes the organization look forward-thinking in supporting projects that might not garner support or be treated like priorities within their industries but still have important potential, and frankly, it also gives the NEA bases of support in industries that might previously have been indifferent to the organization, or the cause of public funding for the arts. But it does raise a fundamentally tricky question for the NEA in the future. How much of the organization’s work should focus on keeping alive high culture that has wealthy patrons but trouble attracting a new generation of mass-market attendees? And how much should it focus on driving the culture of the future? Obviously these priorities aren’t mutually exclusive, but they are competing for resources, and I do wonder how the mix is going to shake out.

The bridge is yours.

-Drama at the Oscars afterparties!

-And what do we want from the Academy Awards, anyway?

-Is Kickstarter on a path to outpace the National Endowment for the Arts?

-A photoessay on addiction.

-Bill Pullman will be your president again!

Reading through President Obama’s proposed budget for fiscal 2013, with a few exceptions, it looks to be a decent year for government support for the arts:

-The administration plans to achieve $25 million in savings by consolidating the Education Department’s arts education programs under a larger umbrella.

-A slight increase in the funding request for the National Endowment for the Arts. For fiscal year 2012, President Obama had asked for $146 million for the NEA, down from $168 in fiscal 2011. This year, he’s requesting $154 million for fiscal 2013, a small increase.

-A similar increase for the National Endowment for the Humanities, from $146 million in fiscal 2012 to a $154 million request for fiscal 2013.

-A $24 million increase in the funding request for the Smithsonian Institution, from $636 million for fiscal 2012 to $660 million for fiscal 2013.

-Continued funding in the amount of $85 million for the construction of the National Museum of African American History and Culture as part of a $186 appropriation for facilities planning, construction, and revitalization of Smithsonian Institution facilities.

-A slight downward tick in funding for the operations of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, from $23,200,000 in fiscal 2012 to $22,379,000 in fiscal 2013.

-A $6 million increase for the National Galleries of Art, from $114 million to $120 million.

Now, just because Obama is asking doesn’t mean he shall receive—that certainly hasn’t been the case in the past. But it’s nice to see the President treat long-term investment in the arts as a worthwhile cause. It’d be a real shame in particular if we lost the chance to get the National Museum of African American History and Culture during the first term of the first African-American president.

I wanted to like Detropia, the new movie from Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady about, among other things, the continued move of the American auto industry overseas; the proposed plan to contract Detroit’s footprint to save money on social services and concentrate the city’s residents in viable neighborhoods; and the role of the city’s arts community in its revitalization. All three of those things would make fascinating movies in their own right, and I think Detropia suffers from trying to do all of them at once. And I’m sorry that’s the case, because I would have been particularly curious to see a movie make the argument currently being advanced by the National Endowment for the Arts that investments in art and culture can provide the anchors that help economically revitalize blighted neighborhoods.

The movie looks at two primary examples of the arts in Detroit: the city’s financially struggling opera company, and the influx of young artists who have helped boost the city’s population of young people by 59 percent. In the former case, the opera mostly acts as a barometer in the movie for the difficulties faced by the city’s wealthy, white residents as well as the poor black ones who have been devastated by the loss of manufacturing jobs. It’s not surprising to know that the Big Three automakers were largely responsible for the corporate support that long kept the opera company running. But it would have been interesting to know how the automakers made decisions to continue — or cut back — their giving, and to have a few individual donors as part of the story. And the movie ends without telling us the fate of the opera companies, or any details about its budget. It ends up feeling sidelined.

And while it’s nice to know, as one young artist tells us that “I would never be able to own a home as an artist…we can experiment here because if we fail, we haven’t really fallen anywhere.” But the movie isn’t clear about whether the very cheap rents that lure artists to the city are helping revitalize its economy, or establishing market values for real estate and other goods and services at a permanently lower level. And Detropia doesn’t put these young white artists in conversation with the black residents, be they former autoworkers or local political bloggers, who are their new neighbors, or who they’re displacing. That would be a fascinating transitional discussion. But it never happens, and we never learn anything about what sorts of institutions these young people are creating or how they’re interacting with old ones. Detropia has parts of a story, but especially on the arts, the version of it that screened at Sundance feels much more like a first act than a complete story.

I spent a day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York over the holiday, and saw two terrific exhibits: the reopened Islamic art wing, about which much more to come, and “After the Gold Rush,” a contemporary photography show. Two pieces in the latter exhibit struck me in particular.

First, Philip-Lorca diCorcia took his 1991 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and used it to tweak conservatives who were hysterical over NEA funding for a traveling show of Robert Mapplethorpe’s work. He parceled out the money in small sums to male prostitutes and drug addicts, paying them posing fees and producing a series of tender, lovely portraits. In my favorite, a young man named Todd M. Brooks, appears washed in blue through a cheap motel window, framed in red window trim, and against a patterned blue bedspread. It’s not Picasso, and diCorcia’s approach isn’t a perfect solution to the problem of artists exploiting vulnerable subjects. But it’s a creative political stunt, with better results than usually come from those sorts of origins.

In the second, Robert Gober superimposes a man’s hand between two newspaper articles, clipped neatly and placed on a shell-strewn beach. Below his hand, the article refers to Matthew Shepard’s death. Above it, a letter to the editor argues that “Orthodox Jews, conservative Christians and others have a right to speak out against homosexuality without being placed in the category of thuggery.” While the piece obviously precedes Jonathan Rauch’s provocative and important piece in the December issue of the Advocate arguing that gay people should tolerate a certain amount of anti-gay sentiment as a sign that they’re legally and socially secure enough to practice tolerance, it’s a useful encapsulation of the dilemma behind that argument. It’s hard to cast off past threats if you’re not entirely sure they’re past.

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.