A day of politics

I live in Bloomington, unofficial camp of three more B’s - Barack, Biden, and Baron (Hill), all of which are dominating our screens and airwaves down here. And regardless of my political leanings, I find it hard to not think of Kennedy when I see Obama on TV, waving gallantly with his young family. And I like thinking about Kennedy for a couple reasons, in the context of signaling.

Signaling is the conveying of some meaningful information, through a would-be less meaningful object or action, when the two are positively correlated; such as a diploma signals a person has achieved a certain level of education and presumed intellectual abilities.

Here are a couple more Kennedy/art examples.

When I visited Washington DC for the first time, my parents took my brother and me to all the Smithsonian museums and on the capitol tour. I remember seeing the extravagant china dishware sets and other historic pieces Jackie Kennedy had acquired to restore the White House. It did seem like our leaders lived lavishly, but I did not think it wasteful. Rather, it invigorated in me a proud notion of what being an American meant. We are a country of people that appreciate fine furniture and art work, where quality and aesthetic value is important; to the president and his family, which reflected well on the rest of us. Jackie’s dishes are a signal of values.

When President Kennedy was working to establish the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in the 1960’s, he recognized that artists often bite the hand that feeds them, by creating work that criticizes and challenges American values. Even so, they should be publicly funded, as a value statement, to exemplify that the United States was stronger than our Cold War enemies, and all other nations that restrict the freedoms of their citizens. Public funding for the arts is a signal that though we may not agree with the art itself, we support an artists right to create it. NEA money is a signal of American values.

Granted, this cannot be the sole argument to justify public funding. (If it were, we would be obligating the government to fund a portion of every industry it finds favorable to American values.) It has to be combined with other reasons, in order to justify funding the arts. And Rushton has given us lots of other reasons to chew on, from market failure to the communitarian shaping of public taste. But the Kennedy point is among my favorite.