The Theatre Times: Germany can pride itself on having a performing arts scene second to none. Hence the country’s application in 2018 to have its theatre and orchestra landscape put on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage List. A decision on that is expected at the end of 2019. Theatre lovers in Germany can count themselves lucky to have such a variety of venues and productions to choose from. Thalia Theater in Hamburg, Schauspielhaus Bochum, Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus–unlike in England and France with their centralized theatre scenes, theatre in Germany is not clustered in the capital.
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What angers me is that I just made a comment on another article about how Trump is attempting to stifle arts educations funding. The fact that there are places in the world where art is government funded… it opens the world up to a new array of possibilities. I love the quote, “Art is free, it need not please and must not serve.” That is so incredibly true. Or at least, I believe it to be. If we had government support of theatre than we may have a conflict of the 1st Amendment… but the preservation of the arts is so important… and so many countries do it differently. Why can’t we? In Germany the freedom of art is enshrined in the constitution and there is no interference of that. Art serves no one, it lives. I love that. The fact that in Germany, the cultural landscape would change immensely if the arts are not acknowledged in the way that they currently are.
Art subsidies, in general, are an absolute necessity. Unfortunately, people do not and are not willing to pay for art, or as much as it is worth. This leaves the arts, and specifically artists at a distinct disadvantage, as they are not appropriately paid for the work that they do. This means that any funding they can get is very, very important or the projects they do (especially outside of theatre) have to come out of their own pockets. This has become even more obvious to me with projects we have to do for Basic Design, in which we have to buy all of our own materials. Overall, we spend significantly more than we would on books for a normal degree, and that’s a little annoying, but overall okay, as the nature of our degrees is completely different, and much less large lecture based. This is an interesting conundrum, that the United States is especially struggling with.
As Ella and Willem said above art is something that should be free and apart of all people's lives. We live in a current day society were the arts has been pushed aside in American culture it has been pushed down as it is something that doesn't make money like other industries and that is one of the most important things in our society not art. Funding art project however is a huge issue and its an integral part to their operation. Almost everywhere else in the world art has some kind of public funding and is an important part of the society. It's something that all artist will tell you about American art culture but theatre is such a lost form and requires such large sums of money for short time spans it sometimes seems like a poor investment. Investment is also an issue for a lot of people as theatre in American culture often seems as an upper class art form.
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