by Drew Johnson, Tennessee Center For Policy Research
posted April 26, 2006
The 37th annual Nashville Film Festival will finish its weeklong run on Wednesday, but not before the event devours over $85,000 in public funds—including $34,500 in state taxpayers’ money.
In addition to the $34,500 in state-funded operating support for the film festival courtesy of the Tennessee Arts Commission, Davidson County taxpayers were looted for an additional $50,635 in public support through a grant from the Metro Nashville Arts Commission.
Among the films included in this year’s Nashville Film Festival are:
Music Is My Life, Politics My Mistress, a documentary about the late artist, trade union leader and American Communist Party activist Oscar Brown Jr.
Super Powers, a movie in which a young couple tries to save their marriage by dressing up as super heroes in the bedroom
Hung, the story of a group of lesbian friends who decide to “try out penises for a day.”
The Nashville Film Festival also features a film about a man sexually obsessed with mannequins and another about a lesbian affair between a teacher and her student in an all-girls Catholic boarding school.
Films considered by some to be sexually explicit or otherwise objectionable garner greater public outrage for being shown at a taxpayer-supported film festival. Yet all taxpayers should be incensed that their tax money is spent to support art of any kind.
Government funding of the arts is inconsistent with a free society. Art—like all other goods and services—should exist in a market environment. If art is of value to a society, people will buy it, listen to it, watch it and enjoy it. It should not be a role of government to tax individuals to support art.
Eliminating government funding of the arts means that taxpayers would have more money to attend films that they personally choose to support. Instead, the state forces taxpayers to support films like Brothers of the Head, a mockumentary about Siamese twin glam rockers. This just goes to prove that the state government has no business spending our money on most of the things they spend it on.
(The “Monthly Misuse” is a monthly feature produced by the Tennessee Center for Policy Research to highlight an example of wasteful or questionable spending of tax dollars by the Tennessee state government.)
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