The Miscellany News

I think there is a right to culture. Public investment in the arts is not a luxury; it is a necessity. Because culture—whether expressed through music, film or dance—is a fundamental human experience, it should be accessible to all regardless of their financial status. Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms everyone’s right to participate freely in cultural life. This claim is therefore rooted in untapped precedent—and in models that already exist. As they are across parts of the world, public broadcasting, subsidized theater and publicly funded museums can be standard features of civic life—not exceptional services. The United States has contributed greatly to the arts, yet it remains an outlier—not the norm—in its approach to arts funding. Recognizing that distinction is the first step toward reimagining what is artistically possible for society.

When we gatekeep creativity behind a price tag, we treat culture as a product rather than a right. Commodification degrades culture’s intrinsic value. Why does art need to have a price? Can its worth not be explained through the emotions it evokes?

My hypothesis is a dual alienation of art: The arts represent a unique human capacity, yet our current system subjects them to exploitation. This results in a “double alienation.” There is the artist, who loses control over the products of their labor, often seeing their work commodified by corporate entities. And there is the public, who are denied access to these “cultural favors,” creating a barrier between the community and its own creative soul. For example, a musician who signs away publishing rights to a label, or a fine artist whose work is reproduced commercially without consent. On the public side, admission prices at major American orchestras and art museums routinely exceed $30, effectively placing cultural participation out of reach for many working communities—the very people whose lives and stories culture so often reflects. As a result, people are estranged from aspects of their thinking, feeling and acting.

Using Antonio Gramsci’s lens of cultural hegemony, we can see how this monetary boundary serves a deeper purpose. By controlling cultural output, a ruling class can manipulate the beliefs, perceptions and values of a society. They transform their specific worldview into the “common sense” of the masses, maintaining power through the quiet consent of the public rather than through overt force. This contrast is one of coercion, a power that Steven Lukes in “Power: A Radical View” might frame as “ideological power”—allowing one to influence people’s wishes and thoughts, even making them want things opposed to their own self-interest.

This serves as a threat to cultural spaces. We must question why we have come to accept these financial boundaries as inevitable. When we view art through this lens of power, the current attacks on cultural centers in the United States become even more concerning. These centers are not just buildings; they are the front lines where “common sense” is challenged and collective identity is formed. To lose them is to lose our ability to envision a world outside market transactions.

Education is the foundation for change. Cultural centers are crucial for learning, and targeting these institutions is a clear instance of limiting people’s ability to critically think about the culture around them and how it is shaped. Educational spaces exist through cultural centers—not through formal curricula, but through exposure, dialogue and the modeling of alternative ways of living and thinking. Gramsci himself placed enormous emphasis on the role of “organic intellectuals” who emerge from communities rather than institutions. Organic intellectuals are thinkers and organizers who emerge directly from a particular social class or group to articulate its interests, consciousness and aspirations. Unlike traditional, detached intellectuals, they bridge theory and action, providing, for instance, labor movements with strategies to challenge established power, ideology and hegemony. Cultural centers create the kinds of communities where those intellectuals are formed.

These monetary boundaries function as a financial paywall that dictates who gets to participate in society’s intellectual and emotional life. Gramsci observed that the powerful maintain dominance not through a police state, but by shaping what counts as reality—through media, education and culture itself. This is the distinction between consent and coercion, and it is precisely why the defunding of cultural institutions must be understood as a political act, not a fiscal one. Art, like clean water or education, provides more value to society when it is shared freely. Art is, and always should be, a public good.

That said, is the Gramscian “common sense” argument the most effective way to challenge the current funding models for the arts, or should the focus remain on the labor rights of the artists themselves? Gramscian hegemony and labor rights are not mutually exclusive, but complementary. The artist’s exploitation and the public’s exclusion are two symptoms of the same structural condition.