The argument of my paper is that rent-seeking is an important reason why governments assist the arts. While I cannot offer it as a settled conclusion, I do put it forward as more than a hypothesis.
In making my argument, I shall try to establish its necessary conditions: (1) that the economic structure of the arts lends itself to rent-seeking, (2) that the arts not only receive assistance but solicit it, and (3) that the assistance clearly benefits those who solicit it while others benefit less or not at all even though they are said to. What I shall not try to do is to make the argument conclusive, simply because by its nature it cannot be, not even if people in the arts came forward and declared, 'Nostro culpa, we are rent-seekers.' I would believe it, but not because they said it.
(1) The economic structure of the arts is more favorable than not to rentseeking. The demand for the performing arts is income-elastic. By one estimate it is unitary in the U.S. (Moore, 1968: 90). ~ For the visual arts, it appears to be one or more also as indicated by the continual increase in museum attendance, by the increase in the real price of admission, and by the increase in expenditure for art objects. The demand for the performing arts is not so incomeelastic as to offset entirely the increase in their cost that comes from their being labor intensive.
Since the arts are a superior good, any decrease in supply will raise their price more, hence the income of the suppliers more, than the decrease would do if the demand were stationary or decreasing. Actually, governments today more often assist the arts by increasing the demand for them than by decreasing the supply (which the French Academy once did by limiting entry to the market for painting). Even so, the income elasticity of demand operates in favor of the arts because in order to obtain a given increase in demand they need to make less effort. That reduces the cost of rent-seeking which (one would expect) increases the amount of it.