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I’m gonna talk at you for a minute about the National Endowment for the Arts. An independent government agency, the NEA fulfills grants for arts and culture schools and organizations nationwide, which includes those in Southern Nevada. In the past five years, it’s granted funds to A Source of Joy Theatricals (for Broadway in the HOOD); to Nevada Ballet Theatre (for new works by Krista Baker and Trey McIntyre); to the Nevada School of the Arts (for a chamber music program); to the Discovery Children’s Museum and the Neon Museum (for artist residencies); to UNLV (for a summer writer’s residency) and many more.
These NEA grants made city festivals possible. They allowed concerts and art shows to be mounted. They provided arts education to kids. They weren’t huge sums of money, relative to how much we spend for other government services and agencies; most of the NEA’s grants to Southern Nevada entities range in the low-to-middle five figures. And nationally, the taxpayer burden is minimal: The NEA’s 2025 budget is $210.1 million, which figures out to less than 62 cents per capita. That means your annual out-of-pocket for the NEA is substantially less than the price of a candy bar.
(Continuing that thought experiment: Last week we did some napkin math in the newsroom, combining the requested 2025 federal budgets for the NEA, the National Endowment for the Humanities [$200.1 million] and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting [$545 million], which supplies minimal funding to PBS and NPR stations. We figured the annual cost for all of that, per taxpayer, at just under $3. Not monthly: $3 a year. Most parents would pay that for Sesame Street alone. Remember that when Elon Musk inevitably brandishes his chainsaw on the socials, threatening to saw Elmo in half.)
I say all this because … well, you probably knew the reason coming in. The NEA has been a political kickball pretty much since its founding in 1965. Ronald Reagan considered abolishing the NEA during his first term but changed his mind; Newt Gingrich tried to pull the NEA’s funding, along with that of the NEH and CPB, but repeatedly came up short; and Donald Trump attempted to defund it in 2017, but Congress kept it alive. Trump’s going to try again this year, likely by allowing Musk’s out-of-control Department of Government Efficiency to fire its personnel and dissolve its administrative structure before Congress and the courts have a say in it.
Whatever DOGE does to the NEA is out of our hands, at least for the moment. But it should remind us that the arts occupy a tenuous and perpetually endangered spot in the national consciousness. The phase itself begs to be spoken in a haughty, mid-Atlantic accent: the ahhhts. Many people—probably not most, but many—regard the arts as a kind of high-minded, existential threat that’s coming to steal their money and indoctrinate their children, leaving only atonal symphonies and Robert Mapplethorpe nudes in its wake. But the arts are substantially more than that, as anyone who lives in this city can attest.
Las Vegas has a foundation of legalized gaming, but it’s the arts that makes losing money palatable to millions of tourists annually. They come for our shows and headliners (the performing, musical, costuming and literary arts), for eye-popping attractions like Sphere and Area15 (the visual, sculptural and interactive arts), for our restaurants and bars (culinary arts and mixology), and for the experience of walking our streets and marveling at our buildings and signage (the commercial, architectural and graphic arts).
None of the talents and skills needed to make a place like Las Vegas were developed in a vacuum. They were nurtured, over time, through specialized arts education. They were made with the help of arts institutions: museums, galleries, libraries, theater companies, musical conservatories. And even with an NEA working at peak engagement—which it has arguably never enjoyed—these arts and culture organizations need our patronage, in denominations ranging from “candy bar” to “monthly streaming service.”
There are thousands of arts-minded organizations and individuals across our Valley that need us now and always, from painters to poets to theater companies to local bands. Many of these artists will never receive a federal grant,or even think to pursue one. But any one of them could make a difference for us, the self-made “entertainment capital of the world.”A little bit of attention could make all the difference to a struggling creative, whether that means offering financial support or simply showing up. Especially now, when the prevailing political sentiment is that the arts are a frivolity, a line item that can be eliminated and replaced with more streaming TV.
It’s not the gambling that entices people away from online betting and their state lottery to visit Las Vegas. And it’s not this Valley’s assortment of strip malls that keeps us locals occupied on a Friday night. It’s the spotlight, the stage, the microphone, the painted backdrop, the movie screen. It’s the arts. And in supporting them, we’re supporting the idea of Vegas. The arts is what Vegas does. The arts is what Vegas is.
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English (US) ·