But arts and music organizations across the board ... a huge sector of the economy that has been largely ignored.
The mayors of ten major US cities have penned a letter to the Biden-Harris administration asking it to take an integrated federal approach to supporting the arts. In their missive, the mayors noted that the September unemployment rate for those in the arts ranged from roughly three to six times that of the overall national unemployment rate of 8.5 percent, according to the National Endowment of the Arts.
Citing an NEA white paper on the benefits to communities when the arts are positioned “at the table with land-use, transportation, economic development, education, housing, infrastructure, health, climate change, diversity and public safety strategies,” the letter’s authors call for a coalescent approach that would employ cultural and arts workers in the aid of federal programs for infrastructure, education, job creation, and health, with the goal of benefiting both the cultural sector and the programs it is put in service of.
According to 2020 reports by both the NEA and the US Department of Commerce, the arts sector, whose GDP blossomed by 69.5 percent between 1998 and 2016, by 2017 was valued at $877.8 billion and thus responsible for 4.5 percent of the US GDP, contributing more to the national economy than the construction, transportation and warehousing, travel and tourism, mining, utilities, and agriculture industries.
https://www.artforum.com/news/mayors-call-for-federal-response-to-us-arts-crisis-84944
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