Europeans are up in arms. Well, only figuratively of course. From England to Italy, they’re irate because of impending cuts to government arts budgets.

The fiscal crunch is forcing governments to make tough choices about what they can afford, and the decisions aren’t welcome to those who consider government spending on the arts as something approaching a human right.

If you attend an opera at one of Italy’s 14 state-supported opera houses, for example, you’ll have to sit through a bitter harangue denouncing the government’s cuts before you get to see “Madame Butterfly.” That is, if the evening’s performance hasn’t been cancelled by a protest strike.

Last week, after I mentioned the Arts Council of England, several people e-mailed me weighing in on whether or not the U.S. government ought to spend as much money on the arts — and in the same way — as do European countries.

Since the debate began in earnest in the 1950s, those who want more federal spending for the arts have looked at what European governments spend on them and tried to shame Americans — in particular Congress — into doing more.

Measuring support

The assumption here (and it’s been the same since the 1950s ) is that the best measure of how seriously we Americans take the arts is how much the national government spends on them. Whether that’s in any way accurate in a country as decentralized as the United States never seems to occur to those who make the argument.

But because of that decentralization, in a real sense the United States supports the arts as much as do European countries, and maybe more.

As an NEA study put it in 2007, “if the American arts system is remarkably complex, decentralized, and dynamic, it is also uniquely effective — producing a cultural landscape of enormous size and unmatched diversity.” That cultural landscape is funded by a wild patchwork of sources with less than nine percent of total arts funding coming from the national government.

Perhaps most energizing are the tax incentives for individuals and corporations to support the arts.

“Individual private philanthropy to the arts is rare in most European nations,” the study said, but in the U.S., individual giving to the arts comes out to about $45 per capita.

American corporations have received tax breaks for supporting the arts since 1936, and 90 percent of their donations to the arts goes to local organizations. European countries are just beginning to experiment with such tax breaks.

Because of all these energetic elements, unlike government arts funding in Europe, every dollar the NEA spends on the arts generates an additional $7 or $8.

There is reason, in other words, to speak kindly of our system of arts funding here in the United States.

Many Europeans pick up on this when they come here. Anna-Sophia van Zweden is the daughter of Dallas Symphony Orchestra conductor Jaap van Zweden, a native of The Netherlands. What she discovered when she and her family moved to Dallas astonished her.

Without the level of state support of the arts prevalent in Europe, she said last year, Americans “feel so much more responsible for their arts. They see it as theirs. The energy is different from in Europe.”

The downside of cities being more responsible for their arts is, of course, that cities are more responsible for their arts. The national government can help a bit, but it’s up to us, as individuals and communities, to nurture and support a thriving arts scene.