When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis recently blocked more than $30 million of state arts funding earmarked to support music, theater and other culture initiatives in the Sunshine State, it was pitched as an effort to protect taxpayer dollars from rogue spending on largely liberal luxuries. But beyond his conservative base, DeSantis attracted more blowback than perhaps he expected for using his pen to try to alter the character of his state.
The Miami-based billionaire art collector Jorge Perez, for instance, characterized the DeSantis move as “just a horrible message to send” about Florida, and Miami in particular. “We want to be a serious city, and serious means that we have great education and we have great exposure to culture,” Perez told Bloomberg.
Perez, who grew his fortune in Florida real estate, understands the value that cultural amenities lend to communities, and how that translates into rising home values and business opportunities. To remain attractive to employers and transplants, in other words, the state has to provide more than a promise of low taxes. It must make a promise of a rich cultural life.
(To wit, Miami’s South Beach boasts very popular tours of its character-rich designated U.S. Historic Art Deco District, one of the city’s signature art flourishes.)
Column | We can only guess at DeSantis’ strange hostility toward arts and culture funding, but it’s difficult to avoid concluding he must view Florida’s cultural institutions as a threat to the peculiar political culture he is trying to cultivate instead.https://t.co/kjbeJgSrC4
— Nate Monroe (@NateMonroeTU) June 21, 2024
Critics like Perez warn DeSantis that if Florida hopes to continue to attract businesses in tech, finance and other lucrative burgeoning industries, the state must understand that their employees will want to see concerts and plays and visit museums — all the types of organizations that traditionally have been recipients of state funding.
Florida residents will also want their children to have access to the arts and to organizations like the Tallahassee Museum of History and Natural Science, the Orlando Science Center, and the Florida Film Institute — all past state grant recipients.
[NOTE: Along with grant-getters like the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami-Dade and The Orlando Shakespeare Theater, less well-known grant recipients include the Florida Gay Men’s Chorus and the African American Cultural Society (Flagler) are presumably easy targets for accusations of “wokeness” as DeSantis has defined it.]
The warning from Florida’s visionaries is that the state’s brand can’t be merely, as DeSantis boasts, a place where “woke goes to die.” Florida is a vibrant, artsy, multicultural mecca in the sunshine — a place where businesses increasingly want to be — and that is at odds with the Governor’s plans to strip support from organizations that put on plays, organize fringe festivals and operas, and support arts and science education for Florida’s youth.
“We were a society of fun and sun, but we’re no longer that — we don’t want that,” Perez said, implying that the arts are a large part of the fun. Not frivolous fun either, in the billionaire’s estimation, but serious fun.