In mid-January The Hill reported that Trump was considering cutting funding to the National Endowment for the Arts. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that was reportedly very influential in Trump’s transition process, argues that
“Taxpayer assistance of the arts is neither necessary nor prudent […] Taxpayers should not be forced to pay for plays, paintings, pageants, and scholarly journals, regardless of the works’ attraction or merit.”
I thought it would be interesting to look at data on public funding of the arts, and I found an interesting dataset for Los Angeles County. The question is: what types of art are funded, and how much?
The dataset (downloaded from here) contains information about art grants given through the Organizational Grant Program of the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, over the three application years of 2014-15, 2015-16, and 2016-17.
These plots were done with the plotly library, so they have some nice interactivity to them.