President John F. Kennedy’s remarks at Amherst College one month before his assassination in 1963 capture the high aspirations that surrounded the establishment of the National Endowment for the Arts. Artists, he suggested, have a central role to play in public discourse. Their sensitivity and concern for justice make artists important social critics: “If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes [them] aware that our Nation falls short of its highest potential.” A prime example, President Kennedy said, is the poet Robert Frost, to whom Amherst College dedicated the Robert Frost Library that same day. Frost “saw poetry as the means of saving power from itself….When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truth which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment.” That is why a great nation will fully recognize the place of artists in society.

Kennedy had few doubts that art is a sociocultural good, as was argued in the previous chapter. He also assumed that people have a right to participate in the arts, that those who attend schools such as Amherst have “a responsibility to the public interest,” and that the artists among us make an indispensable contribution to a country’s “spirit.” Today, none of these assumptions can be taken for granted. The optimism and public-mindedness that President Kennedy exuded have long since dissipated in both the United States and Canada. Mainstream economists have little use for the notion of art as a sociocultural good. And mainstream political theorists are not so sure that art is important for the pursuit of public justice or that people have a right to participate in the arts.