The argument states that in the last five years, the number of people
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03 Oct 2020, 10:41
The following appeared in a memorandum issued by a large city‘s council on the arts.
―In a recent citywide poll, fifteen percent more residents said that they watch television programs about the visual arts than was the case in a poll conducted five years ago. During these past five years, the number of people visiting our city‘s art museums has increased by a similar percentage. Since the corporate funding that supports public television, where most of the visual arts programs appear, is now being threatened with severe cuts, we can expect that attendance at our city‘s art museums will also start to decrease. Thus some of the city‘s funds for supporting the arts should be reallocated to public television.
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The argument states that in the last five years, the number of people watching the visual arts programs on TV and visiting museums have increased by 15%. The author believes that since corporate funding for visual arts TV programs is being cut severely, people visiting visual arts museums would also decrease. So, the funding for visual arts programs should partly be used for public television. This argument makes many leaps of logic and the assumptions do not hold up against critical reasoning.
Firstly, while the argument mentions that visual arts TV viewership and museum visits have gone up, we can not conclude that visual arts have become more popular in the city, since the proportion of city residents patronizing visual arts might have gone down, even as viewership and visitor counts have gone up, due to increase in population of the city in the last five years.
Further, the author also assumes that since both TV viewership and museum visits have gone up by roughly the same amount, they are related. The argument presents no evidence to support this. The demographics of people viewing TV programs and visiting museums could be entirely different and could be for unrelated reasons. For example, TV viewership of visual arts programs could have increased as majority of the programs broadcast are for visual arts, while the increase in visitor count could be entirely attributed to increase in tourism.
The argument assumes that corporate funding being cut would reduce the TV viewership. We can not substantiate this assumption. Corporate funding might form very small part of funding for visual arts programs. The viewership would not necessarily reduce even though funding for visual arts programs is reduced.
Most importantly, the argument infers that since corporate funding for public TV is being cut, visitor count at art museums would decrease. Since, no relationship has been established between TV viewership and museum visitors, nor between reduced funding for public TV and visual arts viewership, this is a completely baseless inference.
Finally, the argument advocates that funding for arts be diverted to public television. This does not follow from the argument as we do not the aims for city’s arts funding nor how public television supports those aims. We also can not assume that reallocating funding to public television would revitalize arts patronage. We have not been provided any information on the budgeting priorities for city’s art funding. For example, the arts funding might have been allocated to preserving monuments of great importance from falling into disrepair.
Therefore, the argument for allocating part of city’s art funding to public television is not a sound argument as it supported by assumptions that do not hold logical ground and are not substantiated by evidence to the same.