If the National Endowment for the Arts will be preserving 200 year old works, then fine, let’s pay for it.
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Once again, private owners who have a vested interest in such works will do a much better job of preserving them than any government agency.
Museums financed by those horrid rich people could and would be vastly superior to the NEA.
The NEA’s sole purpose is to use taxpayer money to enact two communist goals listed by Cleon Skousen in his 1958 book “The Naked Communist”, later read into the Congressional Record in 1963 by Rep. Albert S. Herlong, Jr.:
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to “eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms.”
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. “Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art.”
“... private owners who have a vested interest ...”
And I suppose you believe the same for “private owners” of land along the borders; they should pay for national defense? Your argument suffers from reductio ad absurdum. Every cost of government can be shown to favor a subset of the populace.