DAVID A. SMITH wrote a recent opinion piece in the Wall St. Journal on the arts. "Many will say (often in a testy voice) that the arts deserve a cabinet-level presence because they are just as important to the country as the Defense Department. While that’s something of an apples and oranges comparison, the deeper problem is that it assumes that the country’s defense and its arts can be furthered via the same sort of bureaucratic means. But while our nation’s defense would collapse in the absence of the centralized power of our Defense Department, having a Department of Culture — or even a "Cultural Czar," to use that awful label we’ve apparently become so fond of — would be neither an effective nor necessary way to guarantee the health of cultural expression in America."
I totally agree, and not just because the government should be concentrating on the ‘big’ issues first (war, poverty etc etc) but because it presumes that people are too uncultured for their own good and that they will somehow suffer through their ignorance as if the arts are like a vitamin. *gasp* You are suffering from a massive ballet deficiency! quick get me two CC’s of Bolshoi dancers right away!
Art is subjective – so opinions and experience should not be the criteria for determining where communal cultural dollars are spent in my opinion, and if it is the criteria then Jello Biafra and Blag Dahlia should get a nice big slice of that government money to create public arts. hehe! But, as Henry Rollins famously said at the end of his Grammy award winning (oh the irony!) spoken word recording about touring with Black Flag "Get In The Van", you miss out on a lot of fun by being rich and famous.
Necessity is the mother of invention they say, and the arts will survive without public funding, most everyone on my I-Tunes playlist struggled and starved at times to make great art regardless of circumstance. With people going homeless and hungry, I’d rather help them with public money than fund another classical concert (that’s my vote).
Yes, I do understand how important PBS and NPR are and how the WPA enriched our public buildings with excellent murals such as those by Lucia Wiley but Art doesn’t need a hierarchy and official sanction to flourish, in fact it might be a good thing to start from scratch, a little DIY would help I think.
With tools like facebook and the internet in general, we can have vibrant local art scenes funded with donations alone, if they are tax deductible then so much the better, but art will survive without the government. Hell, just look at how many punk bands have survived and how popular many of them have remained.
Dwarves might not be your cup of warm teabag but they are equally as important to the health of the nation as a classical orchestra, perhaps more so because they deal with the darker side of the human nature and give rebellious kids (and rebellious adults) a cathartic outlet. Trust me, when things make me fustrated (religious intollerance of their fellow man etc) I can sing along with the ridicoulously raunchy and just plain anti-social lyrics of the Dwarves and I can work it out of my system, and I’m not the only one. How many punk kids out there vs. classical music fans? Oh are you saying that classical music is somehow more ‘art’ than the Dresden Dolls? Art is subjective so you can’t say that!!!!!
Foxes Love. sketch by Darren Daz Cox.
"Only love interests me, and I am only in contact with things I love." -Marc Chagall
OH! David Wilcock is rapidly becoming a favorite on Coast to Coast AM and for good reason, he makes sense with solid science and loving spirituality, so much so he will be the guest of George Noori tonight for the second time in 2009! (it’s the beginning of Febuary so David Wilcock must really have plenty of great things to inspire us with! Check out David Wilcocks new blog post he wrote today! (cool art even!!!)
