If you know me well, you know that I really only get vocally political when it comes to arts issues. Well, I just found out yesterday that President Obama cut back arts funding in his budget proposal for 2011. Arts education funding has been consolidated with several non-arts sources.
On the other hand, the government spends twice as much in ONE DAY on the war in Iraq as they do for the entire year on all the government sponsored arts programs combined. This says a lot about not only our government’s values and priorities, but those of our society.
I’ve had students in the past couple of years who have attended schools where the arts programs have been eradicated. I don’t like where this is heading.
Perhaps those at a high level of government don’t understand that without exposure and experience to the arts, our physicians and engineers and chemists won’t learn the creative problem-solving skills that will allow them to address the multitude of pressing issues that face our civilization now and in the near future. In other words, steel and silicon and dna are, or can be, as much an artistic medium as oil paint or ballet, but they are useless unless they are being utilized as such by those with an artistic temperament.
Meanwhile, those of us who are fighting to save our culture and civilization from rotting from within due to the corruptive nature of apathy and escapism are struggling, especially in the current economic climate. We are the infantry of culture. We who have chosen to sacrifice social and financial security to share our art with those who need it most–be they nascent artists or accountants who realize that they desperately need something real to fill that gaping hole in the spirit that we all have–we are falling into a increasingly deeper financial hole. Some of us can’t hold on much longer, and you’ll lose us to steady jobs with benefits.
Is that what you really want, Mr. President?
Can you believe that? So terribly disappointing.
Or for a different viewpoint on the same issue, here’s why J G Ballard would think it’s a good thing:
“The funds disbursed by the Arts Council over the decades have created a dependent client class of poets, novelists and weekend publishers whose chief mission in life is to get their grants renewed, as anyone attending a poetry magazine’s parties will quickly learn from the nearby conversations. Why the taxes of people on modest incomes (the source of most taxes today) should pay for the agreeable hobby of a North London children’s doctor, or a self important idler like the late editor of the New Review, is something I have never understood. I assume that the patronage of the arts by the state serves a political role by performing a castration ceremony, neutering any revolutionary impulse and reducing the ‘arts community’ to a docile herd. They are allowed to bleat, but are too enfeebled to ever paw the ground.”
J G Ballard, from his biography Miracle of Life
There is no such thing as a dependent class of artists in the US, because there is not, and never has been, an artists’ benefit.
A portion of it goes to government-sponsored grants, but a large chunk of it goes to programs that expose the public to culture. The part that got cut from the President’s budget request is the part that teaches six-year-olds how to sing together and allows goth teenagers to work out their angst on paper in a relatively supportive environment, it subsidizes programs that teach disadvantaged black children in rural Mississippi how to play the music of their forefathers on the instrument of my passion, and it keeps jazz alive in the hurricane-ravaged neighborhoods in New Orleans.
I’d love to be able to devote myself full-time to my art and music, so I wouldn’t say no if Bo wanted to give me an artists’ benefit. I’d love to be able to take a year off on the government’s dime to write a novel or compose and record a magnum opus concept album, but that will likely never happen in this country and I’ve come to terms with it (for the most part). What really upsets me is the cutting of all arts education funding.
In response to Ballard, I think it’s as much of a castration to force artists to work jobs which sap their energy and creativity and distract them from their true work, whether it’s in a factory or in an ad agency. It’s unfortunate that he provided an eloquent criticism but didn’t bother providing a possible solution (unless he did in a later passage, in which case you’ll have to forward that to me).