I’ve always been fairly impressed with conservatives’ ability to maintain resentment while being in power. It takes a real commitment.

What makes it all really insane (well ok, even *more* really insane) is that the resentment is all self-inflicted. I deny myself X (sex for pleasure, joyful romantic relationships, indulging my homoerotic crush on Mike Huckabee by sending him letters, whatever), you don’t, I resent you for having X. Isn’t the simpler solution to stop denying myself X?

The whole point of being a wingnut is nursing grievances, and it’s much harder to pull that off when your people are in power.

Hmmm… I’d have to politely disagree with that, given the unavoidable fact that they didn’t have any trouble at all whilst holding the White House from 81 to 93, the Congress from 95 to ‘07, and both from ‘01 to ‘09.  They find it very easy to pull off at any time; psychotics with persecution complexes always do. They just find it easier whilst out of power.

I often wonder if artists as a whole are also resented because we are producers of things and can work for ourselves and completely by ourselves, and therefore don’t always conform to the worker-boss social dynamic. I’ve learned that for many people, simply not conforming is enough to draw their hostility.

I also often find it funny that being an artist gives one the chance to “make it on one’s own” using one’s own skill and effort and initiative, the Libertarian fantasy, and yet those one the right give artists no respect for “making it on their own.” Probably because artists don’t exploit others for labor in their process of “making it.”

I don’t think that lifestyle envy plays a big role, at least so far as some of the resentment that I’ve heard expressed towards artists.  Most of the “cut the art budget” types I’ve listened to focused on what you can call hard productivity.  Governments should build schools, fix roads, buy tanks… all sorts of measurable, easy to understand things.  These folks see their property taxes going up, their income taxes going up, their schools going to shit, their roads turning into a pothole collection and their bridges falling down and they wonder why the fuck they’re paying for somebody in New York to put a crucifix in a jar of urine.

The correct place to aim the “no money for this shit!” anger is, naturally, at the big money: a pointless war costs a trillion, KBR and their ilk walk away with billions upon billions in fraudulently obtained or conducted contracts; the Pentagon insists on funding DARPA studies about flying submarines and kills functioning weapons programs for expensive ones, by-the-rich-for-the-rich tax breaks siphon cash from the middle class…. the list goes on and on.  But Joe Artist and his $2k grant for a pile of green-spray-painted poop called “symphony in Orangeade No.978” is easier to understand and get pissed about.

“Less easy=harder imo. “

Nah.  I refuse to concede that they find anything at all hard about getting frothingly, bitingly angry.  No word which uses any concept akin to “difficult” is properly used for them.

I think r.t. has a point about the boss dynamic.  Most folks have jobs where creativity isn’t possible, or is discouraged, or is actively punished.  Seeing people who are paid to be creative engenders resentment. 

I notice that people don’t express the same resentment for creativity in, say, computers or engineering.  Maybe because the average person doesn’t believe that, given time and a place where some mouth breathing moronic district manager isn’t screaming at him, he could design and encode a video game or build a bridge; but he does, perhaps,  think he could paint a picture or take a lovely photo or craft a sculpture.

I wonder what the choads would say if “abstinence only programs” were put under the purview of the “art czar” and filed under “performance art”.

Because they sure as hell ain’t science or education.

There’s a pretty good article in the latest issue of Newsweek about the pros and cons of setting up an art czar of some kind.  Most other developed nations have such a position.  The article pointed out, however, that the biggest thing Obama can do to encourage the arts is to push for universal health care.  Health care would make it easier for people to survive in freelance art careers, free artistically talented people to quit unrewarding jobs they’re keeping just for the medical benefits, and help arts nonprofits that can’t afford health care for their employees.

My husband and I both work in the arts, in different capacities (I’m a comic-book editor and cartoonist, he’s a museum curator), and we’ve seen our community hit hard in the past couple of years.  In a recession, the arts lose funding from both the private sector (because individual patrons can afford to spend less) and the public (government funding for the arts is one of the first areas to endure cutbacks when there are more pressing crises).  I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing a UPA-like effort to encourage socially valuable art projects.  It isn’t just about individual artists; it’s also about helping museums, galleries, theaters, and educational programs stay open, which is of obvious immediate benefit to the community.

They may already realize that, but are so brainwashed that they still think the private for-profit health care system is good.  I got my father last year to admit that yes, if my sister cannot afford to pay for healthcare, it is ok if she dies (she is a Type 1 diabetic).  He then said that that would “never happen”.  Then later last year, my parents had to get goverment help for my sister because she did run out of money.  My dad’s had a steady diet of conservative talk radio since 1992 and the brainwashing is almost complete.

Arts funding is yet another ironic example of how conservative low brows are jerked around by their wealthy manipulators. Most art funding comes from foundations which are set up to avoid paying taxes, particularly estate taxes. By having an intelligent estate tax with few, if any, loopholes, these movement conservatives would not only benefit socially and get and more meritocratic economic opportunities, but they could see their dream of gutting the arts realized as well.

” .. it’s also about helping museums, galleries, theaters, and educational programs stay open ... “

Word.  Politicians love paying for new things, and hate maintaining the old ones.  The same thing goes for big money types who fund arts programs, and for university administrators.  You can only slap your name on the new building; nobody gives a rats ass about the more necessary long-term care, preservation or restoration, which is often more expensive.  (That’s why, for example, I’m not a big believer in letting universities have the first or last word on where additional government money goes.  They always want a shiny new building to put more clerks in and their names [or their friends’ names] on.  Hiring more TAs or making sure that the food in the caf doesn’t taste terrible are often not on their radar at all.  Some time back I went to my old uni; the law school [my alma matter] was begging us for money for an addition and renovations; to get to the school I had to drive by two brand-new, gleaming, ultramodern buildings put up for the administrative staff.)

I don’t think that lifestyle envy plays a big role, at least so far as some of the resentment that I’ve heard expressed towards artists.  Most of the “cut the art budget” types I’ve listened to focused on what you can call hard productivity.  Governments should build schools, fix roads, buy tanks… all sorts of measurable, easy to understand things.  These folks see their property taxes going up, their income taxes going up, their schools going to shit, their roads turning into a pothole collection and their bridges falling down and they wonder why the fuck they’re paying for somebody in New York to put a crucifix in a jar of urine.

I think this argument is the closest to my own view as to why art and artists are particular targets of resentment.  It’s true, as r.t. points out, that artists produce things, but there are a lot of people who view art as a luxury, and a frivolous one at that.  Art often does come in the form of tangible objects, but the benefit we receive is not tangible, so art is vulnerable to being perceived as “doing nothing” for us.

As for the lifestyle, that may be one facet of a broader issue behind resentment toward artists:  they tend to push cultural boundaries, and that can make people feel uncomfortable.

God, universal health care would be such a big deal for me personally.  It’s why it’s so emotional for me to talk to my family about this, because they don’t realize that opposing universal health care may mean, one day, opposing Amanda’s health care access.

It’s of mixed blessing to me that my parents understand this very well, because it affects my health care access right now.  My mother is very much aware that universal health care could very well mean the difference between grandchildren and no grandchildren.

I know plenty of artist types who don’t have careers in art generally because of those resentful squares.  From the ones who couldn’t go to school for art (because it wasn’t a career, their parents said), to the others who can’t use their degree in design because they’re undersold by a box full of clip art.

In fact, that means that of the artist people I know, any who have to work for a living don’t make their bread and butter on art.  No health benefits, no unemployment, etc.

I notice that people don’t express the same resentment for creativity in, say, computers or engineering.

Engineers, doctors, and other people who are independent, creative, and don’t have a boss breathing down their throats (actually, plenty of engineers do. see: dilbert) are regarded as “professionals.” By contrast, any idiot can call himself an artist and, in fact, many do.

Oh man, I HOPE that Obama sets up an art czar. Better yet, a design council to fix all the government forms and buggy, ugly federal web sites.  That might garner more support because it’s seen as somewhat more useful than just straight art.  Plus, I want a good job (I’m a graphic designer).

I wrote up about that here: http://www.underconsideration.com/speakup/archives/005662.html

Tyro- Ah, so just because, say, Damien Hirst exists, every artist in the world should get the financial and credibility shaft?

I remember Mother Avenger’s best friend telling me how as a child the mothers in her neighborhood in Ohio would have the windows open on a Saturday morning so that their kids could listen to the Metropolitian Opera broadcast in an effort to implant the seed of culture into their offspring, even if it was with stories set to music involving adultery, tragedies of love, death, damnation if not outright annihilation of the universe.

It wasn’t just that they wanted their children to do better materially, they wanted them to strive to some extend in the intellectual and artistic spheres as well so that they’d be reading Faulkner, know why Stravinsky was an important composer, or understand what Einstein meant by his famous equation.

By the time the 60s rolled around, that was lost to such an extend that real appreciation of culture was more likely for small town folks like Amanda and I, in her case that apparently being a way of getting the longhorns in for the evening after they see what you’re reading, in my case because I grew up next door to an orange grove, which is the real boonies in Central CA if you’re on the valley floor

Tyro- Ah, so just because, say, Damien Hirst exists, every artist in the world should get the financial and credibility shaft?

No, I’m just trying to explain why lots of people don’t perceive artists in the same light as they perceive other professionals. I’m not saying that this is acceptable. The existence of all-to-common stereotypes of artists doesn’t mean that this is true of everyone, just that their existence colors people’s perceptions in a way that the lives of credentialed, independent creative professionals doesn’t.

However, in my personal opinion, I find it interesting how we expect few, if any, people to ever make a living from being an athlete and would actively discourage any but the most talented from trying to pursue that life. By contrast, many people have the bizarre impression that most everyone who decides to become an artist should be able to make an independent living out of it.

Just for the record, the year-and-a-half that we lived in the US, our tax+private health insurance burden was much higher than our tax-including-public-health-insurance burden has been in either Canada or the UK.

Funnily enough, GM, Ford & Chrysler say the same thing. It’s cheaper to make cars in Canada because they don’t have to shell out for employee health benefits.

As for why art bothers fundies, I think it has a lot to do with how art tends to challenge certainty. The mere existence of things that can be interpreted in multiple ways is an assault on a black & white worldview.

It wasn’t just that they wanted their children to do better materially, they wanted them to strive to some extend in the intellectual and artistic spheres as well so that they’d be reading Faulkner, know why Stravinsky was an important composer, or understand what Einstein meant by his famous equation. By the time the 60s rolled around, that was lost

Why did this happen? My parents came from working/middle-class families, but life of going to art museums and learning about the opera was something that was part and parcel of their childhoods. It was a middle class passtime.

The only thing I can guess is that the spread of television simply provided more entertainment outlets for people. When you have only a few options which are part of intellectual culture, you gravitate to them because they’re the only place to go. When we have an infinite amount of crap to distract ourselves with, the good stuff will get lost in the shuffle.

“I deny myself X (sex for pleasure, joyful romantic relationships, indulging my homoerotic crush on Mike Huckabee by sending him letters, whatever), you don’t, I resent you for having X. Isn’t the simpler solution to stop denying myself X?”

They tend to be pants-wettingly afraid of the life where they don’t deny themselves x, though.  They want it, but they’re afraid of what it comes with, so they wallow in misery and froth at the people who aren’t too gonadless to go for it.  It’s one of the reasons they tend to be oh-so-giddy when someone who has what they want crashes and burns; not only is the object of their anger suffering, but their timidity is vindicated.

Well, I love making fun of artists.  I guess I could be lashing out due to a feeling of inadequacy, or it could be that so many artists take themselves way too seriously and it’s just too easy to poke fun at that.

I think, too, that a lot of the resistance to “modern art” comes from people’s wariness if they think that they might be being snowed.  If somebody does representational art even people with almost no artistic sensibility can tell good from bad; not good from brilliant, mind, but definitely good from bad.  So-called “modern art” blurs those boundaries and leaves the observer with no frames of reference other than expert opinion and their own gut. 

Somebody builds a tank, it’s either a good tank or a bad tank.  It’s gun either works or it doesn’t, its armour stops shells or it doesn’t.  Pure objectivity.  Funding something which may be a colossal joke on its funders goes against the grain of jus’ folks.

“However, in my personal opinion, I find it interesting how we expect few, if any, people to ever make a living from being an athlete and would actively discourage any but the most talented from trying to pursue that life.”

Well, for starters, your ability to earn a living as an athlete is contingent on your physically-demanding lifestyle not resulting in you ever being injured too badly to return to the sport or so badly that you’re out of it and unable to compete for a long period of time or at a time critical to your career/season trajectory.  Your ability to paint, sculpt, write, sing, etc. is not so fragile or so prone to being destroyed simply by exercising it.  On that point alone, it seems unwise to encourage someone to try to make a day-job of athletic competition.

There’s not really a natural limit on how many artists can be popular, given a broad enough spectrum of exposure.  If you’re hoping to make a living, not a fortune, the market can support a large portion of those with a modicum of talent, drive, and opportunity.  The same could be said of athletes, yes, but it would require a fairly dramatic retooling of the way sports pay to bring it more in line with how art already pays.

I’m a humanities professor at a public college.  A lot of people don’t think the government should be spending money on people like me—including, in hard times, the people who _run_ the government. 

I think the only reason there are still departments like mine is that there’s still a trace of the idea that humanistic education confers something like cultural literacy or, to put it another way, “class.”  Artists face the same social bargain:  if they produce things that inspire or impress or “class up” those who experience them, they’ll be tolerated; if they inspire other feelings, there’s going to be trouble.  People don’t much like the idea of Teh Gubmint paying for things that don’t mean life or death, and they _really_ don’t like the idea of Teh Gubmint paying for things that make them feel guilty, stupid, or outraged.

Sometimes we sneak it in the back door anyway. 

“People don’t much like the idea of Teh Gubmint paying for things that don’t mean life or death, and they _really_ don’t like the idea of Teh Gubmint paying for things that make them feel guilty, stupid, or outraged.

Point, meet your new home, Nutshell.

Of course, people _do_ fault athletes for how much money they make “to play a game,” and that’s part of the reason why a lot of municipalities have rejected public money being spent on stadiums.  People get stingy very quickly when it comes to what they want to see government money / Their Tax Dollars spent on.

keshmeshi—in my experience, be they artists, musicians or writers, the more pretentious and taking-themselves-too-seriously they are seems to be in direct reverse proportion to how much of a talentless hack they are. The best ones are usually pretty laid back, because they have confidence in their own abilities and are not full of insecurity.

I should add that those of us who _do_ like to see the government spend money on arts and humanities and such—even when the material or ideas are confrontational—need to have good arguments.  Arguing on the basis of utility feels artificial; arguing on the basis of “class” feels, well, classist.  I tend to make an argument that what you get out of experiencing the arts and humanities is critical thinking, empathy, and constructive skepticism, but there are times when I don’t feel very convincing.  Spending money on social workers, public defenders, and such really would be a better use of government money than on college professors or artists.

Art, throughout the ages has always been funded by the few be they captains of industry or enlightened governments.  For the most part, most people just don’t care aside from the random Nagel print leftover from their first apartment in the eighties.

“Art Czar” is a stupid, beyond comprehension term.  If they do create an office I hope the nominees first act is change the name.  We’re not declaring war on non-art.  We want to promote art.

The remnants of the WPA and similar agencies are, sadly, fading, but there are enough of them that everyone should understand the beauty many of these projects created.  It wasn’t enough to build a post office, it had to be be striking in appearance and hold something more than postal clerks and mail.  We’ve lost that desire, the desire to live in a world that is more than “gimme mine now”.  The expense of building architecture that is meaningful and decorating with art seems extravagant, but it’s not.  It should be what we aspire to as a society that claims to be one of the wealthiest on the planet.

But, in the same vein as health insurance for all of our citizens, we’d rather see our collective wealth diminished so it can concentrated in the hands of a few.  Collective wealth is meaningless, apparently.

So, we linger on in the drab, stripmallesque DMVs and we cackle and cry out when someone in government has the temerity to spend “our tax money” on a well-designed and beautiful civic building.  I hold no hope that this generation will support civic art.  They’ve already gutted from the schools and rail against it regularly even in the private sector.

Tyro, Susan Jacoby’s “The Age of American Unreason” is an interesting explanation of just that phenomena, which can partially be explained by…da-da-da! Conservative politics and tax structures in the education system. Really, is it ever any surprise that they want us LESS educated?

If we’re going to argue the validity of art in civic life, could we please get beyond the “Well, MOST people think art is stupid, so therefore it is,” and “an artist kicked my puppy once” arguments?  I’ve heard these a gazillion times growing up and going to art school and they don’t have a real point.

I should add that those of us who _do_ like to see the government spend money on arts and humanities and such—even when the material or ideas are confrontational—need to have good arguments.

Absolutely, FlipUrWhig. Sometimes it seems to me that progressives can get too, well, flip about things like this. I wish that progressives would spend more time learning these arguments and making them well.

It is as if the progressives understand on an instinctive level why government support of the arts, (or fill in your pet issue) is good, useful, and/or necessary for society. They understand so well that they don’t feel they need to explain it. Somehow, they think, “Oh, but it’s obvious to anyone who thinks!” But actually, it’s not.

I’m just as guilty as anyone of this. I’m somewhat lazy. I need to focus on what progressives do well, which is learning logically why something is needed, and being able to explain it convincingly.

God, universal health care would be such a big deal for me personally.  It’s why it’s so emotional for me to talk to my family about this, because they don’t realize that opposing universal health care may mean, one day, opposing Amanda’s health care access.

My son and I argued this all through election season…being young and healthy he doesnt think he should be forced into paying for health insurance at all. Of course…he’s still covered by *my* insurance. But recently I think he’s begun to see the light - I was recently and out of the blue diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and he’s started to see that even with *good* insurance I’m drowning in medical bills. And he’s learned that anyone can get ill, even seriously so, right out of no where. He’s started to understand that under our present system, I’m now really stuck at my job - I am uninsurable on the open market.

In some artistic fields, the antipathy of reactionary troglodytes such as the one Amanda quotes in the post is not the only roadblock, or even the biggest one. If I could make a living as a composer of concert classical music without also having to have an academic job of some kind as my main source of income, I would. But with basically no infrastructure of funding classical music in the United States, that’s effectively impossible. It’s better in Europe, but not by much, and only in some countries.

Where is the outrage that a president dares imagine that HE should be telling artists what to do with his little “art czar”?

It’s instructive that this person simply can’t imagine a government office that doesn’t exercise extreme totalitarian control over the people who may fall under its purview or require its services. The projection is palpable. It’s also pretty clear that he doesn’t understand how governmental arts funding — or any other kind of grant-based funding, for that matter — even works in the first place, which makes his opinion on the matter completely worthless from the get-go.

a lot of the resistance to “modern art” comes from people’s wariness if they think that they might be being snowed.

Sometimes you are!

The art experience is really a weird one when you get right down to it, because so often it _does_ happen (to me at least, and I used to work at a museum, though not on the curatorial side) that you think, “Umm, why _would_ someone make such a thing, and, damn, why would _anyone_ buy it?”  Or the corollary, “Either there’s something I’m not getting, or whoever bought this got played for a chump.”  The thought process turns meta fast:  “Do I even like this?” to “Why would someone else like this?” to “Why does this count as Art, and who values it?”  It’s true that there aren’t many venues in modern life that set you up to think such thoughts.

Well, for starters, your ability to earn a living as an athlete is contingent on your physically-demanding lifestyle not resulting in you ever being injured too badly to return to the sport or so badly that you’re out of it and unable to compete for a long period of time or at a time critical to your career/season trajectory

I work with a guy whose NFL career consisted of two weeks in training camp with the Kansas City Chiefs as a walk-on.  He still hurts from it.  (And he is of course very competitive, which explains why it was so satisfying to bowl 120 to his 87 at the company Christmas ((not holiday)) party.)

As for art: Art is important.  The oldest artifacts we have of our species (and I refer specifically to things made, not teeth or bone fragments) are of art.  The corporations that the Republicans so revere spend huge amounts of money on their art collections.  Often just for bragging rights, but still, if it weren’t important in some way it wouldn’t be worth bragging about or spending money on.  Sure, it takes a little bit of education and imagination (like, a single semester 20th Century art history class) to understand why even though Modigliani is way more accessible, Soutine is in most ways the better artist.  If only because it takes dedication to paint the same side of beef over and over and over again while it decayed.  (Also, why the hell doesn’t he have a Wikipedia entry?)

Absolutely there should be public art, and publicly funded art.  That the Forces of Evil have convinced so many of us that we have no right to and should have no interest in art is one of their major triumphs.  I cannot see it as coincidence.

your ability to earn a living as an athlete is contingent on your physically-demanding lifestyle not resulting in you ever being injured too badly to return to the sport or so badly that you’re out of it and unable to compete for a long period of time or at a time critical to your career/season trajectory.

The reason people discourage their children from trying to be a professional athlete is that none but the absolutely most talented are ever going to make it. For most of us, athletics are a hobby or something we learned to do competently as teenagers before moving on to other things when seeking a professional life. None but the most talented artists are ever going to support themselves doing “art for art’s sake,” but somehow we have the expectation that this is going to be feasible or that having a more craft-based profession/business or teaching is somehow falling short.

I’m almost tempted to say that what I’m complaining about is just a symptom of the fact that art is really remote from our lives. Art is, to us, “what artists do,” and people aspire to be the profession of “artist” and doing something other than being an “artist” who creates “art” is considered falling short of their dream. If art were more part of everyone’s life, then people would stop bashing their head against the wall of trying to “make it” as an artist and instead live their lives, support themselves, create art along the way, and if they become successful, good for them. If not, they’re just a person doing art for the sake of it while they live out the rest of their professional lives doing other things.

Granted, universal health care would help a lot of artists, but it would help just about everyone.

So, we linger on in the drab, stripmallesque DMVs and we cackle and cry out when someone in government has the temerity to spend “our tax money” on a well-designed and beautiful civic building.

Yeah, well, sometimes the government decides to hire the services of brilliant architects and you end up with the disaster that is Boston City Hall.

Meanwhile, it is truly sad that the right wing can’t conceive of any kind of public arts policy as being anything other than a tool of propaganda.

Maybe our society doesn’t need art to keep functioning.  But it sure as hell doesn’t need souvenir keychains to keep functioning either, and yet people who work designing, manufacturing, selling, and managing souvenir keychains don’t get this kind of shit.  No, they get praised because they help keep the economy bubbling.

I work for a performing arts company.  There are 8 of us employed year-round in the office (and we’re understaffed.)  Every big show we do has an orchestra of over 30, a chorus of over 20, and five or seven principal performers.  Then there are the directors, designers, stagehands, dressers, etc.  And then there are all the people who make our costumes and sets.  And then there are all the people who sell us the lumber and fabric for the costumes and sets.  And then there is the after-rehearsal bar that the performers flock to…

Anyway.  Besides the intangible “we are a city with culture, we do attract college graduates because we are a cool place to live”, we make a lot of jobs for people, and not all of them are “artists”.

As far as resentment goes, it’s not just wingnuts. I have a (what could be) boring government job—I advise clients on their proposed website content, and I pretty much always rewrite it. My colleagues with the same title have to write a lot of “communications strategies” and documents with business requirements, and other boring, boring shit… while I get to do all the writing, editing, and some design, because that’s my strong suit and my background. They do the bureaucratic nonsense and I get to do all the creative. And some of them resent me for it… but it’s not my fault I’m good at it and they are not.  People request my services. It’s a little weird, I must admit. But I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’m just not sure I should tell them when I get a solo show for my paintings… blarg.

On a related note, I’ve done group art shows and good golly some of the other people have been intolerable. Those are the same people who criticize me for having a corporate job but who live off their families while I’ve been supporting myself since I was 16. It’s all complicated. To be fair, I’m generalizing a lot here. Also I’m tired now and should probably give it up and go to bed.

Art is, to us, “what artists do,” and people aspire to be the profession of “artist” and doing something other than being an “artist” who creates “art” is considered falling short of their dream.

There’s another problem:  the artificial split we have between “high” art and “popular” art.  Right now, it’s perfectly fine to recognize the artistry of a movie or a rap song or a comic book, but if you want to write an opera or a sonata, you’re immediately pigeonholed as “high” art that no one will want to see, much less enjoy.  Which leads us to the strange situation where the popular culture of, say, Elizabethan England, is now considered snobbish and inaccessible for ordinary people, even though the original audience was not shy about throwing rotten produce at the actors if they weren’t up to par.

It’s a pretty recent split, as the Avenger’s post above points out.  Mario Lanza was a freakin’ rock star in his day.  Now I would challenge most people to even be able to name a living opera singer now that Pavarotti’s gone.

Everyday art that’s meant to be art and not advertising has mostly vanished from our lives.  I blame the Baby Boomers (but, then, I blame them for everything, so why not this, too?)

Everyday art that’s meant to be art and not advertising has mostly vanished from our lives.

Commercial art can be real art- you just have to see beyond it’s crassest purpose. We routinely overlook the fact that most great art of the past was done on commission to aggrandize some rich asshole, right? Same deal.

Maybe our society doesn’t need art to keep functioning.  But it sure as hell doesn’t need souvenir keychains to keep functioning either, and yet people who work designing, manufacturing, selling, and managing souvenir keychains don’t get this kind of shit.

Yes, artists get opprobrium just for being artists in a way that other people don’t for their vocations or avocations.  But souvenir keychains aren’t publicly funded.  I think huge proportions of conservatives would have no trouble admitting that art is A Good Thing, maybe even good for society, but still not a sound use of government funds—irrespective of content.  Most often they just prefer to argue it sensationalistically, so that the scandal is that Your! Tax! Dollars! are being given to perverts and blasphemers, which shows that the whole agency is corrupt.  But if all public money for the arts went to ornithologically precise sculptures of bald eagles, there would still be people who objected to the whole idea of Big Government Art, because that’s not what governments are supposed to do with Our Money.  I’d like to have a convincing answer to _those_ hypothetical people so that art and artists are seen as a public good rather than a waste.  I try, like I said, but I don’t know if I’m all that successful at it.

So The Artist might be a quintessential bogeyman for the right, as Amanda points out, for being childish or snooty or parasitic or queer or whatever, but even if all artists were pleasant and charming and made works everyone, left and right, agreed were beautiful, the question of publicly funding their work would still be vexing and potentially volatile.

Mnemosyne, what would be an example of “everyday art that’s meant to be art and not advertising”?  Are you mostly thinking about high/fine arts there?

Universal health care would be an enormous help for young artists. As a painter in NYC, I went through long spells of no coverage while doing odd jobs that often didn’t offer any any, including many jobs which REALLY should have had coverage (like art handling).
I’m an agreement with Nicole to throw this whole “Artists can be pretentious” argument out. It’s a lame and outdated stereotype. All kinds of people can be losers and certainly some artists are and that doesn’t particularly hold up as an argument concerning the worth of the arts.
Tyro-I don’t think most artists at this point see teaching or doing craft based work as un-serious for professional artists. At least that’s never been my experience. Artists are fighting to get in to teaching jobs all across the country. I know once I finish my MFA I will be!
BTW- I think Damien Hirst made some good work in the 90s. It was pretty smart Pop/Conceptual work. He’s a lot like Jeff Koons for me. I like/hate both of them and I think they both epitomized their emerging decades in some ways and then both of their work fell a little flat after they were firmly established.

Artists are fighting to get in to teaching jobs all across the country.

Everyone teaches- Franz Kline, Motherwell, they all taught. Pollock would’ve taught if he had been employable. There’s no shame in it. The economy for artists/musicians in this country is incredibly fucked up right now, and very few people are working much.

Definitely tb, and I think teaching informs artists in their own practices. Certainly I’ve had many professors who feel this way.  My problem is not wanting to leave the bay area to get a teaching job out in the middle of nowhere in Idaho or Montana. The country sounds nice and all but I really don’t want to create my own Brokeback Mountain story if you get my drift..

Actually, it’s really simple.

The backlash against the arts and humanities is because it is associated with the feminine and also to a degree with the urban (code name for blacks). Back in the 50s when being masculine was defined at least partially by intelligence and the smug superiority of a “classical education”, the arts were unassailable as a necessity for society. Same with the humanities.

However, then the beats arrived in the late 50s and were seen as effete, not as manly, and the beginning of the 60s and 70s deepened this impression. At the same time, the humanities stopped being a white male dominated pursuit and began looking at parts of society that weren’t white and male and began to argue for more inclusive or expansive ways of examining culture as a whole.

The idea of artistry in all the various fields became more and more open to the inclusion of all voices and embraced the radical in expression. Beats would listen to bebop jazz, the music of “those” people, worse yet uppity “those” people, artists would allow themselves to be out homosexuals or to document the real existence of people in the chaotic 50s and 60s. Many would be the first to align themselves with the anti-war movement.

And the anti-war movement served as a focus for the growing generational argument in the 60s and 70s. Older conservatives hated that fleeing to the suburbs didn’t make all the black people go away or make all the women permanently submissive. They also needed a focus for their anger. Uppity college kids and their fancy book learning served as that foil, but at the same time they needed people to go to college so they could still get their nuclear weapons to fight the commies stealing their fillings. As such, the target became the humanities and the pursuit seen as crucial to the concept of masculinity became a useless feminine pursuit trying to overthrow the rightful patriarchy and waste money that should go to the good bomb making scientists who are on our side.

These combinations are why humanities and the arts need to explain themselves and only recently has science been publicly on the ropes.

On why the arts are important: Because we need something to document our culture, our history, to examine our history for patterns. Art prevents us from falling into failed patterns, teaches us critical thinking and exposes us to cultures not our own and worlds not our own. Art allows us to understand where another person comes from, thus allowing the options of diplomacy or cross-cultural education even if we don’t accept them. For the masculine bomb everyone, our culture is the best, art can communicate what we mean by that, in a language complex enough to have a chance of persuading. It can also refine culture so as to be more appealing to others who do not share it. Art also is crucial in that we are emotional visual creatures. Studies have shown that ugly surroundings can negatively affect mood, energy, and productivity. Similarily, creativity, the importance of, and it’s expression, are critical to any new development in industry. If everyone is competent but creatively stagnant, you will only be able to respond to ideas rather than make your own. It was only after Japan began focusing more societal attention on the arts and supporting their creative class that they shifted out from being competent copiers of western design to being leaders in innovation.

Another important and often overlooked function of art, whoever has the art can dictate culture to the world. America is losing cultural dominance due to the stagnation of the arts support. This has allowed cultures like Britain, France, Germany, and Japan to begin asserting themselves in the World Market and begin dictating styles and culture. Heck, look at how Britain defined what was true music from the 60s through the 80s. To be culturally dominant, one must have a culture that has the potential to evolve and innovate. Heck, to have innovation at all, one needs the creativity that art and humanities train up. This is its importance. But that doesn’t matter really, because the debate has nothing to do with art, but rather with its implication as a feminine and minority laden aspect of society and therefore, unserious.

More on art and innovation:

Many of the great scientific breakthroughs that are publicly heralded actually owe more to artistic inspiration than the hard slog of slowly progressing science. The cell phone and its revolution (for the worse in my opinion, but let’s leave that aside) of personal communication was directly inspired by a worthless product of the arts known as Star Trek which was widely demonized for its effete treatment of human conflict. Many engineers on various steps of wireless or internet communications have cited visual art pieces as inspirations for the design of networks. Japan’s dominance in the field of robotics is entirely the product of the popularity of the giant-mecha style of artistic expression. In almost universal cases, inspiration for radical advances in science or for interest in particular fields results from artistic expression of future potentials. The space race owed much to Wells, Verne, and his successors in science-fiction. Paleontology received a boon in new support from Jurassic Park, archaeology from Indiana Jones. These may not seem like “the arts” but they are. Each stems from the arts, many of the creators of these works were creative people who often went to colleges focusing on those arts, all built upon the innovations and radical new directions of artists before them. Hell Lord of the Rings has inspired how many budding linguists many of whom became important behind the scenes translators for desperate negotiations?

And less we forget. Without the arts, we have no entertainment. Zero. Oh, but the free market, no, not really. The entertainers who enter those fields had to go to art colleges or major in the arts in public universities. Writers, directors, filmographers, composers, all listened and learned trades from previous artists, even borrowing from or being inspired by radical presentations. Others maintain themselves by producing “arty” works between big entertainment. Without art and art focus and public funding for the arts, our entertainment pool will shrink and disappear.

Hell even reality tv, our era’s bear baiting requires someone creative enough to edit and splice the footage into something more exciting than a thanksgiving dinner with one’s family. With zero artists, we wouldn’t even have the fine cinema of Idiocracy’s “Guy getting hit in the nuts”. A creative class is crucial for inspiration, innovation, and entertainment.

For the right wingers, another great way to stump them is to point out that the other person who thought that artists were unnecessary and too profane to be included in the culture was Mao Zedong. Also Stalin. Oh, who am I kidding? Right-wingers don’t change opinions when they have them. That’s treason behavior that is.

Awww, lookit the cute longhorns!

Cerberus:

For the right wingers, another great way to stump them is to point out that the other person who thought that artists were unnecessary and too profane to be included in the culture was Mao Zedong. Also Stalin.

Not completely accurate. Mao and Stalin both maintained large clutches of favored novelists, poets, composers, painters, singers, actors and other artists whose status correlated directly with their usefulness as producers of statist propaganda and/or whether or not the leader or one of his henchmen was arbitrarily upset with them at any given moment. The fact that many of them were hacks whose only real talents lay in puffing up their leader’s ego is neither here nor there. Artists that were out of favor were usually liquidated, marginalized or exiled, yes, but the ones who weren’t made a decent living (as much as anyone outside the inner circle did, anyway). Shostakovich and Prokofiev were the exception, not the rule, and even Shostakovich’s struggles with Soviet “orthodoxy” are well documented. Being an artist in a communist country isn’t a picnic by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s simply wrong to say that artists in general were rejected by either Mao or Stalin. I mean, there’s an entire genre of art that is characterized by its function and use as propaganda in socialist countries. It’s not like they’re completely artless societies.

What Mao and Stalin (and Hitler, too, for that matter) really have in common with our own totalitarians was the absolute dismissal of art that deviates in any way from their ideological programs. The only real difference is tactical: modern totalitarians prefer to passively stand back and watch the objects of their ire starve; the mid-century dictators simply had them arrested and killed. That’ll definitely change, though, if they ever actually manage to dismantle the protections that democracy puts in place against that sort of thing.

Without starving artists where can we find our sofa size masterpeices for $49.95 - frame included?

“Art is an irreplaceable way of understanding and expressing the world—equal to but distinct from scientific and conceptual methods. Art addresses us in the fullness of our being—simultaneously speaking to our intellect, emotions, intuition, imagination, memory and physical senses. There are some truths about life that can be expressed only as stories or songs or images.”
Dana Gioia, National Endowment for the Arts Chair during Stanford University commencement address

The whole point of being a wingnut is nursing grievances, and it’s much harder to pull that off when your people are in power.

This explains a lot.

If you don’t even understand the opposition you’ll never get things right.

“It’s instructive that this person simply can’t imagine a government office that doesn’t exercise extreme totalitarian control over the people who may fall under its purview or require its services.”

Dan, please bear in mind that if you take out “totalitarian” then what remains is an excellent description of too many government services: they hyper-bureaucratize to an almost pathological degree.  That sort of behaviour can target either:

The Service Recipients
Anybody who has accessed government services has had the experience of the near-unbalanced hatred of the straight lines: “You have to do A, then B, then C, then D, then E!”  “Why can’t I just go from A to E?”  “EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”  Rules and regs and policies and procedures build up and become more complex.  Very few government agencies “check six” and go back and trim their own overgrowths.  eg: When I was a young legal sprout, one of the senior lawyers had a huge, detailed modernist art print (or so I thought) behind his desk: dozens of boxes, lines leading from one dozens of boxes, moving up, down, laterally, overlaps of boxes, broken lines… .you get the idea.  One day I realized to my shock that it wasn’t art at all but an org chart for, he told me, the planning and approvals process for the (then) City of Toronto.
By-the-by: as you move down the food chain of government services, the complexity level may go down but the harassment level goes up.  The humiliating hoops for welfare are well-known and seem to be pan-jurisdictional. 

or
the Service Providers
I have seen some nonprofits here in Canada refuse to apply for funding from certain government departments or programs even when that program seeks to fund something that is desperately needed.  Why?  Because the “paperwork” costs (in administrative time and actual outlays for financial statements, etc.) are so horrendous that it’s not worth doing.  A woman running a shelter generally wants to run the shelter and provide the services; she doesn’t want to spend huge amounts of time re-arranging data to satisfy oft-arbitrary and oft-changing reporting requirements.

Look, just because I’m a progressive and believe that government should be doing certain things doesn’t necessarily mean that I trust it to do it well.  One has to keep an eagle, sometimes hostile eye on it to make sure that it doesn’t fuck it up or make it so complex or bureaucratic that it doesn’t work at all.  Indeed, such wary surveillance should be a key progressive ideal, simply for reason of function: sometimes work done badly is worse than work not done at all.  That would apply to any government function.  Government isn’t a goddamned Roomba which we plug money into and trust it to do a simple job.  It’s more comparable to a highly sensitive and tempermental aircraft which has to be carefully, warily flown at all times and in which “hands off” is next thing to madness.

Where does “art” fit into this?  I honestly don’t know.  I am very torn on this, but come down on the side of government funding.  What one has to be wary of, though, is cliques of established “in the circle” artists on the selection committees funding only their friends/colleagues and being hostile to newcomers; it is not unheard of here.

Just a follow-up on bureaucracy.  Here in Canada we have pretty good homelessness and shelter funding.  Under a recent government program there were nine count ‘em nine layers of approval for individual plans, including the damned federal minister.  And sometimes months would be lost because some anonymous useless mouth in the civil service food chain wanted to change X or Y.  These requests were near-invariably pointless and had nothing to do with substance; they had everything to do with the parasite in question protecting his/her/its iron rice bowl, demonstrating their indispensability by making you jump through hoops.

Do you really want to fund art that way?

Amanda Marcotte: “It’s sad to me that people are so cynical.”

Lily Tomlin: “No matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up.”

Honestly, why would anyone believe that spending money on art in an effort to stimulate the economy such as this was done during the great depression, is a good idea?

Art produces emotion. Art does not produce GDP.

why would anyone believe that spending money on art in an effort to stimulate the economy such as this was done during the great depression, is a good idea?

Because a lot of artists were out of work, and people figured that putting them to work on public projects doing things that they were actually good at would be helpful.

The thing about the Great Depression was that living through it was horribly unpleasant. The idea was that if you could put people to work and get them doing something, their lives might be less unpleasant. And if they were making stuff that made the country look a bit more pleasant, that would be a good thing, too.

As long as the government has to construct buildings for its agencies and have offices for its workers and construct infrastructure, it’s going to need to retain artists. There are other reasons, too: not every isolated town can support museums and community orchestras and theaters, so we might want to see money heading there, too, lest everyone with an interest in the arts feel they have to move to a city on the coast (we’re full!).

RazorCat:

Honestly, why would anyone believe that spending money on art in an effort to stimulate the economy such as this was done during the great depression, is a good idea?

Art produces emotion. Art does not produce GDP.

This only makes sense if you assume that art produces itself, with zero input from human beings.

Look, this isn’t rocket science. Paying artists to produce their art means that those artists then have money to go pay other people for other goods and services. Those people can then do the same, and so on and so forth down the line, ad infinitum. Maybe it even winds up back in government coffers to get granted out to another artist, and the whole cycle starts all over again. Because that’s what happens in a healthy economy.

You know, I find that far too many people think of “the economy” as some sort of vaguely self-aware entity that pretty much operates independent of human activity. As if the economy rocks up and down not because of hundreds of millions of Americans spending, investing and saving their money according to their own personal needs or wants, but because economies just mysteriously ebb and flow for no apparent reason regardless of how money is moving through our society. Sorry, but it doesn’t work that way.

seeker:

“It’s instructive that this person simply can’t imagine a government office that doesn’t exercise extreme totalitarian control over the people who may fall under its purview or require its services.”

Dan, please bear in mind that if you take out “totalitarian” then what remains is an excellent description of too many government services: they hyper-bureaucratize to an almost pathological degree.

I was referring more to the quoted commenter’s assertion that an “art czar” would necessarily be telling artists what they are and aren’t allowed to paint. In fact, he seems to be implying that that’s the sole point of the office. Cronyism and self-important bureaucracy are different issues, structural rather than conceptual, which I doubt he has even considered. His entire comment expresses nothing but disgust with the entire concept of government in general, based on a gross misunderstanding of how it actually works.

Fair ‘nuff, Dan, fair ‘nuff.

Actually, Dan, I agree with you, but I want to add a caveat: structural can become conceptual.  The decisions made at these structural levels can have conceptual motives and consequences.

I agree with that. You’ll never hear me claim that independent oversight is unnecessary or undesirable when it comes to government.

“You’ll never hear me claim that independent oversight is unnecessary or undesirable when it comes to government. “

You might hear me say that, but only when I’m drunk and picking fights in bars.

Paying artists to produce their art means that those artists then have money to go pay other people for other goods and services.

All that’s doing is redistributing tax dollars. In essence, giving it away for services that are not essential and will not produce jobs.

Better would be to get the money to those who will use it to form capial, start businesses and hire people. How best to do that?

Oh, tha’s right…TAX CUTS. Tax cuts for those who actually pay tax. Those are the people who produce. They are also the people that are hated for producing.

DogBreath:

Paying artists to produce their art means that those artists then have money to go pay other people for other goods and services.

All that’s doing is redistributing tax dollars. In essence, giving it away for services that are not essential and will not produce jobs.

Thank you for making it crystal clear that you don’t have the slightest clue what the words “redistributing,” “services,” “essential,” “produce,” and “jobs” actually mean out here in the real world.

Do you know what we call it when you pay someone in exchange for a service they’ve provided? It’s called a “job.” Being an artist is a job, in that it’s possible to get paid in exchange for doing it. That’s what the word “job” means.

Art is a product. It is the physical or performative artifact of human activity over time. It is a thing that people do, rather than a thing that exists of its own volition unrelated to human activity. That’s what the word “produce” means.

Artists get paid by other people (commonly known as “clients”) for producing art. Art is an activity undertaken to produce goods and services that other people will pay to consume. That’s what the word “service” means.

People buy art. They pay money — to the artist or a representative thereof, if you can imagine such a thing — in exchange for the physical possession or temporal experience of art. Money changes hands from one party to another as compensation for goods and services rendered. That’s what the word “redistributing” means.

If art weren’t essential to humanity, it wouldn’t pervade every single aspect and level of human culture and history. Even the most artistically illiterate members of society (i.e., you) cannot deny that art is literally everywhere, and is consumed by everyone (even the most artistically illiterate members of society, in spite of their inability to appreciate it, or even, as the case may be, to realize that it’s there). That’s what the word “essential” means.

A piece of advice: if you’re going to argue about tax economics, it would really help if you’d bother to have the first fucking clue how either taxes or the economy actually worked.

Better would be to get the money to those who will use it to form capial, start businesses and hire people.

Most of that capital is, was and will continue to be completely imaginary. Most of those businesses (something like 85%) will fail within the first year and send all those people they hired right back into the ranks of the unemployed.

That doesn’t sound like a very good investment to me. Hell, I’d have better luck taking our tax revenue to Las Vegas.

How best to do that?

Oh, tha’s right…TAX CUTS. Tax cuts for those who actually pay tax. Those are the people who produce. They are also the people that are hated for producing.

If you cut taxes, it’s not tax money anymore, and you don’t get to complain about the “redistribution” thereof or the people who benefit from it. And without the ability to whine incessantly about the dirty worthless hippies suckling off the public teat, your entire ideology falls apart.

And frankly, your whole argument is completely backwards. If I, as an artist, want government funding for my art, I have to write a grant. I have to do additional work, above and beyond the work it takes to create my art, in order to get a government check, and grant-writing is an art in and of itself. On the other hand, you, as a putative business owner, can sit back and do absolutely fuck-all for the rest of your life and still benefit from a tax cut on business.

Which one of us is getting the no-strings-attached handout, again? I don’t think it’s me.

Mnemosyne, what would be an example of “everyday art that’s meant to be art and not advertising”?  Are you mostly thinking about high/fine arts there?

I’m thinking about things like the mural that Amanda posted.  I guess you can say that it’s “high art” or “fine art” because there’s not a Pepsi can painted into it, but really it’s just a cool picture for people to look at while they’re waiting in line at the Post Office.  It’s art in an everyday setting that’s there to be enjoyed.

Of course, I’m a little spoiled coming from Chicago, which IIRC has one of the highest proportions of public art to square mileage in the country.  When people can walk past a Picasso or a Miro or a Chagall on their way to work, that’s public art at its finest.

I think the metric used by you libs is “fairness” rather than “pump the economy in the most efficient manner”.

The harsh truth is the hated people who invest and produce and enjoy their “ill gotten gains” are the same people who provide the jobs.

Save the investors and save the world.

The harsh truth is the hated people who invest and produce and enjoy their “ill gotten gains” are the same people who provide the jobs.

People who actually produce something, yes.  What do hedge fund managers “produce” that they should pay less in taxes than their secretaries do?  How many jobs did a hedge fund create last year?  How many factories did a hedge fund build all on their own?

Sorry, but people who sit on their asses all day and make bets on the stock market aren’t “producers.”  They’re gamblers.  The sad part is that they’ve convinced people like you that their work is just as important—if not more important—than the guys who actually run real businesses that produce real items.

Everyday art that’s meant to be art and not advertising has mostly vanished from our lives.

This sounds gloomy, but take into account that a lot of the classic art that we enjoy was actually commissioned. Lots of great music was written to glorify some rich bastard or religious cause. Some of the greatest art in history was created by sell-outs. Sistine chapel, anyone?

Honestly, why would anyone believe that spending money on art in an effort to stimulate the economy such as this was done during the great depression, is a good idea?

Art produces emotion. Art does not produce GDP.

Wow.  If you get any stupider, you may need a crash helmet.

My husband and I are artists and our art is a business.  Like all businesses, we have clients.  When our clients request a product—e.g. a custom, artistic steel gate—we go to our metal supplier and buy materials.  We also buy acetylene and welding supplies.  On occasion we purchase new tools, like a plasma torch, angle grinder, etc.

All of which is good for the economy.

Art does not exist in an economic vacuum.  Artists don’t just say, “Abracadabra,” and yank art out of their asses.  (If it were that easy, we’d just yank hundred dollar bills out of our sphincters instead, and head for the Bahamas.)  In order to produce a product, we need to purchase goods and services from other businesses.

Art and artists are indeed part of the economy.

This sounds gloomy, but take into account that a lot of the classic art that we enjoy was actually commissioned.

Most art is commissioned—it’s not like Picasso did that statue for Chicago for free.  I’m thinking more of the fact that most of the “public art” that people see are billboards, movie posters, etc., all of which are advertising a specific product either subtly or blatantly.  It makes it more difficult to look at a piece of art as something other than a product being sold.

If somebody does representational art even people with almost no artistic sensibility can tell good from bad; not good from brilliant, mind, but definitely good from bad.  So-called “modern art” blurs those boundaries and leaves the observer with no frames of reference other than expert opinion and their own gut.

Somebody builds a tank, it’s either a good tank or a bad tank.  It’s gun either works or it doesn’t, its armour stops shells or it doesn’t.  Pure objectivity.  Funding something which may be a colossal joke on its funders goes against the grain of jus’ folks.

As someone who kept a pretty close eye on military hardware for the first half of his reporting career I have to tell you that second paragraph is to laugh. To guffaw, and either to cry or to toast the ignorance of the masses. Military contractors define the scope of “the threat” and the gadget that gets built in response to it, then they help define the tests that will be done to see if it “works”.  Most of this stuff never gets used in combat at all (thank goodness) so little things like a tendency to turn around and lock onto friendlies are usually relegated to footnotes.  And if it does get used in combat and something goes wrong, watch for the complaints that soldiers were using it wrong or putting it up against threats it wasn’t contracted to face. Which would make a heck of a joke on the funders if it weren’t, say, for a few dozen thousand guys missing limbs because no one seemed interested in making a vehicle that helped them survive when the spec was for something easier.

I think this is important because once you’ve got the most deeply-crying needs out of the way, the arts are pretty much the only place in our society other than the military where you can absorb pretty much any amount of funding and employ any number of people without building up a huge inventory of consumer stuff (be it gadgets or houses or financial instruments) that you then have to induce people to buy at an ostensible profit. You can employ and train people in any number of lines of work that are portable to other venues, get them used to the idea of working together in a common cause, make events that will improve the morale of entire communities… and then when it’s over, almost all of the thing you’ve made vanishes, leaving plenty of room to spend money making more.

(Heck, as a former theater/dance tech type, I gotta say that the prospect of big high-ceilinged spaces with decent acoustics, huge electrical service and acres of free parking gets the juices flowing.)

DogBreath:

I think the metric used by you libs is “fairness” rather than “pump the economy in the most efficient manner”.

Out here in the real world, fairness is the most efficient way to pump the economy.

It seems axiomatic that you can’t intentionally lock out portions of your population for no reason other than ideological spite and simultaneously have a growing economy that benefits everyone. But then again, I’m not a complete fucking moron.

The harsh truth is the hated people who invest and produce and enjoy their “ill gotten gains” are the same people who provide the jobs.

Save the investors and save the world.

THESE “INVESTORS” OF YOURS ARE THE VERY REASON THAT OUR ECONOMY IS FUCKED RIGHT NOW.

Jesus Christ, dude. Even FOXNews is on board with that one. It’s not 1983 anymore. You need to grow the fuck up and get with the times. Those of us who A) are paying attention to our surroundings and B) have at least a vague idea of how economics actually works have known for 20 years or more that trickle-down economics is a catastrophic failure in every conceivable way.

But Dan! You don’t understand. He read Atlas Shrugged in high school and it spoke to him with its unvarnished portrayal of How The World Really Works. It is his armour and his shield, and his comfort in times of trial.

He has also never played Bioshock, but that’s a mostly unrelated issue.

But Dan!

trickle-down economics isn’t a catastrophe in every conceivable way. It’s only a catastrophe if you think the little people count; otherwise it’s a brilliant success, and the only problem in the current crisis is not following the trickle-down mantra slavishly enough.

The thing that’s hard to wrap people’s brains around these days is that certain tasks just shouldn’t be accomplished at the lowest possible explicit-dollar cost. Because by the time you find out what the explicit-dollar accounting left out, you’re screwed.

I’m an agreement with Nicole to throw this whole “Artists can be pretentious” argument out.

Agreed. 

Though there are some artists/musicians who are pretentious snobby twits, they are far from the majority….including IME. 

Coming to think of it, from what I and most others experienced when we do discuss this stereotype…..most of it is actually derived from mostly socio-economically self-proclaimed art/music aficionados/critics* who seem to relish tearing down and being dismissive towards anyone who is not as initiated in their “enlightened knowledge” as they are…...not the artists/musicians themselves. 

Though I went through a brief period of hating classical music because I associated it with pretentious snobbishness of the wealthy like the upper-east side set during my high school days, some more socio-economically privileged relatives, and a few college classmates…..the hatred was mainly because most of the fans of that genre I’ve met up until the end of my college first year were socio-economically privileged pretentious snobbish assholes…..not the musicians/artists.  Heck, one of the reasons I got over that hatred was attending a college associated with a topflight conservatory and finding most of their students were actually down-to-earth and fun to hang out with. 

As for why art/music and humanities are important in a nutshell…..they all play a critical part in training the BS detector in our minds.

Saving the investors is exactly why the stimulus package is aimed at saving banks.

Of course, they could try to keep all of the artists afloat, if you had your way, but they don’t build organizations that create jobs.

Saving the investors is exactly why the stimulus package is aimed at saving banks.

Jeebus. At least Bush’s crony economists understand how the banking and investment industry work and just don’t care. You, on the other hand, don’t have the first fucking clue, and are just too goddamn stupid to know any better.

Here’s a clue: if the best explanation you can come up with of a complex, real-world economic problem is simpler than the instructions on the back of a box of Pop Tarts, you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.

Of course, they could try to keep all of the artists afloat, if you had your way, but they don’t build organizations that create jobs.

You’ve never met a single artist in your entire life, have you? Wouldn’t even know where to go to meet one, I bet. You certainly don’t have any idea of what actually happens in the arts industry.

Seriously, you couldn’t possibly have less of a clue what you’re talking about, and you’re only making yourself look worse by refusing to listen to those of us who do. Go back and re-read my lengthy post explaining exactly why you can’t be correct about anything when you’re working from definitions of words that have absolutely no relationship whatsoever with the way that real people actually use them in the real world.

Although I do thank you for so aptly illustrating the dangers that arise when you combine belligerent ignorance with a complete lack of the capacity for shame. It’s becoming increasingly clear that you’ve never once even considered the possibility that you might not be an expert on all things under the sun. I’m very sorry to burst your bubble, but simply being a pompous twit with a pathological inability to listen to anything other than the echoes rolling off the inside of your own inches-thick skull isn’t really all you need to be a Nobel laureate in economics. Now, if only it were possible to make yourself smarter by repeating the same bullshit over and over again. Then you’d really be good to go.

they don’t build organizations that create jobs.

Hey, razorcat, will you tell that to the IRS so I don’t have to send out this pile of 1099’s on my desk? I’m sure all of my fellow bandleaders, music stores, art supply stores, lessons studios, arts organizations, art galleries, orchestras, ballet companies, theater companies, opera companies, music publishing houses, record labels, recording studios, photography studios, dance studios, drum lines, and art studios will thank you as well.