entitled dependency -- art’s albatross

Art gets a lot of help. Grants fly for painted hydrants and bus shelters, socially relevant outreach classes, and for the public-art edification of everyone. There’s a layered bureaucracy in art-oriented non-profits not to mention a vast teaching apparatus with no track record for graduate employment whatever, except for more teachers. Lots of public money flows to art.

Does it help -- it’s hard to tell. Money into rockets and we go to Mars, into research and we cure disease. The benefits of public money for art and artists tend to be more surreal. Kafka wrote a story about a man who supported his entire family, all helpless and dependent wretches, but when he becomes incapacitated they all seem to find a way to do wonderfully well on their own. It’s just a story. Does it apply, who knows? In any case, the rewards of this formidable public investment in art are not equally shared by everyone who forks over and that’s baldfaced realism.

What would happen if suddenly all that money metamorphosed into serious art classes in public schools where future audiences are spawned, into public exhibitions which truly represent the spectrum of art produced across a region, and into efforts toward compromise and reconciliation with the local audience instead of the academic’s advanced-degree condescension? Would 'progressive' art as we know it wither and disappear without its massive subsidies, grants, and tax exemptions? Maybe, probably, but I’d expect something new to arise. Each region has a character expressed best by the artists who live there and by their recognition within their communities, a two step process. Given the chance they’d find each other. Together they’d forge an authenticity of expression which would both represent and inspire regional cohesion and identification, enliven dinner conversation, and tune the eyes of everyone to register the details and features of the world around as they encounter it. 

There’s a movement afoot to make more area-produced art available in offices, in restaurants, in salons and galleries, and the inevitable result will be a rapid acquisition of knowledge and art awareness by lots of local people. It’s been a long drought.