state support -- state control

So I guess it would be just too bad to live in a country where the state controlled art, favored certain styles, picked winners and losers. They would do this through a vast bureaucracy of grants and stipends, foundations and agencies, by jiggering the tax code, and, of course, hiring all the teachers. Even if they didn’t round up dissidents and throw them in prison they could just cut them out, ignore them, force them to seek other occupations. Be it fascist or communist, that would be a sorry place, I’m here to tell you. 

On the other hand, governments have manipulated art for a long time. Egypt lasted three thousand years with people walking sideways, all dressed the same, thinking the same thoughts. The church had a message and was a big influence for a few centuries, and you wouldn’t want to paint something they didn’t like. Since the nineteen sixties, and secretly before, this government here has sought to encourage art, to support artists and art endeavors, to bend public opinion toward art, all of a certain sort as it turns out. Not only is there nothing dark, conspiratorial, or evil about it, anyone who benefits in any regard is ready to defend every dime as essential to our cultural lifeblood, sincere and pleading. Please don’t let art die, folks. 

Einstein gave us the ‘thought experiment,‘ a hypothetical situation only possible in the imagination which illustrates possible outcomes. Let’s try. Suppose the apparatus of art sponsorship by our government, fed, state, and local, was suddenly suspended, everyone on leave with pay of course. Wouldn’t want to take colored pencils and paper away from the kids, wherever that happens, but all the afternoon sessions with styrofoam cups and the careers of artists on the table would stop. Who are you people? Did you try in school to make art, gave up and wound up here, or are you only a celibate scholar toting a bag of credentials? Do you own any art, live with art, and how much could you say about it?

No need to get personal, I’ve just always been curious. The real point is this. Since you’ve been pumping in tons of public money how many citizens these days have original art in their homes, how many artists make a living independent of your programs and support mechanisms, and how do rusting culvert sections piled on a building roof across from the downtown library encourage either of those? None of these concerns are your problem, understood, but I’d sympathize with anyone claiming all that money would be better spent on providing shelter in the winter, planting grass in the median, such as that. Let the state see to its responsibilities, and let art find its own way -- out of studios and into homes, the way a free society operates.