Come the revolution we’ll Bernie Sanders art, push aside the millionaires and their trademark trophy art and start over. Let us be perfectly clear, we will focus on the tax code, the poison root from which foundations and museums collude with mega-wealth to hack into the revenue system and throw the burden of paying taxes down on little people. We will also no longer support art departments on college campuses, using valuable campus real estate to prepare students for no other occupation than teaching, and even at that with a worse record for placement than for-profit sham schools.
What would happen if we did that? Ending all federal subsidies would shift art to the private sector, insist that art prove its contribution to our culture through popular appeal rather than remain a charity-dependent hothouse flower. Of course massive unemployment would ensue, bureaucracies collapsing, institutions imploding, with large scale workforce retraining required. I picture an austere barracks in some remote area, mountain air, honest chores, and in each spartan cell an easel, good brushes, and all the colors. Here former art professionals will have time to express their passion and they can all get together each evening and critique each other, such fun. Many would bolt quickly for further training in some other field, but those who make it through come back changed, their outlook different, their need and desire for connection and communication with a greater humanity renewed.
In the meantime average citizens might began to realize that art really isn’t miles over their head but something they can experience and benefit from in their own lives. Local painters, they’re everywhere, would slowly emerge from under the suppression of civic funded art agencies constantly rejecting and deriding their work in favor of knockoff versions of high fashion contemporary art in far off urban centers. If art produced wherever you live were to gain enough exposure so that individual artists began to be recognized, buying and hanging a new painting might be something to talk about over bbq and beer. With real art on the wall individuals would begin to take themselves more seriously than the sit-com characters we’ve all been copying without realizing it. If an interest in the art of neighbors was to one day awaken a region’s sense of political identity and individual autonomy, society might one day approach that utopia of common purpose and communal self-interest Bernie has been trying to picture for the rest of us. In the meantime, without waiting for fellow citizens to discover all the benefits, it might be wise to take advantage of the insight and encouragement hometown art provides to improve your own life.
What would happen if we did that? Ending all federal subsidies would shift art to the private sector, insist that art prove its contribution to our culture through popular appeal rather than remain a charity-dependent hothouse flower. Of course massive unemployment would ensue, bureaucracies collapsing, institutions imploding, with large scale workforce retraining required. I picture an austere barracks in some remote area, mountain air, honest chores, and in each spartan cell an easel, good brushes, and all the colors. Here former art professionals will have time to express their passion and they can all get together each evening and critique each other, such fun. Many would bolt quickly for further training in some other field, but those who make it through come back changed, their outlook different, their need and desire for connection and communication with a greater humanity renewed.
In the meantime average citizens might began to realize that art really isn’t miles over their head but something they can experience and benefit from in their own lives. Local painters, they’re everywhere, would slowly emerge from under the suppression of civic funded art agencies constantly rejecting and deriding their work in favor of knockoff versions of high fashion contemporary art in far off urban centers. If art produced wherever you live were to gain enough exposure so that individual artists began to be recognized, buying and hanging a new painting might be something to talk about over bbq and beer. With real art on the wall individuals would begin to take themselves more seriously than the sit-com characters we’ve all been copying without realizing it. If an interest in the art of neighbors was to one day awaken a region’s sense of political identity and individual autonomy, society might one day approach that utopia of common purpose and communal self-interest Bernie has been trying to picture for the rest of us. In the meantime, without waiting for fellow citizens to discover all the benefits, it might be wise to take advantage of the insight and encouragement hometown art provides to improve your own life.
