art recovers -- was never really sick

Munchausen syndrome by proxy (MSBP) is a mental health problem in which a caregiver makes up or causes an illness or injury in a person under his or her care, such as a child, an elderly adult, or a person who has a disability. Because vulnerable people are the victims, MSBP is a form of child abuse or elder abuse.

It’s a matter of incentives and which side of your bread the butter is on. The US has a huge budget for art with tier upon tier of agency support and tax-funded ‘nonprofits’ in every community. Subsidized art is a major industry with blocks of real estate on college campus dedicated to a preparatory program that leads essentially nowhere. This entire bureaucratic dynasty is based on the lack of appeal of art to the masses, those duds who support uncounted careers in art, most without making any. Something fishy here, some element seems to be clogging the works, and it's almost like there’s an incentive to support an art that’s grossly unpalatable to average people, and desperately in need of life support in every little town.

For art to thrive there only needs to be two kinds of people, the people who make it and the people who buy and live with it. Agents who facilitate this exchange should get a taste of a self-sustaining, economically viable cottage industry and a clean contributor to community prosperity and well being. It should be clear that every person who draws a tax-funded paycheck to promote and support art has a vested interest in keeping art scrawny and underfed, ugly and unappealing, and they do what they can to keep those first two types apart. They’ll freeze out independent artists and flood their tax-supported galleries with a conceptual obscurity only a complicit insider could love. They justify their parking spots this way.

Their entire enterprise is sustained by the aspiration of average people for some form of honest self-expression and they step on the product and drain its nutritional content. I feel as much sympathy for them as they’ve shown artists who might have had a following in their own hometowns but for them, and for the society they’ve impoverished. Perhaps this is harsh. There’s not much you can do with an art degree in the real world and finding a regular paycheck from some arts agency is so much easier than trying to make art in a town where no one looks at art. Still, full recovery requires budget cuts and that means mass layoffs of people without real training and a purge of state agencies whose main institutional imperative has simply been self-perpetuation, so sad.

Art in communities everywhere is about to pull out the tubes and rise from ICU care, ripping back the curtains to feel some sunshine with feet on the floor and art up on the wall in houses all across town. There’s two or three artists around here, wherever you are, who are pretty talented and they’d get better with more time in the studio. If you bought a piece yourself you could follow their progress and maybe talk to them at an opening, on a studio tour, or when you purchase another piece directly. Art which couldn’t exist without government subsidies probably shouldn’t, and art that broadens and deepens your perceptions and makes you think is all around.