*Rather different from the popular perceptions of what stimulates the
economy.
Natalia Kuzmyn*
*From: http://www.harwich.edu/depts/history/HHJ/fedart.html
*An overview of F.D.R.'s Works Progress Administration, Federal
Project Number One.
*
*
Chicago Tribune, Feb. 09/09
In economic stimulus package, arts deserve place in line
In the recent debate over the Barack Obama administration's economic
recovery bill, proposals to spend government money on the arts have
become poster children for pork.
"The National Endowment for the Arts," wrote sarcastic editorialists at
the National Review last week, "is in line for $50 million, increasing
its total budget by a third. The unemployed can fill their days
attending abstract-film festivals and sitar concerts."
In the Senate, an amendment sponsored by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.)
lumped museums, theaters and arts centers (a terrifyingly vague term)
with such frippery as casinos, golf courses and swimming pools as
recipients who must be stopped from getting any of this funding. The
amendment passed 73-24 on Friday, with many Democrats voting in the
majority.
It is time for the American arts community to confront its stunning
political ineptitude. It has arrived at a place where there seems to be
no one to make its case; no one, at least, free from the taint of
self-interest.
After all, the argument that the labor-intensive arts are not
job-creation engines is patently absurd; they just fuel different kinds
of struggling workers, workers unaccustomed to bonuses. Their role in
generating billions of dollars in ancillary economic activity for
stores, restaurants and the travel business has been proven in
bucketloads of surveys and analyses.
The contrast in priority with the last comparable American stimulus
package is simply breathtaking. Funded by the Emergency Relief
Appropriation Act of 1935, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Works Progress
Administration made the arts a priority. Federal Project Number One --
home of the Federal Writers Project, the Federal Theater Project, the
Federal Music Project and the Federal Art Project -- was, believe it or
not, the largest of the WPA's endeavors.
Its mission was to give more Americans the chance to experience what
Roosevelt called "a fuller life." Its legacy -- from invigorating murals
to landscape paintings to the careers of Arthur Miller or Orson Welles
-- is everywhere you look.
In less than 75 years, the arts have gone from the single largest
priority in a government stimulus package to a toxic joke, with a
popular special amendment keeping them out. It is a stunning turnaround.
How did it happen?
Somehow it has come to be broadly accepted that concrete, asphalt and
medicine for the body (as distinct from the heart and soul) have greater
moral worth.
Artists must shoulder some blame. The last massive federal involvement
in the arts nurtured propagandists and political absolutists. The
controversy surrounding the so-called NEA Four -- the subversive solo
artists whose grants became political footballs in the early 1990s --
extracted too great a price from the sensibilities of the ordinary
public. Too little attention has been paid to making the long-term
political case that culture is important and accessible to ordinary
people and thus worthy of financial support. Too few artists embrace
populism, preferring to heap scorn on work with mass appeal.
Without their people-magnet cultural institutions, New York and downtown
Chicago surely would be in much worse economic trouble. Yet few of the
business or local government leaders who would benefit from arts funding
have been speaking up.
More significantly, the arts have thrown up precious few, articulate,
clout-heavy American leaders of their own. That needs to change. Old
economic arguments must be articulated anew.
Be all that as it may, some common sense must prevail as the newest
government stimulus package winds toward President Obama's desk.
Economic stimulus is dependent on the human spirit. The arts create
confidence and self-worth, and those qualities in turn foster fiscal
activity. The arts build neighborhoods and can help stem the decline in
property values. The current recession is most devastating in inner
cities, precisely where the arts are at their best.
An artist with an instrument is every bit as "shovel-ready" as a
potential new highway. In fact, without some help maintaining jobs in
culture in, say, struggling downtown Cleveland, there is one fewer
reason to build another way to get there.
If you want to prevent the building of another bridge to nowhere, it
does not make sense to condemn everything beautiful at the end of that
bridge.
Artists deserve to be held accountable by anybody paying their bills.
And in a job-stimulus package, money given to the arts should go
directly to the creation of artistic jobs. But those jobs, and those
workers, are just as important as those who pour concrete.
The arts are not, ipso facto, cheap pork. They are education. Health
care. And they make up an American infrastructure of a different, more
important, kind.
*/_ _/_Christopher Knight, L.A. Times -_- Here are five reasons I
believe Congress hates the arts:
-The culture industry is cosmopolitan, so flag-waving options are few.
-The culture industry is pluralistic, but Congress is only marginally so.
-As corporations, arts institutions are nonprofit, so there's no money
to be made via lobbyists.
-Culture is girlie, not manly.
-The arts often look at sexual experience -- eek!
Got any others?
*
*
*
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