As someone who has made his living in the arts for decades, writing novels and feature films, and was a former officer of PEN, I should be appalled. I'm not. In fact, I'm supportive. And not just because it saves taxpayer money. Government sponsorship of the arts is fundamentally undemocratic and ultimately dangerous.That's because, as with business, it puts the entity in society with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force in charge of picking winners and losers:
From time to time in my career as a writer and in my activities as a musician, I have had people say to me, "You should look into getting a grant." The idea is utterly foreign to me. Expressing yourself is an occupation like any other. There is either a market for what you are offering or there isn't. Forcibly taking fellow taxpayers' money just to keep yourself in groceries due to your occupational choice is antithetical to the American way.State-sponsorship of the arts also creates what we could call a "Solyndra Effect," after the failed solar company whose financing was aided by the Obama administration. Picking winners and losers in the arts is even more difficult than in business, with the government prone to choosing Salieri over Mozart even more frequently than it does a Solyndra over a more worthy company. This selection is better done by the public because art should really be for the pleasure and edification of the people themselves, not a tool of their rulers. In the arts, it's better for the market to rule. It also makes for better art in the long run, no matter what some professor might tell you.
Let's hope the new bunch acts on this promptly.
Throw it all into defense!
ReplyDeletePlenty will be budgeted for defense. Let's use these savings to reduce the debt.
ReplyDeleteThis American carnage stops here! NPR & PBS simply have the highest brow programming, but outcomes don't matter, only how the money's spent. Let's roll. I'm expecting continued carnage. That giant sucking sound I hear is conservatives sucking up to the Donald.
ReplyDeleteThe cuts, which were hinted at by unnamed members of Trump’s transition team, are part of a so-called “skinny budget” being pushed forward by conservative think tanks, and which is apparently being adopted by the administration, and will remove a whopping 0.02 percent from the $3.8 trillion federal budget.
ReplyDeletePiss Trump (Nick Wanserski)
They’ll also remove a favorite target for conservative snipe hunting; criticisms of the NEA date back at least to the Reagan Administration, and periodically crop up any time a GOP bigwig gets the urge to find a pee-covered Christ to kick. (For the record, Reagan was convinced to keep the NEA alive by his equally conservative advisors, who found that there were actual merits in the U.S. government subsidizing and supporting the arts.)
http://www.avclub.com/article/trump-planning-kill-nea-cut-loose-pbs-and-npr-248721