National Endowment for the Arts chairman Rocco Landesman reported Wednesday night on the NewsHour that when the $787 billion stimulus package was enacted there was $50 million in there for the arts. Even that teentsy sum met with opposition, Landesman said, from one U.S. congressman who opposed it to the effect that the stimulus should be spending on things that create “real” jobs, like road building. Must we go over this territory again and again?, as appears to be the the fashion of undervaluing arts. The US. with its $160 million in annual arts funding delivered to arts companies and artists by the NEA, compares poorly, said Landesman, even to the lowest spender on the arts in Europe that is Great Britain (consider country sizes in these comparisons as well), that spends $900 million annually. France spends $2.3 billion. When finally the numbers are culled out and a message arrived at one could conclude that the undervalued arts in this country are really still seen by our Puritanical rooted fellow citizens and lawmakers as some form of self-indulgence (please!) rather than as the economic driver and foundation of civic life that they are. Landesman remarked that artists are entrepreneurs, individual small businesses that contribute year in year out tirelessly, without remark, even as entrepreneurship is said to represent the American can-do spirit in some of the most challenging economics since the Great Depression. If all this gets you down consider that we are forming a fledgling community here, on this Website and in all the places creative life thrives, around the cultural polity of life in the West. Forming community is a matter of participating even though we recognize that it remains an uphill battle to convince those in power that those who think for themselves, who reflect the actual freedoms of democracy, should be granted even the minimal respect accorded to roadbuilders. And p.s. to the congressman, many of those roads are traveled by people seeking to go places where they choose to encounter the arts.
