md
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Test
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Jul 14 01:11 UTC 1997 |
One thing I don't like about government funding of the arts is that the habit
of depending on a patron (as opposed to royalties, box office receipts, gallery
profits, etc.) can be risky. What your patron gives, your patron can take away
if he doesn't like you anymore, or likes someone else better. When the funding
goes, it all goes at once. I think it's especially risky when your patron is
the government. All the arguments about the dangers of letting government
encroach on the arts apply equally to this situation. I once heard an artist
claim that the government was in effect violating her First Amendment rights by
*not* providing an NEA grant she had applied and been rejected for. That makes
a kind of sense. Why those artists, but not this artist?
But in spite of all that, I'm definitely pro. As long as most of us (let's
stop talking about the government) can't tell a sonata from a rondo, or an
impressionist from an expressionist -- and don't want to know, and haven't been
given the mental tools to understand even if we did want to know -- in
sufficient numbers to endanger the survival of the arts, then we're going to
have to keep the arts artificially alive as long as possible, by taxing
everyone.
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