by Holly Frost
I was chatting with our lovely hostess the other day, and made a comment informed by having spent my entire life training and working in artistic endeavors, that Art is something that someone enjoys.
"Guest Post" she replied.
Ok, then.
My background: I was enrolled in music lessons at two, dance probably at three, visual arts as soon as my mother could manage it. Music is my first field, and writing my second. I do not remember a time when I could not read music or English, and the oldest dated score in my own hand is from when I was two. (Visual art and dance I lack the talent for, but I'm a fair technician in visual art.)
Is a banana taped to a wall Art? Sure. It's simply Art for a very few, who enjoy that sort of thing. (My suspicion is that it's either an in-joke I don't get or the enjoyment of a sense of self-superiority.) Is Thomas Kinkade Art? Sure. It's Art for the masses, and you can tell that a lot of folks enjoy it because they put their money there.
Is 4'33" Art? Yes. It's Art that reflects on what the nature of music is. The audience is small, and it's not something one adds to a playlist, it's something that must be experienced live in concert, and if you are not a musician yourself I would hesitate to recommend it. Some of my favorite music, Phillip Glass' string quartets, George Crumb's Black Angels, PDQ Bach, is difficult for someone who is not a musician. I explained PDQ Bach thus to a student yesterday: it's like puns. If someone is not fluent in a language, puns are confusing. Only when one is fluent are the puns amusing. You might appreciate the surface qualities of the speech as a language student, but you cannot get the full meaning with the puns until you are fully fluent. Meanwhile, John Williams' movie scores require no music education to enjoy.
But a definition does not a guest post make, and I think it worth talking about the distortion of Art in our country. Much public Art, that is, Art which is funded by taxpayer dollars, is not Art which is widely enjoyed. Indeed, most of it seems to me to be the opposite of enjoyed. Someone commented recently that you can tell the Art funded by the government because it is ugly. This is not universally true:
One of several displays in what the City of Pocatello, Idaho, calls its Urban Outdoor Art Gallery — a series of painted murals, graffiti, and public art in an alleyway off Main Street in the city's Old Town neighborhood.
One reason that has been revealed by declassification in the last several years is that the US Government decided to take Art in an anti-Soviet direction by means of public funding. If the Soviet government funded handsome men and pretty women in pastoral landscapes, then the US government would fund whatever was as opposite of that as possible. This reactionism led to a good deal of Art that is very limited in appeal. It is very poor public policy to buy Art that the majority of the public does not enjoy.
Ah, I hear you, "The government should not fund any Art!" Stop a moment and think on that. Should the federal courthouse have a painting in it? Perhaps the iconic blindfolded Justice with her scales would be appropriate? Or John Adams defending the British soldiers of the Boston Massacre? I would argue that there is a limited place for Art funding by our government, very limited, and it ought to be only for Art that appeals to the majority of the population at the time it is funded, as we are a Republic. (Monarchies of course buy Art that appeals to the Monarch, see Versailles.) Surely the Veterans' Home ought to have music for the residents, and art on the walls, chosen by them and paid for by us.
The problem with current government Art funding is that it is elitist and overreaching. The money goes not to Art that most people enjoy, but to Art that people with a deep education in Art enjoy. This is inappropriate. That the government buys so much Art distorts the market, and makes the main goal of many Artists be to receive government grants, rather than to appeal to the population. There are millions of people who will hang a Thomas Kinkade on the their walls, and a bare handful that will hang a banana.
Then, of course, there's the Art that serves as money laundering, and we'll leave that to our friendly Freds to deal with, and hope that they can and do. I guarantee you someone's enjoying that all the way to the bank, though!
On the bright side, you can probably find someone free of government funding peddling Art that you enjoy at any farmer's market or Ren Faire these days. Buy a sketch or painting, a quilt or a pot, toss some money in the dancers' or musicians' tip bucket, grab a business card. We live in an era when our materials are fairly cheap, so you're mainly paying for training and labor. You can have all the Art you enjoy exactly as you want it, or at least as much as your household and budget will tolerate.
A word about prices: When you pay for Art, you're paying for the hours of production that go into it, and a portion of the training the artist went through to be able to produce it. It's a five by seven painting, or an hour performance--you're still competing with other places for the artist's time and labor--if I can make more working fast food why would I play your event? (And actually, for me? it's teaching music, so you can figure out pretty close how many hours of prep you're paying for if you ask my hourly lesson rates and my hourly performance rates.) I have an entire lecture on not undercharging because "it's for a good cause" and admitting you're donating, and getting the receipts for all my lovely self-employed unwitting philanthropists, but we can cover that one another time if you like.
So Art? Art is what people enjoy. Great Art is what people enjoy and protect for the future to enjoy. The more people enjoy Art, the more likely it is to be considered worthy of protection efforts and preserved for the future. Remember, the works of Johann Sebastian Bach are only known today because of Felix Mendelssohn's enjoyment of them. Go forth and enjoy Art.
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