The real question on art

William Safire And Art That's Good for You:"American art used to confront and shame the art haters, exposing their provincial ignorance and bald hypocrisy, their cant and dogma and lies. Art used to be about more than convincing people that piano lessons will help your darling get into MIT. But no more. By limiting the debate to the idea that art is useful for developing practical skills, the arts world disengages from a more epic battle with forces in our society that prefer a world closed to questioning, impatient with the new or threatening, and comfortable only with certainties passed down from authority figures. Perhaps that's why these forces have recently taken on such prominence in our cultural discourse."

Wow. That's the best I've seen it put. I enjoy the classics. I have seen performance art. I have seen a number of controversial art exhibits, like the Piss Christ. And everywhere I look, particularly for music, organizations are failing. People no longer have jobs. People I know cannot get jobs in classical music. My violin teacher (a professional violinist with the MSO) has taken a 50% pay cut, lost all health benefits, etc. his wife was also a professional with the orchestra - bassoonist. That means their household income is halved. And they weren't making THAT much to start with.

As I look around cities, they are more homogenous than I recall them being. Strip malls in one city look exactly like strip malls in another. And if there's art around, its Thomas Kinkaid (blech). And that's it. The bookstores like Politics and Prose go away. The art galleries go away. The spaces for performances go away. Disney moves into Broadway.

We are suffering from a lack of vision. A lack of creativity. The solution to everything is corporatize, cut taxes.

Maybe we all need to look at how we spend our time and money. Avoid chains, if possible. Although then it brings into questions like local chains. Do I avoid lebanese taverna because it has 5-6 places around DC? Do I avoid a good sporting goods store that's only in one city (there's one in Boston who's name I cannot remember).

This is all made harder by living in StripMallHell(tm).