Curt C. Chiarelli
What of the Arts, Mr. Obama?
by
Curt C. Chiarelli
Of late there has been much ink spilled across national headlines concerning severe double-dip recession triggered by debt default, spiraling unemployment, foreclosures, homelessness, bankruptcies, plunging stock values, bailouts for corrupt financial institutions and the potential for the American economy to sink like a millstone into the tar pit of a new crisis that will make the Great Depression look like a Sunday tea social. President Barack Obama is responding to this challenge by marshaling an expanded stimulus program that will help steer our country away from such a fate. Considering how this economic crisis is the worst our nation has been faced with in over seventy-five years, it's inevitable that Mr. Obama's plan would be compared to the efforts of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Thus far, Mr. Obama has been able to limit the effects of the recession with his recovery program which, according to the Congressional Budget Office, created over 3.3 million new jobs in road construction, mass transit, weatherization of government buildings and the installation of information technology in medical facilities. But, as yet, no mention of job creation in the arts has entered the dialogue. If Mr. Obama wishes his term to leave a truly lasting, positive impact upon our nation's history he would be hard pressed to find a bolder, more constructive issue to champion.
Our national character is reflected in our priorities and those priorities are best exemplified by how the federal budget is spent. Let the numbers speak eloquently. Our government's annual budget is broken down into two major categories: defense and domestic spending.
As a recent example of defense spending, the war in Iraq - an illegal quagmire which has (according to estimates provided by such prestigious sources as John Hopkins and the medical journal, The Lancet) killed over 1.25 million people since 2003 (inclusive of both Iraqi non-combatants and American troops), maimed an additional 31,926 American troops and effectively undermined the credibility of American foreign policy abroad - has already cost the American taxpayer$800 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars. Furthermore, the Pentagon's total annual operating budget for 2009 - 2010 was between $859 billion and $1.16 trillion and has consumed over 4% of our G.D.P.
In contrast, the embattled National Endowment for the Arts has been allocated a diminished total annual budget ofa comparatively minuscule $124.4 million - yet there is hardly a time during the past 12 years when conservatives haven't targeted this agency as a primary example of irresponsible and wasteful Big Government spending. With the exception of a few public relations controversies, the abuse the N.E.A. has had to endure has been disproportionate to its value. It has been penalized, censured, suffered severe budgetary cutbacks (in 1996 its budget was slashed from $180 million down to $99.5 million), fallen under intense public scrutiny and been threatened with dismantlement for trying to enrich American society and promote our role as a world leader in something other than outsourced jobs, home foreclosures and personal bankruptcies.
It's at this point that the frowsy, shopworn argument over socialism versus euphemistic free market economics gets trotted out and enters the fray. Do we have Marxists? Perhaps more of the mocha variety found in any university cafeteria. Socialists? Certainly. Parasites? Oh yes, decidedly. We have plenty of those . . . . but few who wear leotards or paint-spattered T-shirts and sneakers with clay-clogged treads. The ones I wish to speak of have tastes which run more towards tailored Brooks Brothers three-button pinstripes and handmade Italian leather brogues.
Those who have the wealth and power to avert moral compromise regularly make the largest ones. Every fiscal year, corporate welfare (like its latest incarnation, the taxpayer bailout of our corrupt banking/financial institutions - courtesy of the Bush administration) continues to sap our economic vitality to the tune of approximately $100 billion on the federal level and an additional $40 - $50 billion at the state and local level in a game that's rigged to enrich a few at the expense of the many. Enormous subsidies, bidless contracts and tax breaks are handed out as freely to the wealthiest Americans as candy is on Halloween to morbidly obese children.
Hidden in plain view, a small army of faceless men, their agendas neatly tucked into their leather lunchpails, can be found swarming over the Beltway palm-pressing and back-slapping their way into many a Congressman's good graces. They are the corporate lobbyists, the backroom boys, quietly cutting deals and the cheques that seal them for the benefit of their corporate masters like Monsanto, General Electric and Exxon/Mobil.
Without fanfare, but with much sangfroid, they have won their bloodless coup. Socialism has insinuated itself in the body politic. We do have entitlement programs. The corporations pocket the profits while the overhead costs are externalized onto the middle class, the poor, the disabled and the elderly. It's the free-booting spoils of laissez-faire capitalism for the elite few and crushing, socialized liabilities for the many. Welcome to the realpolitik welfare state, comrade.
In America, morality has been replaced by market forces. The truth of it can be found in the numbers. Workplace productivity, corporate profits and unemployment rates are climbing along the same steep trajectory. Battered and buffeted by this perverse economic turbulence, the American public is then subjected to an endless stream of blame-the-victim flummery and gaslight from conservative pundits about the fierce glories of predatory capitalism, the manly, Darwinian virtues of compulsive greed, ruthless competition, the savage justice of natural selection and the nobility of Adam Smith's Invisible Hand. "Create Nothing, Own Everything" has become the guiding ethos of the modern wealthy elite. "Bleed and Feed" would also be a fitting alternative.
Fiscal conservatives justifiably fret about the long-term repercussions of the debt accrued by expanded social services, but those figures pale before the monstrous effects and destabilizing costs of the way we have been handling the economy in recent memory. Beginning with the Reagan administration thirty years ago, it has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt that trickle-down economics and corporate welfare will not translate into more abundant, better paying jobs for Americans. "Reaganomics" has translated into a higher concentration of wealth for the wealthiest and obscenely focused more power into the hands of those entities that have a proven track record of abusing our sacred liberties the most. It is transforming America into a Third World oligarchy.
It would be hard to conceive of anything more inimicable to Democracy and the American way of life, yet many find this arrangement - no matter how brutal to human dignity or corrosive to personal liberty - preferable for unfounded, calcified ideological reasons.
A tradition of support for the arts in America never took hold and flourished as it did in Europe. America has long been a beacon of hope for the disenfranchised and persecuted of the world. Unfortunately, the best part of European culture - the arts - were identified by our predecessors with the social injustice, economic exploitation and religious/political oppression that they were fleeing. Guilt by association was the name of the game when the lord who burned peasant farms, hanged your peasant neighbours for whispering a word of protest and taxed your peasant family into starvation to preempt any future uprisings also flaunted a refined taste in Gobelin tapestries, Bach chamber pieces, Chinese porcelain, Dutch velvet small clothes and the Florentine Masters. Art, it appeared, was the live-in slut of a decadent, parasitic aristocracy and an even more profligate Catholic Church. Like an indelible stain, this prejudice stubbornly clings to the psychological fabric of Americansto this very day. Thus our national mentality finds something deeply suspect about someone making an income from a profession that is considered little more than a recreational hobby for most others and a degenerate luxury for the elitist few.
Looking at the problem from another historical perspective, consider how different societies in different times approached this controversial issue. A quick glance at the pages of history informs us that there's much precedent for the success of state-sponsored art. Periclean Athens has become synonymous with cultural glory. The Medici-dominated Republic of Florence enriched their world and ours by commissioning works from Brunelleschi, Ghirlandaio, Michelangelo and Leonardo DaVinci, amongst many others. Vienna under the Hapsburg Dynasty hosted and commissioned Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler, Otto Wagner, Gustav Klimt and Joseph Urban - just as F.D.R. underwrote Orson Welles, Pare Lorenz, Thomas Hart Benton, Ben Shahn, Grant Wood, Saul Bellow and James Baldwin.
However much the default American mindset reduces the transcendent to a commodity and translates the intrinsic worth of everything into hard currency, Americans must at some point dispense with cant and recognize the larger issues at stake. When a community invests in the arts it sets into motion a kind of domino effect: it encourages economic growth and the attraction of outside investment which, in turn, further improves the community's welfare through better education, infrastructure and municipal services. This promotes greater job opportunities, lowers crime rates, raises real estate values and generates larger incomes that are channeled into a larger tax revenue pool by attracting and maintaining a larger, more prosperous population base. The arts are a springboard from which this kind of success can be launched.
When F.D.R. initiated the W.P.A. and placed Harry Hopkins in charge they both recognized artists were valuable contributors to American society and so they instituted Federal One to put them back to work. One would think that you can't argue with success - however, the Republican Party could and did. F.D.R.'s efforts were met with rabid ideological hatred and stiff partisan resistance from conservatives nationwide - in spite of tangible proof of the program's success. The same hostile political climate exists today. No doubt President Obama should expect the same kind of reaction if he decides to follow his predecessor's example. My colleagues in the arts can only appeal to his sense of vision and encourage Mr. Obama to commit to developing jobs for our artists as a part of his extended stimulus package.
In the final analysis, sponsorship of the arts is a self-perpetuating economic stimulus package and amongst the shrewdest investment that any administration could make in America.The arts have more than proven their worth as a short-term and long-term strategy for promoting economic growth and sustaining a higher quality of life for her citizens. Now is the time in which they should be given our fullest support.
Our national character is reflected in our priorities and those priorities are best exemplified by how the federal budget is spent. Our government is a government of the people and their actions and values are an echo of our own. The federal budget may be divided between domestic and defense spending, but the real underlying question faced by Americans as we move into this new century is: do we as a nation wish to forfeit our future to the greedy few or do we have the courage to strike out in bold new directions that will create prosperity for all? Do we want to embrace hope or deny it a voice in our messy national discourse? We are now at a critical juncture in our nation's history, atthe confluence where America's promise is supposed to deliver into her reality. How we answer this question will effect the destiny of our country for decades to come.
So, what of the arts? Are they relevant at all to America in the 21st Century? Consider this:
Artists are the ones who bring color, light, motion, words, sound and form to your grey, increasingly degraded lives - lives cowed, stunted, laid waste to and stripped barren by isolation, anxiety, fear and rage. We proffer a voice to the inarticulate, ascendancy to the forgotten, effulgence to the bereft and a sense of wonder to those beyond hope of a far horizon. We throw up edifices that embrace the skies, festoon your public places and adorn your inner sanctums. We fill the abscesses hollowed by social alienation with a sense of connection to our shared humanity. What we craft is wrought with a passion, energy and commitment that gives something fresh back to the viewer, reader or listener in a perpetually renewable resource. We are the medium through which America experiences herself.
We give far more than we receive. We always have and always will. And without us your lives wouldn't be bearable because all your exteriors would begin to echo the ringing emptiness of your interiors.
Americans rationalized the smirking duplicity of their elected officials, acquiesced to a war motivated solely by corporate greed and national vanity, allowed their government to trample their civil rights underfoot, passively submitted when cronyism and ballot tampering manipulated election results and legitimatized racism and intimidation under the sacred, protective umbrella of patriotism. Americans embraced the arrogance and ham-fisted corruption of leaders in the business world for ideological reasons, allowed international cartels to strip mine our children's futures, resigned themselves to tightening their belts so that the wealthiest 1% of the population could loosen theirs and reconciled the contempt of other nations for our folly as mere jealousy.
With bravado, Americans shouldered these and a flotilla of other indignities, abuses and encroachments. In doing so, they permitted brutality, apathy and willful ignorance to pollute our national dialogue. For my fellow countrymen, this was considered bearable.
But for Americans to be forced to confront the abyss without the arts acting as a buffer or distraction, to give vicarious flight to their deepest, most frustrated desires and dreams, to frame their private narratives in a national mythology, now, that would be intolerable.
Copyright © 2010 Curt C. Chiarelli
by
Curt C. Chiarelli
Of late there has been much ink spilled across national headlines concerning severe double-dip recession triggered by debt default, spiraling unemployment, foreclosures, homelessness, bankruptcies, plunging stock values, bailouts for corrupt financial institutions and the potential for the American economy to sink like a millstone into the tar pit of a new crisis that will make the Great Depression look like a Sunday tea social. President Barack Obama is responding to this challenge by marshaling an expanded stimulus program that will help steer our country away from such a fate. Considering how this economic crisis is the worst our nation has been faced with in over seventy-five years, it's inevitable that Mr. Obama's plan would be compared to the efforts of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Thus far, Mr. Obama has been able to limit the effects of the recession with his recovery program which, according to the Congressional Budget Office, created over 3.3 million new jobs in road construction, mass transit, weatherization of government buildings and the installation of information technology in medical facilities. But, as yet, no mention of job creation in the arts has entered the dialogue. If Mr. Obama wishes his term to leave a truly lasting, positive impact upon our nation's history he would be hard pressed to find a bolder, more constructive issue to champion.
Our national character is reflected in our priorities and those priorities are best exemplified by how the federal budget is spent. Let the numbers speak eloquently. Our government's annual budget is broken down into two major categories: defense and domestic spending.
As a recent example of defense spending, the war in Iraq - an illegal quagmire which has (according to estimates provided by such prestigious sources as John Hopkins and the medical journal, The Lancet) killed over 1.25 million people since 2003 (inclusive of both Iraqi non-combatants and American troops), maimed an additional 31,926 American troops and effectively undermined the credibility of American foreign policy abroad - has already cost the American taxpayer$800 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars. Furthermore, the Pentagon's total annual operating budget for 2009 - 2010 was between $859 billion and $1.16 trillion and has consumed over 4% of our G.D.P.
In contrast, the embattled National Endowment for the Arts has been allocated a diminished total annual budget ofa comparatively minuscule $124.4 million - yet there is hardly a time during the past 12 years when conservatives haven't targeted this agency as a primary example of irresponsible and wasteful Big Government spending. With the exception of a few public relations controversies, the abuse the N.E.A. has had to endure has been disproportionate to its value. It has been penalized, censured, suffered severe budgetary cutbacks (in 1996 its budget was slashed from $180 million down to $99.5 million), fallen under intense public scrutiny and been threatened with dismantlement for trying to enrich American society and promote our role as a world leader in something other than outsourced jobs, home foreclosures and personal bankruptcies.
It's at this point that the frowsy, shopworn argument over socialism versus euphemistic free market economics gets trotted out and enters the fray. Do we have Marxists? Perhaps more of the mocha variety found in any university cafeteria. Socialists? Certainly. Parasites? Oh yes, decidedly. We have plenty of those . . . . but few who wear leotards or paint-spattered T-shirts and sneakers with clay-clogged treads. The ones I wish to speak of have tastes which run more towards tailored Brooks Brothers three-button pinstripes and handmade Italian leather brogues.
Those who have the wealth and power to avert moral compromise regularly make the largest ones. Every fiscal year, corporate welfare (like its latest incarnation, the taxpayer bailout of our corrupt banking/financial institutions - courtesy of the Bush administration) continues to sap our economic vitality to the tune of approximately $100 billion on the federal level and an additional $40 - $50 billion at the state and local level in a game that's rigged to enrich a few at the expense of the many. Enormous subsidies, bidless contracts and tax breaks are handed out as freely to the wealthiest Americans as candy is on Halloween to morbidly obese children.
Hidden in plain view, a small army of faceless men, their agendas neatly tucked into their leather lunchpails, can be found swarming over the Beltway palm-pressing and back-slapping their way into many a Congressman's good graces. They are the corporate lobbyists, the backroom boys, quietly cutting deals and the cheques that seal them for the benefit of their corporate masters like Monsanto, General Electric and Exxon/Mobil.
Without fanfare, but with much sangfroid, they have won their bloodless coup. Socialism has insinuated itself in the body politic. We do have entitlement programs. The corporations pocket the profits while the overhead costs are externalized onto the middle class, the poor, the disabled and the elderly. It's the free-booting spoils of laissez-faire capitalism for the elite few and crushing, socialized liabilities for the many. Welcome to the realpolitik welfare state, comrade.
In America, morality has been replaced by market forces. The truth of it can be found in the numbers. Workplace productivity, corporate profits and unemployment rates are climbing along the same steep trajectory. Battered and buffeted by this perverse economic turbulence, the American public is then subjected to an endless stream of blame-the-victim flummery and gaslight from conservative pundits about the fierce glories of predatory capitalism, the manly, Darwinian virtues of compulsive greed, ruthless competition, the savage justice of natural selection and the nobility of Adam Smith's Invisible Hand. "Create Nothing, Own Everything" has become the guiding ethos of the modern wealthy elite. "Bleed and Feed" would also be a fitting alternative.
Fiscal conservatives justifiably fret about the long-term repercussions of the debt accrued by expanded social services, but those figures pale before the monstrous effects and destabilizing costs of the way we have been handling the economy in recent memory. Beginning with the Reagan administration thirty years ago, it has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt that trickle-down economics and corporate welfare will not translate into more abundant, better paying jobs for Americans. "Reaganomics" has translated into a higher concentration of wealth for the wealthiest and obscenely focused more power into the hands of those entities that have a proven track record of abusing our sacred liberties the most. It is transforming America into a Third World oligarchy.
It would be hard to conceive of anything more inimicable to Democracy and the American way of life, yet many find this arrangement - no matter how brutal to human dignity or corrosive to personal liberty - preferable for unfounded, calcified ideological reasons.
A tradition of support for the arts in America never took hold and flourished as it did in Europe. America has long been a beacon of hope for the disenfranchised and persecuted of the world. Unfortunately, the best part of European culture - the arts - were identified by our predecessors with the social injustice, economic exploitation and religious/political oppression that they were fleeing. Guilt by association was the name of the game when the lord who burned peasant farms, hanged your peasant neighbours for whispering a word of protest and taxed your peasant family into starvation to preempt any future uprisings also flaunted a refined taste in Gobelin tapestries, Bach chamber pieces, Chinese porcelain, Dutch velvet small clothes and the Florentine Masters. Art, it appeared, was the live-in slut of a decadent, parasitic aristocracy and an even more profligate Catholic Church. Like an indelible stain, this prejudice stubbornly clings to the psychological fabric of Americansto this very day. Thus our national mentality finds something deeply suspect about someone making an income from a profession that is considered little more than a recreational hobby for most others and a degenerate luxury for the elitist few.
Looking at the problem from another historical perspective, consider how different societies in different times approached this controversial issue. A quick glance at the pages of history informs us that there's much precedent for the success of state-sponsored art. Periclean Athens has become synonymous with cultural glory. The Medici-dominated Republic of Florence enriched their world and ours by commissioning works from Brunelleschi, Ghirlandaio, Michelangelo and Leonardo DaVinci, amongst many others. Vienna under the Hapsburg Dynasty hosted and commissioned Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler, Otto Wagner, Gustav Klimt and Joseph Urban - just as F.D.R. underwrote Orson Welles, Pare Lorenz, Thomas Hart Benton, Ben Shahn, Grant Wood, Saul Bellow and James Baldwin.
However much the default American mindset reduces the transcendent to a commodity and translates the intrinsic worth of everything into hard currency, Americans must at some point dispense with cant and recognize the larger issues at stake. When a community invests in the arts it sets into motion a kind of domino effect: it encourages economic growth and the attraction of outside investment which, in turn, further improves the community's welfare through better education, infrastructure and municipal services. This promotes greater job opportunities, lowers crime rates, raises real estate values and generates larger incomes that are channeled into a larger tax revenue pool by attracting and maintaining a larger, more prosperous population base. The arts are a springboard from which this kind of success can be launched.
When F.D.R. initiated the W.P.A. and placed Harry Hopkins in charge they both recognized artists were valuable contributors to American society and so they instituted Federal One to put them back to work. One would think that you can't argue with success - however, the Republican Party could and did. F.D.R.'s efforts were met with rabid ideological hatred and stiff partisan resistance from conservatives nationwide - in spite of tangible proof of the program's success. The same hostile political climate exists today. No doubt President Obama should expect the same kind of reaction if he decides to follow his predecessor's example. My colleagues in the arts can only appeal to his sense of vision and encourage Mr. Obama to commit to developing jobs for our artists as a part of his extended stimulus package.
In the final analysis, sponsorship of the arts is a self-perpetuating economic stimulus package and amongst the shrewdest investment that any administration could make in America.The arts have more than proven their worth as a short-term and long-term strategy for promoting economic growth and sustaining a higher quality of life for her citizens. Now is the time in which they should be given our fullest support.
Our national character is reflected in our priorities and those priorities are best exemplified by how the federal budget is spent. Our government is a government of the people and their actions and values are an echo of our own. The federal budget may be divided between domestic and defense spending, but the real underlying question faced by Americans as we move into this new century is: do we as a nation wish to forfeit our future to the greedy few or do we have the courage to strike out in bold new directions that will create prosperity for all? Do we want to embrace hope or deny it a voice in our messy national discourse? We are now at a critical juncture in our nation's history, atthe confluence where America's promise is supposed to deliver into her reality. How we answer this question will effect the destiny of our country for decades to come.
So, what of the arts? Are they relevant at all to America in the 21st Century? Consider this:
Artists are the ones who bring color, light, motion, words, sound and form to your grey, increasingly degraded lives - lives cowed, stunted, laid waste to and stripped barren by isolation, anxiety, fear and rage. We proffer a voice to the inarticulate, ascendancy to the forgotten, effulgence to the bereft and a sense of wonder to those beyond hope of a far horizon. We throw up edifices that embrace the skies, festoon your public places and adorn your inner sanctums. We fill the abscesses hollowed by social alienation with a sense of connection to our shared humanity. What we craft is wrought with a passion, energy and commitment that gives something fresh back to the viewer, reader or listener in a perpetually renewable resource. We are the medium through which America experiences herself.
We give far more than we receive. We always have and always will. And without us your lives wouldn't be bearable because all your exteriors would begin to echo the ringing emptiness of your interiors.
Americans rationalized the smirking duplicity of their elected officials, acquiesced to a war motivated solely by corporate greed and national vanity, allowed their government to trample their civil rights underfoot, passively submitted when cronyism and ballot tampering manipulated election results and legitimatized racism and intimidation under the sacred, protective umbrella of patriotism. Americans embraced the arrogance and ham-fisted corruption of leaders in the business world for ideological reasons, allowed international cartels to strip mine our children's futures, resigned themselves to tightening their belts so that the wealthiest 1% of the population could loosen theirs and reconciled the contempt of other nations for our folly as mere jealousy.
With bravado, Americans shouldered these and a flotilla of other indignities, abuses and encroachments. In doing so, they permitted brutality, apathy and willful ignorance to pollute our national dialogue. For my fellow countrymen, this was considered bearable.
But for Americans to be forced to confront the abyss without the arts acting as a buffer or distraction, to give vicarious flight to their deepest, most frustrated desires and dreams, to frame their private narratives in a national mythology, now, that would be intolerable.
Copyright © 2010 Curt C. Chiarelli
