What should we do with the NEA? (Natl. Endowment for the Arts)

I find this to be a more complex issue than one assumes at first blush.

The utilitarian in me thinks that this is a moot point with millions out of work, but this doesn't work because a large number of american workers are employed in trades that service the arts. (Not only actors, artists, singers and musicians, but the engineers, builders and laborers of various sorts that help productions go forward.) These jobs need support and assistance like any other.

On the other hand, when government funds the arts, is it not giving an opinion on what is art, and is that the place of government?

Let me know what you think.

Millions of people could be working in the arts.

Funding should be non-discriminatory as to the value of the art. People get upset when the government funds art that they don't like, but that is part of the price of free speech.

The funding of art we don't like shouldn't be an issue, we fund wars some of us don't like, and policies that we disagree on all the time.

If the funding is non-discriminatory, then fine art (opera, theater, etc.) should not get a higher priority than the arts of pop-culture, right?

of The People.

while it has High Art aspects -- it is simply an American Myth that it is or has to be effete or elitist.

I apologize if it seemed so. It does illustrate though, that one person's "People's art" is another person's elitism.

Surely not everyone will appriciate "Tannhauser" or "the Nibelungenleid" even if they understand it.

because they are not really separate -- when -- oh lets' say La Boheme was created -- that WAS the popular culture --

you can and really should create an opera from a Peoia Illinois labor leaders struggle with love and management into opera -- usiing a rock and roll back beat.
that scenario really describes opera as it was really created to be.

There is a group, the name escapes me, which has redone "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" as a Goth Rock Opera. I saw part of it on PBS a while back, it was a little bizarre, but interesting to watch.

can and should be local as much as it is anything else.

whether it's blue grass or theatre, opera or street theatre, -- the outlet is endless and it all or can support the local economy.

partly because there is a belief that is a cultural space for The People.

i.e. you can find tickets for the opera in italy that are well within the range of everyday people -- and just following this example -- you find a more diverse range of people attending and appreciating opera.

#2 the arts have a way of adding lots of dollars to any local community when it is actiively supported publicly and privately.

Opera is a fundamental part of Italian culture, not so much for American culture. I suppose Musicals are rather American though, would we go to Guys & Dolls if it were cheap enough?

As to number 2, you get no argument from me.

however -- you might want to consider chicago -- which years ago stepped up funding of the performance arts in it's schools.

chicago created an active audience for decades with that effort for things like opera or the theatre or the symphany.

just sayin.

It makes sense that an audience for high culture must be cultivated. Is it crucial for us to do so?

I suppose it actually is. There are insights I've gotten from Hamlet that have enriched my life, have they put food in my belly, no, but life is easier to take with different ways to interpret it.

Hell, even the Defense Department has oversight (as much as a joke as it is.) If we wouldn't want the DoD doing what ever it wanted with its money, the same should go for the NEA, right?

IT'S ART !!!!! 'Nuff said.

Kitchen middens.

Pottery--not good art, but prosaic stuff made by local potters. We can call it art, but then we have to call the cheap crap sold in the local supermarket "art" and most won't assume all graphic design = art. Mosaics that are intended to be walked on can survive. Buildings and sculptures and engravings intended to glorify gods or kings (if there's a difference).

Jewelry. Coins. Bones. Maybe wood and leather in an oxygen-depleted environment.

Music just about never survives. Paintings rarely survive. Literature survives to a much lesser extent than is usually believed, certainly much less often than financial records and archives. Oral literature arguably almost never survives (since it gets reformulated unless it's too sacred to change).

of course there's a donation box. I'm sure there is a way the NEA could be involved in that, many families cannot afford to take their kids to museums of any kind, why not make them free, it for the benefit of everyone, old and young.

Museums should be free for all and fully funded. (Institutional bias here, I'm an aspiring Historian)

of natural history were just outstanding, as well as The Tate, The Victoria and Albert the Imperial war museum. We were fortunate and we got to take them all in and there was literally something for everyone.

But full disclosure--I am an artist. :) Grants are bestowed by panels of professionals in the arts. This is how art gets selected and funded all the time in this country. I am more disturbed by the government's decision in National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley.

"The "NEA Four", Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes, were performance artists whose proposed grants from the United States government's National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) were vetoed by John Frohnmayer in June 1990. Grants were overtly vetoed on the basis of subject matter after the artists had successfully passed through a peer review process. The artists won their case in court in 1993 and were awarded amounts equal to the grant money in question, though the case would make its way to the United States Supreme Court in National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley.<1> In response, the NEA, under pressure from Congress, stopped funding individual artists."

Pat Buchanan and Jesse Helms had their fingers in there, as I recall.

helps students get through college in fields that don't make tons of money

The NEH needs more money too.

etc. It gives out some small grants to literary publications and some to individual poets and writers. Grant recipients are chosen by advisory panels made up of people prominent in the particular field: big name poets (Robert Pinsky, et al) select that year's winners from a list of finalists culled from the big pool (hundreds, at least) of applications, AND you have to already be a well-published writer/poet to even apply for those grants. The NEA no longer funds individual visual artists because some of its past recipients have proven to be controversial among wingnuts. It doesn't fund the "popular" or commercial versions of the arts because it's assumed that those enterprises have a fair chance to succeed or fail in the popular marketplace.

One of the things the FDR did under the umbrella of the WPA was to create a number of projects that employed artists (The Federal Art Project, The Federal Music Project, The Federal Theatre Project, and The Federal Writers Project), giving thousands of people decent jobs through the worst years of the great depression. I think in hard times you do fund the arts, because I believe that the arts have an important place in a progressive society. Ultimately a society is judged on how it treats its citizens and what it produces: mostly we produce cheeseburgers and mortgage-backed securities, so it might be a good thing for posterity, at least, if we could produce a little bit of art, too.

many national parks lodges employed artists to create things from lighting fixtures to bas relief.

all kinds of things.

Life is richer with art.

Peter Jackson's "Meet the Feebles" (I'm not sure if it was his 1st film, but it's at least 20 years old) was funded by New Zealand. And its about horny, bulemic, stoned, gay, bitchy muppets.