Good point.
I’m not sure exactly how grants work. Maybe jsgoddess can help us out here, since she has a friend who has received a grant. My understanding is that the grant is given simply so the artist can create the art, not that the government is actually commissioning the art (meaning that the government then owns it). Commissioning someone to create art is a little bit different…for example, if you are creating a public space, and want something decorative for it. But even in a case like this, my preference would be to raise funds specifically for this purpose, from private donations. As far as giving a grant to give someone the opportunity to create art, and the government doesn’t profit except in the most vague sense of adding art to the world, I have to strongly disagree with this use of public monies.
Except…it’s not letting the market decide. What if I want to walk dogs for a living, but there aren’t enough people who are willing to pay me to do this? Should the government provide me with dogs to walk, and pay me to do it? Or should I find another way to support myself?
I don’t know about all art, but poets can be given grants to allow them to pursue their work. The grant is based on past work and the potential for future work, but the work isn’t owed to the gov’t, nor is it controlled as to content.
Wow. Where to begin?
Let’s start by defining what we mean by The Government™ funding art. There seems to be a general misconception that (as others have pointed out) artists walk into some government office, delcare themselves to be artists, and without question go on lifetime government payrolls. Let’s dispense with that fiction right now. It’s incorrect and it’s stupid.
So where does this government funding come from? As near as I can tell, from two sources. Someone please correct me if I’m wrong.
Source one: Grants from the NEA and similar organizations. They do not pay artists’ salaries, they pay artists to develop and advance our culture. It’s not a handout, it’s an investment. As matt_mcl pointed out above (though I believe a little over the top), art is part of a nation’s culture. It’s a way of a society to look at itself. Now, a lot of people consider that to be frivolous. I do not.
So, should such organizations pay artists to paint endless copies of the Mona Lisa? Of course not. 21st century (country of your choice) is not 16th century Italy. We do little to advance our culture by imitating the past. The very purpose of the NEA is for artists to push the envelope, to discover and invent where we are going.
Money well spent, in my opinion.
Source two: To decorate a public space. Once again, they are not paying artists’ salaries. They are making a business deal. If a commissioned work of art beautifies an area and stimilates economic growth, then once again it’s an investment. They pay an artist to do work. The artist gets paid to work. There is no charity there, no handouts. It’s a business transaction in which everyone benefits.
So in such cases, should the artist pander to the lowest common denominator? Hell no. Giving the artist free reign of expression raises the bar, not lowers it, and stimulates creative capitolism, not stiffles it.
As a side note, I talked to an artist about a month ago. She makes her living at it. Rah rah capitolism. I applaud that she found a new talent at a mature age and made so much of it. But she barely squeeks by. She really wants to do some abstract work, but cannot afford the wallspace of her studio to display that which will not sell. If it’s not a beach scene, it won’t move. Such is the downside of the capitolism-art system. She has to pander to eat.
This thread spurred me to do something I’ve been contemplating for weeks: I just commissioned her to do an abstract. 
The problem is, selective support of the arts is one thing when done by private citizens, because we have the right to support some art and not others, based on aesthetic value or the message it is trying to send. The government, on the other hand, does not really have that right. What I was trying to say before is that if the government pays for art someone finds offensive, then it is a misuse of public funds. If, on the other hand, if the government does not give funding because someone finds it offensive, that is censorship.
That is awesome!
The government has decided that dogs need walking, so they’re going to pay to get the dogs walked. The artists aren’t going to some grant meeting with guns and forcing the money to be handed over. The money is there and goes to the applicants with the proposals that appeal to the committees. The government is promoting dog walking by funding dog walking.
Don’t wave your hands around about the market and expect me to care. As previously mentioned, the market supports “The Painter of Light.” While I can’t predict with any accuracy what painters will be treasured in the coming millenia, I can assure you that it won’t be Thomas Fucking Kincaid.
This thread is an excellent example of why the market can suck. So much vitriol from so many people who probably can’t even name a modern artist who hasn’t been lambasted on talk radio.
Well, not really censorship at all, because the government is not quelching the art, or forbidding an artist to persue what he or she feels is of value. It’s just choosing not to financially support it.
And, ‘someone’ will find anything the government does offensive. I don’t think that that is a good meter for judging the rightness of government action.
Then I guess we need to talk about why the government should take it upon themselves to decide why the dogs need to be walked.
I don’t expect you to care…I know where you are coming from. I am giving you MY opinion. Granted, the market supports Thomas Kincaid…and to a rather astounding degree. But despite the lameness that we think should be obvious, people like his stuff. So what makes it any less worthy of being created than something that YOU might consider to be worthy? This is the inherent problem I have with government funding.
That makes no sense. The market, for the most part, mostly supports artists like Kincaid. If the government supports artists, then artists should pander, and thus become Kincaid. Therefore government funding is useless. But if the government pays artists to do something that might offend, then…
Do you really see no value in someone paying artists to do non-commercial work?
It’s already being created. It’s being funded by the market. I think there is other stuff that should be funded as well, and not by the market because the market is specifically geared toward finding that which is popular rather than that which is good. The two can intersect, and if they did often enough I wouldn’t worry about it. But the intersections aren’t all that common, especially in the fields where my interests lie. Matti Stepanek sells more books of poetry than Alicia Stallings, but that doesn’t make the poetry good.
A lot of art never sells, at least in the artist’s lifetime. If she can’t sell it and has no space for it she can give it away. At least she gets to do work that pleases her. It would be nice if somebody bought it, rah rah, but like any other service there has to be a demand.
On Antiques Roadshow a guy brought in a Grandma Moses original. His mom paid $10 for it. Grandma Moses probably had no room for it and was happy to get $10, I’m sure she’d rather have the $40,000 or whatever the current estimate was. And FWIW, the piece did nothing for me. I might have paid an old lady $10 for it. That I wouldn’t pay $40,000 for it doesn’t diminish it as art, obviously there are others who place a much higher value on it.
I don’t believe that artists should necessarily have to pander (not sure that even describes Thomas Kincaid…he probably thinks he is producing great stuff). But the fact that they may or may not find a market for what they do doesn’t mean the government should have to support it.
Oh, I absolutely see the value in it, but there are other ways to get this funding. I have a friend who wrote a rather, shall we say, avant-garde opera. Not the kind of thing that I think would be a success on any kind of mass scale. She had the whole thing funded through corporate and private donations, and it was professionally produced.
Sure, except there is only a finite amount of time in her life, like anyone else’s. She does the occasional abstract, but she has little time to develop that aspect of her art. In order to pay the bills, she has to spend most of her life working on stuff the tourists will buy.
Now, I’m not saying that The Goverment “owes” her a living, nor that she “deserves a paid career as an artist.” I’m saying that if she had the free time to persue her talents as an abstract artist, the world may be richer in art than it would not have been otherwise. Private donations aren’t always enough to cover that. If The Government can give the tiniest part of its wealth to promote American (or whatever country) fine art that would otherwise never see the light of day, then that seems like a wise investment with a huge ROI.
And you sound like a knob, and an incoherent one to boot. The argument is not much advanced.
Possibly because at least part of it is being carried on by someone whose efforts drag the whole thing down to the intellectual level of a hamster, buttmunch. You just did a marvellous job of completely failing to understand my point - which was not that Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Stravinsky, Puccini, Bartok and others either had a knack and only a knack, nor that they were any way defective. I wouldn’t accuse any of them of cacophony (except maybe Stravinsky and Bartok when they were feeling particularly rebellious), nor was I slating them - only certain talentless do-nothings who, whether having studied classical forms or not, appear incapable of learning from the lessons of the past by all the evidence of their works; who, apparently incapable of finding anything to say in the language of their predecessors and betters, loudly declare that melody and harmony and so on are played out and consider themselves no end of iconoclasts for it. It’s not that the form is played out but that they themselves haven’t a finger-full of the creative fire that Beethoven had dripping out of his ears.
Ooh, a stinging riposte. I declare myself worsted. :rolleyes:
Well, trying to figure it out would be one possibility, perhaps preferable to just restating yours.
Oops. Too late.
Yes. Probably that Rembrandt applied his methods to conveying his unique, inspired visions to his audience; which nicely illustrates the difference between a great capacity for taking pains (which his students presumably had) and out-and-out genius.
Quite true, and not in fact contradictory to anything I actually said.
True, of course; and in no way supportive of the position that a great number of artists could in fact duplicate Leo’s methods and application on an original topic of their own choosing.
And if I were saying that modern artists should aim to duplicate the style of the old masters, you’d have a point. I merely choose to doubt that one-tenth of those who claim that representational art is a dead letter could make a go of it if they so chose. I may be wrong. It may be that someone whose idea of art consists of piling a ton of bricks on top of each other and presenting it as a work of genius could, if they chose, match Michelangelo’s talent for taking a hammer and chisel to a block of marble and cutting away everything that didn’t look like the vision he had of what was inside it. But I do entertain the right to a certain scepticism, not to mention remarking that the Emperor is likely to catch his death of cold.
Education is only as good as the mind of the student. Or: You can drive a whore to culture but you cannot make her think.
Holy fuck, are you for real? Movies aren’t art? Tell me this was ironic, or a typo, or something, because otherwise, The Stupid inherent in this post just broke my brain.
As for the topic of funding the arts, I support funding arts. I’d do it myself, but I don’t have enough money to actually make any sort of a difference through personal donations. I can barely afford to buy a poster, let alone commission a painting. That’s why we have the government, though: to do things most people can’t do on an individual basis. I can’t afford to support an artist, but I can afford to pay .01 cents every year on my taxes to support the NEA. Take that same fraction of a cent from everyone in the country, and Hey Presto: we’ve funded ourselves some art. Sure, some of I don’t like, personally. So what? My taxes are also going to fund roads I’m never going to drive on, hospitals I’m never going to be healed in, and wars that I’m never going to fight in. Just because I’m not personally getting any use out of the results of my tax dollars doesn’t mean nobody is, and it certainly does mean we shouldn’t be spending that money at all.
I’d also like Sarahfeena to clarify exactly why the government paying an artist to learn how to be an artist is okay, but paying him to be an artist is a “misuse of funds.” I don’t see a meaningful distinction, there. If the government doesn’t owe anyone a profession as an artist, then why should it owe anyone training as an artist? If we’re going to spend money on giving people the training, doesn’t it make sense to give them some more money so they can actually use that training? Paying people to learn skills that they can’t use to support themselves strikes me as a larger waste of money than funding art that some arbitrary portion of the public might dislike.
Also, you’ve said that the government selectively funding artists is a form of censorship. Can you elaborate on this? Helping one artist to create art is not the same as preventing another artist from creating art. I don’t see how this could be considered censorship under any definition of the term as I understand it.
I fully agree with your first sentence.
The parenthetical remark I cannot guess on. Who knows what goes on in that freak’s head? Honestly, who the fuck cares?
But the last sentence – who (besides one poster) said that the government “has to” support it? It’s not a charity handout, it’s a government contract. No different than the government hiring Haliburton or Grumman.
Would you know it if they did? I wouldn’t.
The only art I consider myself well-versed (forgive the pun) in is poetry, and I know that many poets can write in the style of old masters. There are also many poets who can’t (or at least refuse to try). You won’t see many ways of citing these abilities because they aren’t published and, in most cases, aren’t publishable. Since I can’t even begin to cite, you’re welcome to discount my experiences.
Those who deal more in painting can speak to whether most painters can create representational art. I’d wager that most could if they put the effort forth, but that most wouldn’t put the effort forth on a dead end application of their talents.
So, to prove you wrong, they’d have to study and work hard and in the end have something that isn’t worth anything except as a gotcha.
You might be surprised, then. Learning the basics of drawing, persective, value, and color are basic. I’d imagine that most abstract artists have worked very hard on these skills.
Can they sculpt marble? Probably not, as this is a very specialized skill. Can they match Michelangelo’s talent? Of course not. Who could? Could DaVinci match Michelangelo’s talent? No. He was not Michelangelo.