Heather Penn on inprnt and Tumblr

Architecture is art. Fashion is art- and yes, even if you ‘don’t give a damn’ about fashion and dress in ‘what’s comfortable’, someone had to design your fucking cargo shorts to be maximally comfy. Industrial design is art. Furniture design is art. Cooking is art. 

Firstly: fine art creates utility for many other people. Whether or not you find any utility in it yourself, many people in your community do. I do not find sports particularly valuable- I honestly think there’s not much in the world that’s more boring than men running around on a field kicking a ball- but most other people seem to for some reason. If the other people in my community want to fund sports, I think they should receive funding even if I’m individually against it. Because clearly, they’re getting something out of it.

Secondly: Fine art employs a lot of members of the community who would otherwise be unemployable. The tormented artist stereotype has a grain of truth in it: many artists struggle with physical and mental illness. Having a career in art- like many other careers where you’re self-employed- means being able to work at your own pace. Having too many bad days in a row won’t get you fired. Funding the arts means giving disabled people the time and breathing room they need to begin a career on their own merits, without working themselves to death trying to hold down a more ‘normal’ job.  

Thirdly: art gives us a common language we can use to communicate, in the same way that science does. If I say a government policy is “Orwellian”, for example, you know I mean “it’s dictatorial”, with the heavy implication that it creates a surveillance state. If I say something is a “Cinderella story”, you know I mean it’s an underdog story, presumably with a heavy element of rags-to-riches. Art creates connotations and shades of meaning that enrich and deepen human communication.

Imagine that amount of money spent on after hour soccer leagues, or bowling, or anything else that does not stink of top-down class warfare!

Imagine a world without the NEA. Would people still spend money on industrial design, on illustration, on fashion, on beauty? Would people like Ben Stahl, Dieter Rams, Bob Ross, Gianni Versace or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe still have existed?

I feel slightly bad for @earlgraytay here, because there are so many good arguments for funding art, but if you just admit that you want to fund political activism that is edgy and contrarian, but not ultimately well thought out or tied to a concrete policy, please don’t call it art.

So cutting public investment in the arts won’t do a thing to take money from Rich Dude With Paintbrush. It’ll get rid of local summer art classes for kids who can’t afford private lessons. It’ll get rid of the two or three field trips my elementary school could take to the local civic center for plays meant for kids - everything paid for but a couple of dollars, and there was a fund for if your parents couldn’t afford that. It’ll get rid of the ability of the local museum where I grew up to have so many local shows and competitions for artists who weren’t rich enough to buy their own gallery space.

But art is also the doodle at the edge of your notebook page, or a drawing in chalk on the sidewalk. Even during the darkest periods in human history, people – and not just members of a specialized Artist class – have made art.

Authoritarian regimes throughout history have:

A) Tightly controlled the arts for use in State propaganda, and

B) Suppressed and punished artists for creating art outside the State-sanctioned parameters.

They don’t do this because they are Big Meanie villains like you see on Saturday morning cartoons, and just want all their citizens to be Sad, and their nations to be Gloomy.

They do it because they fear the arts as an expression of the citizens’ voice, as a way to challenge the status-quo that keeps the authoritarian regimes in power.

TVG: When do you get angry? Where does Mr. Rogers draw the line?

Mr. Rogers: I was incensed by what the Ku Klux Klan did recently. I am hardly a suing person, and yet that just got my goat. Members of the Klu Klux Klan were giving out a telephone number in a schoolyard, and these kids were calling the number. There was a Mister Rogers sound-alike voice on it with terribly racist messages. I just saw red. And so we sued them and we won. Maybe it’s strange, but the only thing that really angers me is something that’s demeaning to somebody else.

TVG: If you had one message you

(end quote) Description ends.]

Frankly? I don’t think that’s strange at all.

Mr. Rogers also gave the next town over from the Neighborhood of Make-Believe a Black Woman for a mayor (in 1975), and gave her a White Man to be her assistant.