Not Supporting the Arts

Issue 212

⁨Buenos Aires⁩, 2014

I.

Here’s a sentence that might sound like a confession: I’ve never quite understood the phrase support the arts. Nor have I ever been able to grasp the derivative phrases that typically follow, such as support libraries or support museums or support artists. The essential desire that’s expressed isn’t difficult to recognize, yet the words always sound woefully insufficient—they’re too vague, too elusive, too easily dismissed. I’ve heard the phrase support the arts spoken with heartfelt, earnest feeling, I’ve seen those words written on tote bags and bumper stickers and shop windows, yet I’ve never been exactly sure what’s commanded. The words, it seems, do a reasonable job of conveying the speaker’s attitude, but that very quickly starts to feel like the entire purpose. Rather than attempting to achieve an objective, the objective of this slogan is to state the slogan—which is the difference between crying because you want change and crying because you want people to hear you cry.

Obviously eyebrows should begin to lift whenever slogans start to fill the air. There’s something suspicious about platitudes, about the unthinking, commonplace words that require no commitment. There is, of course, an implicit sense of commitment in each of these phrases, of having joined an opposition force—to carry a tote bag with a slogan or hang an affirmative sign is to identify with the rebellious group, it is to join the group that’s fighting against something that’s wrong. But that very identification appears to be the objective: to be viewed as a person who supports the arts, rather than as a person in some other, more distasteful category. Just like Václav Havel’s Greengrocer—which is, I must stress, a more consequential example—the purpose of a slogan is identification, it is signaling, it is membership in a group, but pretty much meaningless as an actual position. The statement places you alongside everyone else who enunciates the words, the group distinct and the membership public, which is the entire point.

Although there is also, underneath all of these phrases, the slightest impression of art as secondary. As extra. As what comes after the real work is done. And that’s what I find the most curious. You should support the arts in the same manner that you should support worthwhile hobbies, once you’ve finished the workday and managed to complete all the truly essential tasks. If you finish your homework and eat your peas, then you can, for just a little while, go outside and play with your art. Not everything that’s worthwhile has its profits exceed its costs, unfortunately, so here’s a polite request to chip in a coin—to support the arts—when you’re not too busy.

Palermo, 2018

II.

Somewhere along the way the art world became the art market, so it naturally became a category, one of many categories in life, one that many people deem supplementary, extraneous, what you play around with after the work is done and the bills are paid. Yet this appears a little peculiar if you consider art fundamental. For my eye, it is much easier to see how art supports the more humdrum aspects of life, rather than the more humdrum aspects of life supporting art. My sense is that nearly everyone agrees but that nearly everyone also acts like this isn’t true.

But to look around the world is to notice that most people spend most of their free time and money searching for better art. This is especially true if you broaden the definition beyond the traditional fine arts, by looking at how often the typical person thinks about creativity or storytelling or aesthetics or craft or design. Some might consider it crass to include streaming shows or Hollywood blockbusters in a discussion of fine arts, but it takes effort to overlook how much time people spend in fictional, mythical worlds, how much the typical life is spent in a universe that’s created by artists. There’s a relentlessness, once you look, to all the creativity that’s demanded, from the countless hours of streaming music to the nightly concerts in every city to the simple fact that actors and directors and musicians are the subject of everyday conversations. And if you’re willing to broaden the definition of art just a bit more—which you certainly should do—then you can’t help but notice, too, that nearly everyone wants tables and lamps and gadgets with the most appealing designs, that nearly everyone takes care in the clothes that they select or in the shade they paint their walls, and that all of these decisions aren’t really supplementary to some core, underlying decision that’s empirical and cold, with the aesthetic decision only a secondary, incidental thought. Even the tedious people who state an indifference to architecture end up appreciating when a building or street is organized just right, the invisible figure in the background busy with the art that supports life.

Besides, the alternative is pretty much incomprehensible: it is a desire to fill your home with objects that you dislike, to purchase a car that you find clunky and embarrassing, to spend your nights watching shows that you consider banal, to search for music that’s uninspiring and tedious and poorly played. The arts aren’t just in museums, but believing that to be the case gives you an impoverished view of the world. You have to search for a long time to find a single moment, a single moment when you move through the world without grasping for the best in aesthetics, craft, or what you might call artistry.

Prague, 2011

III.

If you do try to write novels, paint canvases, or schedule live performances, however, money is almost certainly an issue. Artists need to live but compliments don’t pay the rent. And it doesn’t help that artists have the unfortunate tendency to be a bit timid around money. Too timid to ask. Too timid to price the work. Too timid to demand payment for labor. Because art comes from such an intimate, impassioned place, because art is often the consequence of an artist using a scalpel to amputate a portion of their body, tossing the extracted viscera against the wall for everyone to examine, it makes the listing of a financial price feel like a betrayal.

Much as you can’t quantify your friendships with a spreadsheet or put a financial number on your ability to feel tranquility, not every value comes with a price. And many artists are simply unable to switch perspectives from the labor of birthing a creation to the task of selling one of their children. The distinction between the value and price triggers too much dissonance; to demand money for themselves, for their innermost secrets, for what incites them, feels distasteful.

Nevertheless, the need to pay the rent still lingers. Compliments about paintings don’t help, though sold paintings have a chance. Most working artists are certainly happy to hear your compliments, but they feel too proud, too ashamed, or too frightened to ask for more, and they end up hoping that you drop a little money on the nightstand table before you leave.

‎⁨Veliko Tarnovo⁩, ⁨Bulgaria 2016⁩

IV.

Although I can’t be too hard on the typical person. Most behaviors in life are the result of following the well-worn path, and that’s what most people do: how the market prices art is what feels natural. It isn't difficult to find people who blindly accept outlandish prices for Picasso or Matisse or Van Gogh, yet grumble at the supposed inconvenience of paying for a musician to perform at a local bar. Rather than being the result of highfalutin calculations about artistic merit, this impulse merely conforms to the norms of our contemporary culture, with the market price feeling equivalent to the artistic value. This isn't a conspiracy from the markets, nor was there some past age when all deserving artists were supported. These are simply the results of expectations and habits, responses to what feels ubiquitous and what feels scarce, with the average person simply responding to what’s commonplace, so it never even occurs to them to leave their wallet unguarded at a local art studio.

Of course having a public that’s unaware of how much value they derive from art while also having artists uncomfortable with selling their art is not an ideal combination. This is how you end up with tote bags that say Support the Arts donned by people walking past underfunded museums and dropping or not dropping a coin into the case of the violin player on the corner. It is how you end up with people streaming a show for six hours in a row while also wondering how writing is supposed to be a job. It is how you end up with people listening to music as the background track to pretty much every significant event in their life but, no, they’re not really into culture.

The arts should find a good salesperson—someone from big oil, the coal industry, a casino game designer, a pharmaceutical executive—and have them examine the usual plea. I want to hear an executive from a weapon’s manufacturer analyze the groveling marketing campaigns of most museums. I want to see the National Endowment for the Arts give the leadership reins for a few months to a pharmaceutical CEO and see if that gives a jolt to funding. I am especially curious to know whether a cigarette executive who specializes in the under ten age group can sell classical music to the next generation. My guess is that an oil tycoon might tell a bookstore employee—on the subject of sales, as I’m sure there’ll be plenty to discuss—that some specificity is needed. A good sales pitch needs relevance and direction and also doesn’t sound like a sales pitch. Oil companies only advertise “oil” as a general product after some horrific environmental disaster, just as pharmaceutical companies only advertise “medicine” after some ghastly fiasco—which probably also explains the shortcoming of selling “art” all the time.