All Thrift And No Art Makes Dull Culture Pro-Nea: Grants Bring Arts To Masses In Rural Communities
If bean counters ruled the world, we’d all live in utilitarian houses, drive utilitarian cars, wear utilitarian clothes, worship in utilitarian cinderblock churches.
Thrift is not the ultimate virtue. The proposal to end federal funding for the arts illustrates what can happen when you seek leadership only from the narrow minded.
Or from the demagogues. A handful of ill-advised grants have been blown out of proportion, jeopardizing the existence of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Isn’t it strange: Of the $1.5 trillion federal budget, NEA spends $170 million; CPB, $285 million. Like them, the Pentagon has made mistakes. But its mistakes are measured in lost lives by the hundreds and wasted dollars by the tens of billions. Is anybody proposing to eliminate the Pentagon? No. The same people who want to kill NEA want to give the Pentagon more.
In a culture that measures virtue with a dollar sign while making a mighty noise about spiritual poverty, the arts are an essential. They puncture pretension, express deep emotion, capsulize truth, inspire, refresh, entertain, provoke, lead, and lift our eyes from the grey routines of life.
But they need patrons. And the patrons should not come exclusively from society’s elite. Large cities enjoy sizeable arts organizations and millionaires to support them. But the Corporation for Public Broadcasting provides seed money for stations that offer quality programs to the masses.
Margot Knight, director of Idaho’s Commission on the Arts, says NEA funds create points of cultural light from one end of Idaho to the other. A ballet in Challis. A gallery for regional artists in Coeur d’Alene. A theater and music festival in Sandpoint. A new music festival, modeled on Sandpoint’s, in Montpelier. The millionaires and corporate donors who back the Metropolitan Opera don’t give a rip for Salmon, Idaho. But with grants from NEA an arts community organized there, won matching support from local residents, and brightens the quality of life.
A free society needs the vibrance art provides. The elimination of federal arts programs poses a threat of cultural impoverishment in smaller communities all over the country, and wouldn’t make a dime’s worth of difference to reduction of the federal budget.
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