I understand that having your field constantly mocked for being arcane and boring is unpleasant, but can you please not do the same to other people? For the love of every fucking god ever to walk this blighted earth, you’d think it’d be obvious that the weirdoes need to stick together.
but nooooooo, clearly anyone who can Do Maths is superior and anyone who says “art is very important to most people” in slightly imprecise terms is Wrong.
Unless you want to live in a fucking stone cube with no decoration and eat soylent for every meal, art is fucking essential.
@ me next time.
I have no problem with people who can’t do math. But I don’t feel bad about holding people to unreasonable standards of well-roundedness when they assert that their favorite corner of human experience is equivalent to humanity itself. I suppose a true polymath may indeed call me out on this, but I strongly doubt that any true polymath would be running around asserting the superior human-ness of a single specific field in the first place.
In any case, the original article isn’t even about “art”, in the sense of what most people would consider to be missing from a stone cube, and which does include, as pointed out, such diverse works as fashion, music, movies, video games, furniture design, international technical symbols, the patterns on shampoo bottles, cooking, typography, and hentai doujins. (And not just because many of the actual stone cubes we have today are entirely the fault of artists, and the governments and large institutions that backed brutalist architecture.) It’s about “the arts” and cutting the funding they get from the United States government.
While it should be obvious that there’s a pretty hard limit on just how subversive anything that gets funding from the United States government can actually be, the author doesn’t want to admit that it’s in service of a power-that-is that they happen to side with, and so equivocates the defunding of a government arts program with the active suppression of art (by, for example, mass executions) that people would otherwise create on their own, state funding or not.
And indeed, people do create a lot of art on their own, without state funding. Every form of art you mention to emphasis the importance of art only argues against the National Endowment for the Arts, because if people can create all of that without government funding, then how important can the NEA possibly be? Not important at all, unless you want to protect art from influence of the regime, in which case, getting government money out of the arts should be something you’re entirely on board with.
Much of the “subversive” art is highly overrated, buying into existing boring narratives already approved by factions that have existed for a long time, and I’m beginning to wonder about an Alt Righter’s claim that modern art is actually some kind of tax avoidance scheme.
If the government is going to fund art, it should be art that people actually LIKE and as such benefit the nation, not deliberately insulting and confusing pretentiousness. The other suitable role is to preserve elements of our cultural heritage, such as historic buildings. This isn’t like materials science where pushing the cutting edge improves our standard of living.
In other words, government-funded art should be unironically pleasant.