February 16, 2009

It has become a necessity for art to justify itself as an agent of commerce and development. Every arts organization competing for public funding with homeless shelters, crossing guards and needle exchange, uses a formula developed by Americans for the Arts called “The Arts and Economic Prosperity Calculator.” The formula converts spending by arts organizations into dollars of jobs, tax revenues, etc. Using this formula, the most recent estimate is that nationally, the nonprofit “arts and culture industry” generates $166.2 billion in economic activity every year.
I am of three or four minds about this. Wouldn’t we all rather have the inherent, inalienable value of the thing we do and love recognized by the world without question - so much so that the right to pubic funding would be obvious to all. But since I’m not an air traffic controller  or a food safety inspector (there are still a few of those, right?), that’s not likely to happen.
And I truly and deeply believe that the arts are absolutely and demonstrably essential to a rich human life and that music, art, literature and theater should therefore be taught to our children and supported by our leaders in good times and bad. Good Lord, our ancestors living in caves and struggling to drag home enough meat to survive found time to paint eternally inspiring images on the cave walls. And we remove art and music classes from public schools because we can’t “afford” it?
But the truth is that in this world, we do compete with homeless shelters and athletic programs and that the people who decide where to allocate public funds can’t ignore that. So as long as the arts depend on public funding, which is probably forever, they will have to speak in terms that allow the public’s representatives assign value to the arts, and in this world, that seems inevitably to mean dollar value.
Still, that’s not going to stop me cringing when I hear every arts organization claim that it generates X dollars in value. Because the dollar value of art is among the most arbitrary things in the world. Just consider the latest New York auctions. A painting worth $1 million this year was “worth” $10 million last year. Does anyone actually believe that the inherent value of that art is 1/10 what it was 12 months ago? Dollars don’t measure that value, just like they don’t measure the value of clean air and unpolluted water or a mountaintop in West Virginia.
This rant seems to be drawing to a close. It was triggered, I will now admit, by the weekend St. Valentine’s combination of art and commerce in which I happily participated, co-curating and showing in “RED: St. Valentine Bled for us All.” It was good for the artists, good for the visitors and good for the developers who need desperately to rent all the spanking new apartments near the ballpark. Still, these always get me thinking.