04-17-2022, 06:08 AM
(04-12-2022, 03:27 PM)JasonBlack Wrote: The arts usually don't need more funding. It's not because they aren't important, but because getting exposure to the arts is usually extremely inexpensive.
1) You can go on youtube and find free videos of every genre from rap, to classic rock, to baroque opera to Mongolian Throat Singing
2) The library is free
3) The human voice is free
Sure, maybe you need a bit for paint supplies, instruments and the occasional class trip, but by and large, just because something is important doesn't mean it has to be expensive. Seriously though, do you know anyone around today who doesn't have near constant exposure to like 10 different genres of music? The idea that we need exorbitant school district spending to facilitate this is absurd and wasteful.
The arts can enrich life, offer insights into the complexity of life that academic studies offer, and define a culture. To be sure, the arts can serve as an anodyne (the Nazis still showed love for great music so long as it was "Aryan" and compatible with Nazi ideals). Still, I will take the extreme creativity of the profit-oriented movie moguls of America over any cultural innovation that the Nazis offered. To the embarrassment of the Nazis the British could exploit the humanity of great German music.
Visual arts must be seen to be appreciated, and an essential part of art education is in learning the conventions of form*, shading, color, and perspective. Music at its best is often so abstract that it has such generic titles as String Quartet No. 13 in G major, Op. 106 by Antonín Dvořák that one needs a certain measure in both literacy and knowledge of music to recognize that it merits a listen:
If one does not recognize that two violins, a viola, and a cello can offer rich, complete sound, that such music is too good to need eccentric costumes, and that music with such generic titles can be richer than music with colorful titles, then one misses this.
People can appreciate this music if they are in Baltimore or Bangalore (I chose these two places solely for the rhyme); Perth, Scotland or Perth, Australia; Odessa, Texas or Odessa, Ukraine. or San Jose, California or San Jose, Costa Rica. But only among people both learned in music and highly literate, in which case this music is highly accessible. Otherwise it might as well br on the dark side of the moon.
Then music like this is known to offend the sensibilities of juvenile delinquents -- enough that it has been used as a deterrent to hoodlums.
2. The library might be free and thus useful, but it generally lacks much appeal as might a sports bar.
3. Honing an operatic voice is fiendish, and although everyone can sing, far too few can carry a tune. In my case I can carry a tune, but my baritone voice is so weak that I would be buried in a chorus. Pop singers operate by different rules than do singers of opera or Lieder, but the really-good ones have trained their voices.
Such painting as I have done is more geometry than art.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.