Tyler Green reported in Modern Painters that Americans have reason to be concerned about the relationship between the arts and politics. An excerpt:
“I’m not sure why U.S. art lovers are reacting with such passivity to the worst funding decreases in nearly a generation, but here’s a guess: No one is suggesting that they be mad. No one close to them is organizing a public response, demonstrating how many art-related events, programming, and jobs in their communities will be lost, or explaining that their children could lose key elements of their school curriculum and that the costs of visiting their local museums could go up.
I think the key reason is that U.S. art lovers just aren’t that effective at organizing or lobbying. That’s a surprise, because the way Americans interact with art should lend itself to coordinated campaigning in favor of funding. One of the strengths of art in the United States is its broad base. We don’t have one city with the majority of our great museums, our great collections, or our great education institutions; we have dozens. There are world-class collections of Old Master paintings in Dayton and Toledo, Ohio. Two of the world’s best photography collections are in out-of-the-way Tucson, Arizona, and Rochester, New York. Minimalism’s mecca is the Chinati Foundation, in Marfa, Texas, population 2,121. Ed Ruscha’s favorite Ed Ruscha is at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in the former capital of the Confederacy, Richmond. Although New York City is America’s art capital, metropolitan-area New Yorkers make up just 6 percent of Americans. That means that 94 percent of Americans have their most regular and meaningful engagement with art somewhere besides New York, probably close to home. (Point of comparison: Metro London contains about a quarter of Britain’s population.)”
Click here to read the full post on ARTINFO.com. Image in this post of a collage by Sam Lubicz representing slashed funding for the arts.