[rollei_list] Re: OT Artistic Voices (was Re: OT Mapplethorpe)
- From: Marc James Small <marcsmall@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:07:34 -0500
At 04:25 PM 3/8/2010, Eric Goldstein wrote:
Your thoughts remind me of the recent
protestations of a great American Tea Partier,
"get your government hands off my Medicare." It
seems you have no hesitation about being the
arbiter of what is worthwhile and what is not.
OTOH I enjoy seeing our money being spent in
ways which you and I find loathsome via our
American Democracy in action. You see I am a patriot.
As for the lefty leanings of Jeff Jacoby, that's
alternative universe stuff. Jacoby came from the
untra Righty Boston Herald before the Glode made
him their Conservative in Residence, and his
right of Attila The Hon rants over the decades are legendary...
Eric, you certainly appear to be no patriot. You
simply seem to me to be yet another person intent
on taking MY money to advance your own private
agenda. Not very nice, old boy, not very nice at all.
No one on the right seems to regard Jacoby as
anything but a Leftie-Loonie, Eric. The Boston
Herald was quite left of center and could only be
regarded as being right-wing when compared to the
Bolshevik Globe. Calling yourself a Conservative
does not make you one, nor does being endorsed as
such by an organ of the Comintern such as the
Globe. And no one out here in Flyover Land has ever heard of Jacoby.
As a side note, if it were up to me, I would
eliminate Medicare, Social Security, the
Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal
Reserve, and a lot of other agencies. I would
sell off the National Parks and the National
Forests. I would restrict the Federal government
to its four mandated roles, that of providing for
a common foreign policy, a common defence, a
common currency, and protecting the individual
rights of the citizens. Beyond that, the States
may do as they wish: if Massachusetts wishes to
pay for an Art Museum, more power to them. Just
don't hope to steal MY money to pay for YOUR museum!
Art is intensely personal and there just is
nothing universal about it. For starters, I
doubt that 5% of the USian polity really care
much about Art beyond velvet posters of Elvis,
paintings of dogs playing cards, and Super Bowl
and NASCAR art. And of the 5% who do claim an
appreciation of art, I suspect that 4% are just
sucking up to their betters. So, why tax 100% of
the folks for the benefit of 1%? Hardly sounds
like a proper goal for a popular government, does it, Patriot Eric?
At the least, Medicare is a universal program
involving every US citizen and resident
alien. Public funding of art is NOT a universal
program: it is a program which forces the
entirety to pay for the benefit of the very few.
Nevil Shute set out a part of my attitude most
wonderfully when he commented in THE FAR COUNTRY
on paintings "praised by critics who really
should have known better". I am not attracted to
visual art in any form -- the only D grade I
achieved in college was in an "art appreciation"
course, the sort of slide course taken by the
jocks to pump up their grade point average. I do
not see the distinction between the products of,
say, Eisie or Capa and the products of the
average camera-jockey on a daily paper. I do
like photography but I only wish to please
myself: I have no interest in producing a print
which would garner a reaction from you, as your
opinion of my work is of no interest to me. And
I cap this position of disinterest by promising
NOT to reach for your pocketbook to pay me for my personal hobby.
In the end, art is such an intensely private
matter as to have no universal norms by which it
can be judged. You can establish construction
standards for highways and aircraft but you
cannot establish such standards for art. If you
cannot reduce it to a mathematical formula, the
engineers claim, it is not real. And, so, a
picture that YOU might like I might find of no
worth at all. So, why should you be entitled to
steal MY money to pay for pictures you
like? Again, not very nice, old boy, not very nice at all.
I really had thought Garrison Keillor had put the
public funding of art to bed with his broad and
very sarcastic tales of "Bob: A Starving Artist"
on A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION. If a Leftie like
Keillor has no respect for the public funding of art, why should you?
Marc
msmall@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Cha robh bàs fir gun ghràs fir!
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