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February 24, 2009

STEPHANIE SALTER: Artists are workers, too – don’t they deserve to be supported?

By Stephanie Salter

TERRE HAUTE — I just think putting people to work is more important than putting more art on the wall of some New York City gallery frequented by the elite art community. Call me a sucker for the working man.

— U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga., on allocating a small part of the emergency stimulus package to the National Endowment for the Arts

You’ve got to hand it to Rep. Jack Kingston. In two sentences, he managed to perpetuate several of the most popular and divisive lies about art, artists and the public money that sometimes helps support a few of them.

Among hundreds of billions of dollars allocated for tax cuts, infrastructure projects and jobs creation in the emergency stimulus package, $50 million will go to save real women and men from losing their jobs at non-profit arts organizations.

Savvy pol that he is, Kingston didn’t talk jobs when he weighed in on the NEA money — at least not jobs held by people in the arts. Rather, he offered up the kind of phony, Either/Or, Us-versus-Them image that has helped relegate U.S. arts and letters to the Guantanamo corner of American society. (And, of course, he used that magic word of class warfare — elite.) So:

• You either work for a living and pay your taxes or you — ugh — sit around all day and paint pictures or something.

• You’re either a sucker for “the working man” or you enable slackers who — Kingston implied with his trumped up dichotomy — live in big cities but do not work or contribute to the public coffers in any way.

• Money in the hands of NEA recipients is really for the elite, those snobs with hot-shot educations who don’t have to work and who think they are better than all the honest Joes and Jane out there who bust their butts just trying to pay the light bill.

• Public arts money is always a one-way street that ends with “more art” on the wall of “some” gallery in New York.

• Being East Coast and urban, this gallery is so cut off from reality and ordinary standards, it isn’t even visited. It is “frequented,” like an opium den, porno movie house or public rest room.

• And frequented by whom? Not by students, seniors or working men and women who feel elevated and excited by a painting, sculpture or multi-media installation. No, the only creatures attracted to such a place are members of the “elite art community.”

Kingston’s statement is almost, you should excuse the term, a work of art. In 37 words, he reduced our nation’s vast and talent-rich realm of visual arts, music, theater and dance to an over-crowded wall in a hypothetical gallery in New York.

Would that he were alone.

Last week, during a visit to Terre Haute, Sen. Evan Bayh played the Artists-or-Working-Folks card. A Democrat and supporter of the stimulus package, he nonetheless felt compelled to diss the $50 million for the NEA.

“I think the arts are great,” Bayh said. “When the economy is strong, I am all for investing in the arts. If you ask me if that [money] was directly related to creating jobs today, I would say, not as much as some of the other things we could be doing.”

Since when did creating jobs cancel out saving jobs?

Are we arguing need? Then, why is it OK to earmark money to save jobs in the auto industry, where workers will turn out more vehicles in a country already saturated with vehicles that no one really needs?

Unlike many industries, non-profit arts organizations are not just now learning about downsizing. They always struggle. Their workers know no budgets other than lean and mean.

The NEA stimulus money isn’t luxury pork, it’s a teaspoon of the big vat of chicken soup that President Obama and Congress are cooking up to feed the sick economy.

Bayh may be all for investing in the arts (and the jobs they create and sustain) when the economy is strong, but many of his Congressional colleagues are not. Public funding for art, music, dance, film and theater in the United States has never reflected good times or bad.

Private donations, however, do reflect boom or bust, which is all the more reason to throw a lifeline to the arts when the economy is weak or staggering.

In the same period that Jack Kingston was painting his misleading portrait of some gallery wall in New York City, I attended a Terre Haute Symphony concert, watched a play at St. Mary-of-the-Woods College and ducked into the Swope Museum to see the current exhibits.

The symphony, Indiana’s oldest continuing classical orchestra, would not exist (and present magnificent music) were its caretakers not experts in pooling private, corporate and public funds, and making the money go as far as is humanly possible.

The Swope is the same. There are no year-end, six-figure bonuses for any of the folks who work to keep that beautiful space open and exhibiting such engaging shows as the Midwest Paint Group and African American Images and Artists.

The theater students at the Woods might have presented “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” just fine all by themselves. But without Arts Illiana grant money, they would have missed valuable lessons, which transcend the stage and were shared by professional actress Delia Taylor, who portrayed the title role.

The day may come when the economy is so bad, I will have to spend every penny I earn just to buy food. Until then, the work of people who paint, sculpt, play, compose, act or write stage dialogue for a living is part of what makes life more than just a hard, scrubby existence.

Don’t buy the lie. A gainfully employed person is a benefit to society, and “Made In America” matters, whether the product is pickups, silicon chips, concrete pilings, sliced bread, textbooks, stock portfolios or art.



Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

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