If you listen to the radio you have heard many public service announcements (PSAs) in recent years that fill up advertising space since advertisers are fewer than ever.
There is one type of PSA that you hear often. It promotes “music education” or “arts education”. It says that students who study music and art are much better students. This comes on top of decades in which “the arts” and “arts education” have been promoted endlessly in the Liberal Media and in the schools.
And of course we all agree that the arts are wonderful. But this promotion plan is all propaganda put out by public teacher unions and other Democrats to get more “funding” for music and art (i.e., to hire more teachers, most of them liberals) as fewer and fewer students can even handle the basic science, math and English skills that our society needs to prosper.
And unfortunately anyone can be an artist these days. And we are getting more and more of them every year. And this is hardly what America needs – another one million artists to add to the ten million who already cannot make a living.
Indeed the liberals lay it on thick, that only ‘the arts’ can save us, that only art matters, that everything else is irrelevant, that we all can be rich and famous artists, poets, novelists etc.
Yet the so-called “arts” have been commandeered by no-talent political hacks on the Democrat left who are not even artists. They put out endless rivers of paintings and sculptures and volumes of poetry, plays and other gobbledygook that make no sense and have no value except to other fakers.
It is called “postmodernism”. And it is intended to contravene everything we know about the Western triumph in the arts in order to degrade Western societies. It all comes from the destructive communist left and commenced with the publication of the Communist Manifesto in 1848.
And remember who the fakers are. Not only do these socialists not believe in the high ideals of historical Western art that we conservatives do – because they are utterly incapable of understanding them or emulating them – but they are often hard leftists who endlessly malign the economic institutions that provide our basic resources like oil companies, coal companies and utilities.
In other words they think that the world is powered by dance performances, senseless paintings and postmodernist films, i.e., by themselves. It is utter narcissism.
These people are too propagandized by the left to know that there would be no art, plays or novels without a strong economy in the first place. Have you noticed how many arts organizations have been shuttered by the Obama Depression?
But on and on they go. They talk about the “economic value” of the arts. Yet art would have no economic value whatsoever without an underlying economy to produce the wealth to devote to the arts.
Like good liberals today’s arts organizations always have their hands out. And you are supposed to think that you are really ‘cool’ if you buy a painting or give money to one of these organizations.
Actually, friends, in today’s world you are not ‘cool’ at all. You are being conned. Generally you are giving that money to no-talent freeloaders.
How about ‘1% for Art’, the formula that has been widespread for decades now, that public buildings must devote 1% of their construction costs to art for the building, like a sculpture out front? So if the government builds a $10 million building some artist gets $100,000 for his sculpture.
Indeed the taxpayer ends up being forced to patronize an artist picked by a ‘panel of experts’.
And you know who these artists are and who the people are on the “panels” that pick them – they are all left-wing hacks in the Art Establishment who are vocal socialists/Democrats. Period. End of story. Conservatives need not apply. In fact in many cases if a conservative even shows up at an art event he is singled out and hounded for his views.
Up where I, Nikitas, live in New England, one of the most significant supporters of the arts is a former Republican state senator who is a very successful businessman. All the arts organizations are left wing, but he still supports them and is loved by them because he gives them money.
That is as far as the love goes, however. After Bush won re-election in 2004 one of the bureaucrats who works at one of those arts organizations wrote a scathing column for the local newspaper declaring that “Republican poison” was spreading across the nation.
This is typical. To the arts establishment Republicans are evil… unless they are handing over the cash.
Of course museums get into the act. The museum at Williams College in Massachusetts spent a huge amount of money – hundreds of thousands of dollars, apparently – to buy this horrendous artwork called Eyes (part of it is pictured below) from the non-artist Louise Bourgeois.
This is a piece of vulgar cartooning; it is not art. It has all the characteristics of cheap cartooning – it is jokey and crudely crafted – and none of the fine traits of drawing, painting or sculpture. Yet the museum bought it because Bourgeois is a world-famous feminist and leftist.
Artist? No.
Why did they buy it?
To further the idea that non-artists are “artists” and to direct money, fame and authority to non-artists and feminists. As long as they espouse leftist ideals, of course.
Meanwhile across the street from the museum is this beautiful Thompson Memorial Chapel (below, built 1903-5) which was designed by a real architect more than 100 years ago. Louise Bourgeois could not design the janitor’s closet in this magnificent building.
The fact is that there are too many artists in America today, too many no-talent artists and far too few really talented people. And any genuinely talented people are discriminated against by the bullies and thugs in the so-called Arts Establishment (critics, gallery owners, patrons etc.)
And for decades now, since the 1960s, an increasingly wealthy ‘arts culture’ has gotten richer and richer. Which is the point. It is all about shifting wealth, power, notoriety etc. to people on the left. Conservatives are virtually excluded (oh, sure, there’s a token few).
Yet the art is getting worse and worse. There recently was an article about Yoko Ono, the widow of John Lennon, who now fancies herself an artist.
Her art?
Piles of dirt…
But this is what art has descended to… piles of dirt.
No beautiful landscapes or portraits or challenging human forms to ponder. Instead we get piles of dirt from someone who is not even an artist. Her only claim to fame is that she was married to a famous musician.
But these people have been raking in the billions in the arts in the last 100 years. Today an artist judges his or her “success” on how many shows he/she has had, how many paintings have sold, how much media coverage he/she gets.
And this certainly has happened throughout history. But in the past you got recognition for real art, not for piles of dirt.
So the wealth and fame have shifted from real artists to fake left-wing artists. And then the fake artists take all the big commissions and the prestigious teaching jobs at the universities while lesser fake artists take all the jobs lower down in the public and private schools, and the lower-level commissions.
A conservative can never exist in this universe. Because it is relentlessly liberal and anyone who disagrees with the orthodoxy of the left cannot stand the non-stop propagandizing. Even if you go to an art opening, for instance, you can expect to hear at least one conversation about how horrible Republicans and conservatives are, with everyone nodding in agreement.
And then these people demand more and more money for “arts education”.
Gee, wonder why…
Of course we conservatives believe in real arts education. But if you want to teach about the classical approach to art and the triumph of Greek art or Renaissance art that we advocate, forget it. Today “arts education” is multicultural, politically-correct, postmodernist, ugly and meaningless. Like piles of dirt.
And they demand ‘1% for Art’ so that they can fund terrible ‘artists’ to get large amounts of taxpayer money producing art that is multicultural, politically-correct, postmodernist, ugly and meaningless. Like piles of dirt.
And their media friends praise people who make piles of dirt, while anyone who makes anything vaguely beautiful is maligned and kept away from the cash box.
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