Jewish Art

[crazy 0]

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GOOD ballet and opera can be profitable. Ditto with good paintings and sculpture.
There's no reason for the government to subsidize bad or unpopular "art"

Hopefully you'll never work for any Arts Council :-)
What is GOOD art? What is bad art? What makes art (un)popular?

You are right, GOOD Art can be profitable. Fortunately, some artists focus on artistic creation instead of focusing on marketing and profitability. The drawback is that they are unlikely to make much profit, if any, even though they would create potentially profitable art. Sometimes, it's only years after their death, that GOOD businessmen notice the GOOD art, and make some GOOD money out of it. Sometimes, it's only years later that other artists use unknown obscure arts from the past as the main inspiration of their own profitable art. Are Van Gogh's paintings bad art because he sold only one during his lifetime?
Without subsidies, there is no more arts creativity, only product development and marketting -- which implies a cultural and economical setback.

Besides, subsidizing arts makes it available to more people. Without subsidy, arts could become as elitist as some European art collections used to be -- the Louvre, for example. When people are not exposed to the diversity of arts, they have no opportunity to educate their taste, no reference for sound criticism.
Without subsidies, there are no more arts lovers, only pop-corn eating blockbusters customers -- which implies a cultural and economical setback as well.

--
Come
Skydive Asia

[falxori 0]

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I dont see any twisted facts here, they are all pretty well known, except for maybe the deaths of palestinians i think is around 150,000 not 200,000.

mind telling me where you got these numbers from?
none of these figures is "well known" and at least some, i can easily prove they have nothing to do with reality...

but lets go your way, and talk about the definition.
what is a refugee? a person who has lost his home and had to settle somewhere else? and after he was settled, do you count his children and grandchildren as refugee too?
killed? civilians only or armed forces too (including terrorists)?
even if you go to the most extreme definitions i doubt you'll get to these numbers.
then again, if you believe israel uses gas on children in Gaza and dump toxic waste in their water supply, i don't see why you'd doubt these "facts"

O

"Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero."

[billvon 2,902]

>Without subsidies, there is no more arts creativity, only product
>development and marketting -- which implies a cultural and
> economical setback.

Who subsidized William Faulkner? Walt Whitman? Jackson Pollock? There was no NEA when they lived.

>Without subsidies, there are no more arts lovers, only pop-corn
> eating blockbusters customers -- which implies a cultural and
> economical setback as well.

Are you saying there was no art lovers (or indeed any art at all) in the US before the 1960's, when the NEA began subsidizing artists?

Mediocre artists apply for grants. Truly great artists just create art.

[newsstand 0]

I think authors/playwrites fall in to a different class because their work is readily distributed to the masses.

Patron's of the arts can also be wealthy individuals so while the money may not have come from the government it still came from a small group of people.

Who says Jack the Dripper is an artist?

"Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay, you may kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening."
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes

[billvon 2,902]

>Patron's of the arts can also be wealthy individuals so while the
> money may not have come from the government it still came from
> a small group of people.

Exactly! And that's a much better way to fund the arts. A patron can fund whatever they want - sculpture, literature, photography, even porn - and there are no issues over public money going to support such things.

[newsstand 0]

Of all the places the government can spend my money arts seems to be one of the better ones. As I said earlier the trick is defining art.

"Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay, you may kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening."
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes

[crazy 0]

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Who subsidized William Faulkner? Walt Whitman? Jackson Pollock? There was no NEA when they lived.

Art subsidies didn't start with the NEA. Among these 3 examples, Whitman is the only one who was not subsidised in some way. William Faulkner was subsidised by his familly (i think they started the Kentucky Railroad Company and the First National Bank of Oxford) and the University of Mississippi in Oxford under a special provision for war veterans, even though he had never graduated from high school and he never went to war. Pollock was subsidised by his family (they spent a lot of money for his art classes) and he was on the federal payroll (New Deal's work-relief projects).

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Are you saying there was no art lovers (or indeed any art at all) in the US before the 1960's, when the NEA began subsidizing artists?

Again, Art subsidies didn't start with the NEA. There were art lovers before.

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Mediocre artists apply for grants. Truly great artists just create art.

Would you care explaining what grant applications has to do with he quality of the art or the quality of the artist? There are many artists considered as great artists who applied for grants (Diego Rivera for instance, or Jackson Pollock). There are pitiful artists who never applied for any grant and just focused on creating.

Do you think that great artists would still be great artists without the mediocre ones? Would William Faulkner be such a great artist without his grandfather as a source of inspiration? Claiming that only great art should be subsidized sounds a bit like claiming that only gold ores should be extracted from a gold mine. It's even worse because it's easy to identify gold; it's much more difficult (if even possible) to identify great art.

--
Come
Skydive Asia