Economics vs culture: 21st c. boxing match.

We had a rousing good discussion in cultural policy class last night on the issue of globalization as it affects the arts. It's a tangled web of economic and governmental interests versus a variety of artists, local and small-country governments, and nonprofit arts advocates and managers, trying to negotiate terrain that gets more complicated every day as the digital capabilities of the world increase.

It comes down to money versus culture. Two interests speaking different languages. At present, there is no authority who decides. The World Trade Organization versus UNESCO. Just as the "culture wars" of the 80s and 90s were so much about women, sex, the gay movement, and religion under the guise of arguments about art, the "trade wars" of the 2010s might well be about big money vs little (and individual culture), under the guise of "free trade" versus "protectionism." There's a lot of work to be done -- advocacy, education, scholarship, negotiation, just plain thinking. Keep the artists at the center and much will be gained, not so much lost.

We need new arguments

The elimination of the arts from the stimulus bill -- and the chorus of "who needs the arts" that followed even on liberal sites like Huffington Post and Daily Kos, suggests that we have so spectacularly failed to make our case that the arts are important. The popular imagination doesn't buy the "arts create jobs" concept, even though it's true. People generally understand roads, rails and buildings as ways to employ people. They support (sort of) education, especially when the President talks about crumbling school buildings and the need for science labs.

One of my students last night rather brilliantly linked the beleageured cause of the arts to the sciences, which, under the previous administration and in the chorus of global warming-deniers, has become a somewhat partisan cause. Who knew that the search for objective truth would become a liberal cause, when even many if not most scientists aren't liberals?

Artists, academics, humanists, scientists -- we're all in the same boat, drifting further and further from the mainstream's perception. Obama's election helped, but we have to row this boat on our own, not wait for his administration's solutions. How shall we speak up for the arts?