What isn't art?

Wall poems

Leiden is home to 99 wall poems.  It was supposed to be 100, but that's a long story.   Here's a favorite of mine by the Nieuwe Rijn.  

Cultural observation:   The gilded cage  

The arts are heavily subsidized in the Netherlands.  This leads to a few perverse results.  

First,  lots of young people pursue the arts to the exclusion of other career options despite a, .... oh how shall I put this delicately?... , TOTAL LACK OF TALENT!   

Second, truly talented artists find it difficult to rise above the noise floor.  

Third, the government owns lots and lots of art that it keeps warehoused.   

Now, it's nice that artists who would otherwise have to get jobs, go on the welfare, or just starve, are paid by the government to make art that the government then buys. But, does it do the artist any good beyond the direct value of the subsidy?  After all, my grad students like their monthly stipend, but they get upset when I take forever to edit a joint manuscript.  Why?  Because they do what they do to have the results disseminated and also to build a reputation and a career.  

Anyway,  sometimes sensible people in the government agencies that own the art manage to get some of it on display or directly commission a work for public installment and we get things like the quirky tube of toothpaste in Leiden Castle.   So on the whole, I think it's good for the public, but I don't think it's as good a deal for the artists as one might think.  

In defense of art 

So you might surmise that I am generally hostile to public funding of the arts or to the arts generally. I am not at all. Here, one comes across funny little art projects very frequently and many are not ``professional." I think that art should be part of our lives every day. Great artists, in my opinion, don't create works that we can only admire from afar, rather they break new ground that we can all find fertile. Whether it is a choice of room wall colors, or a flower arrangement, or the doodles on a notebook cover we can and should create little bits of art everyday. This does not require professionalization. All the choices we make, all the projects we undertake, if we bring some aesthetic sense to these things, they become art projects. In the end, what isn't art?

Word of the day

schoonheid beauty. Schoonheid is waarheid, waarheid is schoonheid.