When In Doubt, Shoot The Rich

There's nothing like a great big mess of fuzzy populist logic to get my blood boiling on a Monday morning, and thanks to outgoing St. Paul Pioneer Press arts critic extraordinaire, Dominic Papatola, I've just been reading an 1800-word rant of cosmically fuzzy and populist proportions by none other than rock star David Byrne, who maintains an impressively extensive blog on his website.

It's always dangerous to try and summarize an argument that you vehemently disagree with, but since I'm assuming that most of you aren't actually going to go and read the whole blasted thing, I'll do my best to be fair up front. Basically Byrne has noted from local LA news reports that the LA Opera is currently in severe fiscal distress, and is seeking (and has since received) some $14 million from the city/county government to keep it from collapsing before the end of the current season. Byrne has also noted that the very same LA Opera is undertaking a truly massive (even by Hollywood standards) production of Wagner's Ring cycle, at an estimated cost of $32 million. "What makes this situation notable is not the amount of money," says Byrne, "but the fact that the audience will be so small, and that the state is footing part of the bill."

Leaving aside the question of how we're defining "small," Byrne's obviously got a point here. It's wildly awkward, to say the least, to be asking for a massive government bailout at the same time that you're continuing work on the operatic equivalent of Avatar.

Of course, bailing on a project as big as the Ring when you've already committed significant resources to it might not make fiscal sense, either, so my guess is that LA Opera has found itself in a damned-if-they-do, damned-if-they-don't situation, and is trying to make the best of it. But whatever - Byrne's not dealing in such minutiae. He has bigger fish to fry.

His next target is museums and other cultural institutions around the US which, inspired by huge projects like the Bilbao Guggenheim, decided that a splashy new building (or piece of a building) designed by one of the four or five "starchitects" whose names are actually known to the wider public would be enough to generate new revenue streams and public devotion for ever and ever, amen. Once again, that's not exactly what happened, but Byrne again has a serious point to make, and it's one that's been made by many who analyze the arts world for a living.

But that's where Byrne stops dealing in reality, and makes his stunning leap from a defensible idea - that large arts institutions (much like banks, Fortune 500 companies, and families across America) spent much of the last 20 years thinking too much about expansion and consumption and too little about long-term fiscal security - to an absolutely absurd one...

"However this mess ends up, my thoughts are that maybe it’s time to rethink all this museum, opera and symphony funding — and I refer mainly to state funding. A bunch of LA museums just got a bailout from LA real estate king Eli Broad, and that’s great, but I suspect there will be county money involved there somewhere too. I think maybe it’s time to stop, or more reasonably, curtail somewhat, state investment in the past — in a bunch of dead guys (and they are mostly guys, and mostly dead, when we look at opera halls) — and invest in our future. Take that money, that $14 million from the city, for example, let some of those palaces, ring cycles and temples close — forgo some of those $32M operas — and fund music and art in our schools. Support ongoing creativity in the arts, and not the ongoing glorification and rehashing of the work of those dead guys."

Now, look. I'm all for getting America's commitment to arts education back up to a civilized level, but this argument has honestly become the last refuge of the damned in the cultural sphere. It boils down to "I don't personally enjoy or attend the specific performance/museum/concert that recently received money from my city/county/state, and therefore I believe that said money was entirely wasted, and probably should have gone to the schools instead. Won't someone please think of the children?!" It's the arts equivalent of me saying to you: Minnesota spends a huge amount of money to give out food stamps that I never use and that are no good to me. Wouldn't that money be better spent giving poor kids an education so that they won't grow up to need food stamps?

Moreover, in the rush to decry and demonize government assistance of any kind to any private institution in the wake of the massive bank bailouts of recent years, I've noticed that Americans on both ends of the political spectrum have gotten exceedingly good at spotting which of their political/cultural enemies receive some level of public funding. But those same people often seem willfully blind to public funding that goes to causes or organizations that they personally value. People working in the arts or education blast huge state subsidies to build a baseball stadium for a billionaire MLB owner, but conveniently ignore (or defend) the subsidies that helped build the Guthrie Theater. Others toss around words like "socialism" when government wants to provide equal access to health care using public funds, but ignore (or defend) the enormous earmark their city/county/state received to fund a new hospital and create a few hundred jobs.

Back to Byrne, though, because he's not remotely done throwing around baseless assertions and drawing bizarre conclusions from them...

"The problem of course, as far as private funding goes, is that what billionaire wants to fund school education?"

Um, well, tons of them, actually. Your average hour of public radio contains half a dozen underwriting credits for education-based foundations funded by America's wealthy. But I'm sorry, I interrupted - you were saying...?

"Where’s the glamour in that? You don’t get your name etched in marble on the outside of a hall for that, or get invited to amazing galas, so what’s the point? That’s why I’m focusing on public and state funding — let the private funders bankroll the opry halls, if that’s where they want to hang out."

Ah, yes, that old canard. Rich people, you see, don't actually fund arts and culture because they like it or think it's important. They fund it to see their name on a building and have a private box where everyone in the hall can gaze upon them in their fur coats and other frippery. In other news, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett recently grew moustaches like the guy on the cover of the Monopoly box, started charging exorbitant rent on Park Place and Marvin Gardens, and used the proceeds to build a secret volcano lair from which to control their impending plan for planetary domina...

...oh. No. Wait. My mistake. That's what rich guys in cartoons and James Bond movies do. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are too busy funding education and trying to cure AIDS for that volcano stuff.

At it's core, Byrne's argument boils down to this: it's not fair that so much money goes to cultural institutions that celebrate the classics when modern-day artists, musicians, and writers have to struggle for recognition and subsistence-level funding. Moreover, "it’s more important to encourage creativity than to imply that good work can only be made by professionals — your betters."

Hard to argue with that. But Byrne doesn't actually offer any solution to the problem: he just whines about imagined elitism amongst the cognoscenti, and then, like a toddler throwing a tantrum, takes his dissatisfaction with the status quo to its most illogical end: let's just blow the whole thing up! And coming from a musician who actually produces thought-provoking work on a consistent basis, that's worse than fuzzy logic. It's an attempt to start a war that will inevitably claim you as a casualty.