Why Art?

On Friday I received an email from my alma mater, North Carolina School of the Arts, informing me that the state was looking to cut it’s annual budget by 10%, or roughly $2,000,000. This reduction in funding will force the school to lay off faculty and staff, and thus reduce the level of education for it’s students. It seems likely that the budget cuts will also raise tuition.

As dire as this is for the school, what disturbs me most is the underlying reason for it. Despite having been in existence for forty years, and producing graduates who have gone on to star onstage and behind the scenes in film, television, theatre, music, opera, dance and film, the school has been under attack by members of the NC state legislature who question the need for it to exist.

The argument frequently is that the arts are not practical, don’t produce anything of tangible value. And of course many of us do work for little money with almost no security. But as far as not producing anything practical?

I honestly don’t know what to say to people who don’t see the need for the arts. To me it seems self evident. The arts are why we do all the other crap, why we live at all. To attack the arts is to attack that which makes life worth living.

These attacks generally stem from the religious right, and I am left to wonder why. Is it because the production of art is no longer solely under the patronage, and thus control, of the church? That has been the case for centuries, so I somehow doubt that is it.

Is it because societies have elevated artists into almost worshipful status, thus supplanting God? Perhaps, but we have done the same with sports and political figures as well, and no one from the church is raising hell about that.

What I think causes these attacks is this: I believe the arts are about expressing one’s understanding of universal truths. And those that would like us all to believe what they believe, think how they think, cannot stand that anyone would have the ability to see these truths through any other lens but their own. When we are each capable of seeking, grasping and expressing these truths on our own, we have ended the need for the church to interpret them for us.

This is not to say I am anti- church. I am for any means to seek the truth. I simply object to the notion that there is only one path to be followed on this quest.