While perusing assorted blogs, news articles, and Internet sites (no— not THOSE sites) this past week, I read two wildly different pieces. Though both explored the role of the liberal arts in our culture, the first— a reader response to a local news article— implicitly excoriated any profession that hinted at creativity.
The grumpy writer was responding to an on-line report, one that described how an artist lost her city job because she fell asleep too often during the workday. The ex-employee stated that she had a problem with narcolepsy. The former employers couldn’t comment. The artist’s salary was mentioned. And, like children unleashed in the bumper car pavilion at the local amusement park, the critics were off, debating the pros and cons with different assumptions.
One writer, however, took a side path. In earth-scorching prose, he lambasted the authorities and society and whomever for paying an artist the unrighteous sum of $55,000 per year. (A quick note: if you don’t live in a major city, this is a good salary) At the very least, cut the salary in half, the writer opined; he also offered a few other choice observations about the good things that could be done with that money, rather than wasting it on a needless occupation.
Sometimes I am amused by ranters; occasionally, offended; and, every once in a while, mystified. What still puzzles me about this writer’s response, what pulls me back as if I’m scratching at a scab on my knee, is the writer’s implied understanding of the role of an artist. Because I don’t know this person, I can only imagine that he sees performers and painters and designers and writers as periphery to our lives, as silly dabblers. They add nothing to our society beyond a few frills.
Makes me laugh, of course. I want to find this person and point to his car, to his house, to his faucets, to his television, to his furniture, to his clothes, to his watch, to his yard, to his walls, to his streets, to his grocery market aisles. I want to ask him,
Where would we be without the artists?
The second article, an Associated Press article, quoted Supreme Court Justice David Souter discussing the necessity for a solid understanding of history and the liberal arts. His views in brief: we need a liberal arts education so that we can understand ourselves and our impact on the world.
Of course, as the product of a liberal arts education, and as a teacher, I naturally gravitate toward Souter’s views. We need to understand the context of our surroundings, of our actions, of our trajectories. Visuals in particular, and art in general, are ways of understanding the ordering our lives, of giving meaning, beauty, and expression to experience. So why not pay an artist a salary, one that will allow her to live a comfortable middle class life?
Long live David Souter.
Robin Follet lives, writes, and cartoons in North Carolina.
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