The return to regular routines for children and adults alike this week marks an unofficial end to summer for most of Utah, including those of us at 15 Bytes. During most of the summer we have taken a break from our hectic routine, both on the blog and in the pages of 15 Bytes. But no more. We’ll be out with a new edition of 15 Bytes next Wednesday, and, to prime the intellectual pump, this week we’re reawakening our relatively dormant blog.
One of the items that has caught our attention as we’ve returned to work is a recent piece by Chris Vanocur on ABC’s local affiliate, Channel 4. The piece was titled
“Could Salt Lake County sell multi-million dollar art collection to save money?” despite the fact that apparently no one, besides Vanocur, is even suggesting that possibility. As Vanocur reports, over the past 3 years the County has spent $85,000 on art (that at one point in the reporting this is called “nearly $100,000” suggests these journalists may not be the best people to keep track of our money). The piece fails to report that over half of that amount was spent in the first half of 2008, prior to the economic crisis. And while the last third of the piece mentions that the County art budget has been cut, it does not say by how much. In 2010, the Salt Lake County art budget was only $10,000 (or about one penny for every citizen in the county). Thankfully Vanocur’s piece does mention a few important points: that the Salt Lake County Art Collection is the largest collection of Utah art on public display, and that all the work is in public view. We’ll add a couple more: the County Collection art budget is used exclusively on work by Utah artists, so the money spent goes back into the local economy; and the well-respected collection attracts out-right donations as well as reduced pricing by artists and galleries so that the value of the collection exceeds its price.
When Vanocur couples the County’s art collecting with ominous phrases like the “worst economic stretch since the Great Depression” we wonder if he realizes that the State’s public art collection was begun during the Depression of the 1890s (and has yet to be auctioned off), or that the 1930s saw a flowering of art projects throughout the state, including collections in many of our public schools. We also wonder if Vanocur will soon be “following our money” to other County programs and asking if the Salt Lake County parks should be sold to private developers to make up for budget shortfalls, or if the County library system should sell off its books, movies and DVDs.
Vanocur’s piece made us consider two salient factors relative to our own project here at 15 Bytes: the perception of the arts’ relationship to the economy, and the state of journalism.
On Marketplace’s
Monday PM edition, Bill Radke spoke with Randy Cohen about the state of arts non-profits in the country. In his wrap-up Radke referenced the importance of the arts for the economy: “There's 100,000 nonprofit arts organizations. That supports 5.7 million jobs in this country. If you're a company or a government worried about jobs, that makes the arts a smart investment.” While well intentioned, Radke may be making the wrong argument from an economic perspective.
As British economist John Kay points out in a recent essay, it takes a good economist to know the “true value of the arts.” The value of the arts, writes Kay, is often spoken of in terms of jobs created, incomes paid. But according to this type of reasoning we could also say “disease is good for the economy.” “In Britain, more than a million people are employed to diagnose and treat disease and care for the ill . . . Illness contributes about 10 per cent of the UK’s economy: the government does not do enough to promote disease.”
Kay says, “the economic value of the arts is in the commercial and cultural value of the performance, not the costs of cleaning the theatre. The economic perspective does not differ from the commonsense perspective. Good economics here, as so often, is a matter of giving precision to our common sense. Bad economics here, as so often, involves inventing bogus numbers to answer badly formulated questions.” Read his full essay
here.
Another recent radio program explores the second topic Vanocur’s piece on the County art collection brought to mind: the state of journalism. Vanocur’s chosen journalistic medium, television, favors attention grabbing headlines and simplistic sound bytes to reasoned analysis and in-depth reporting. Traditionally we turn to print journalism for this latter type of reporting. Doug Fabrizio’s recent
Radio West segment on the future of the Deseret News and the current state of journalism may make you wonder if there is any hope of survival for this more informed mode of journalism. We found the program interesting in light of our own “journalistic” experiment (now nine years old) at 15 Bytes. Talk of “disruptive change” made us think of our own network of volunteer reporters and critics. As the Radio West program points out, this model for journalism can be very dangerous when it comes to reporting on politics and local civic news. But what about the arts? Is the coverage of the arts in 15 Bytes better or worse than what it was/is in the papers?
disclaimer: 15 Bytes editor Shawn Rossiter currently serves on the Salt Lake County Art Committee. But you might have already figured that out.
image: 15 Bytes editor Shawn Rossiter on a pre-summer vacation in Paris -- working on 15 Bytes.
"She wants her curators to draw from the eclectic and diverse collections and package them in interesting ways. Most importantly there must be no mediocre shows. As she discusses exhibition ideas with her staff her first question is always, “Is the art good? If the art’s not good enough we don’t do the show. . . "
"Florence has always been interested in textiles and patterns and has collected many pieces, either from clothing, upholstery, or yardage. So a few years ago, he decided to see what would happen if he painted directly on a piece of patterned fabric . . ."
"Before I die I would like to have a painting turn out like I see it in my mind’s eye. That would be nice . . ."
"The predicament of art that takes the human figure as subject matter today recalls Dickens on pre-revolutionary Europe: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” On the one hand, with reading on the decline and the graphic image taking its place as the popular narrative form, illustration dominates the channels of cultural diffusion, multiplying familiar outlets and creating new uses for figurative art at every level of accomplishment. On the other hand, in an era when art is split several ways, including the divide between the elite, permanent avant-garde and the popular, low brow alternative that shrugs off critical scorn, the realistic presentation of our favorite subject—ourselves—may earn the money and have the mass audience, but it cannot command the respect still adhering to Giotto, Rembrandt, and even Picasso: all masters of capturing the inner dimensions of humanity through the arrangement and presentation of pose and expression. . . ."
"It’s hard to find a frame shop around town that doesn’t secretly want to be a gallery. They may start off with the intention of simply framing art, but somehow, whether through the relationship with their artist clientele or their own passion for art, hosting exhibitions becomes an exciting focus for their business . . ."
"Watching Colleen Howe set up her easel during the “wet paint” painting session is a defining moment. I get it. On the spot painting. I watch Colleen Howe squeezing tubes of oil onto her palette, squinting into the distance. She is soon immersed in her personal world. The painting that she is working on will go on sale within hours, thus, wet-painting. On the spot painting means making art, not subjects . . ."
"This Is The Place Monument by Mahonri Young is about as popular as public art gets in Utah ...
Forgotten are the politics, money, controversy, and conflict that surrounded the monument’s development during the 1940s. “If past public projects now seem pacific and universally accepted, it is only because their initial conflicts have been eclipsed or repressed,” writes Maureen Sherlock in Sculpture magazine . . ."
"Given that three accommodating dimensions are one thing Utah seems to have in adequate supply, the lack of support provided by Utah’s government, corporate, and socially responsible patrons for the fully round equivalent of our extensive wealth of painted images adds up to a shocking failure. "
"His various series of works are characterized by dichotomies – destruction and utopia, idealism and depravity, romanticism and disaster. These dichotomies are revealed through his juxtaposition of disparate images, which, even in the flattened view on a computer screen, creates an amazing depth of field -- achieved in part through his process of layering. "
