Cash rules everything around me... or does it?
Editorial
I have an ongoing dispute with a friend who works in real estate. He is perpetually annoyed by my need to get artistic fulfillment from my work. In his estimation, having a day job that pays well and doesn’t mistreat me should be fulfillment enough, and I should be grateful that I still have time to pursue my artistic “hobbies” (his word) on the side.
It’s a maddening conversation for me to have over and over, but I remind myself that my friend is coming from a completely different mindset. He’s a guy who chose his career almost entirely because he knew he could make good money doing it. For him, the paycheck is the ends, the means and the motivation. I can’t fathom approaching life that way any more than he can fathom having a creative passion that trumps all other factors. And that’s fine on a one-on-one level. The problem is that there seem to be considerably more of him than there are of me.
Gary Gutting wrote a theater!” card. At that point you could bring up how many of the songs they grew up singing were lifted from stage musicals, or how many of their favorite sitcom stars worked their way up from Second City or The Groundlings, or how desperately Broadway has been contorting itself to appeal to their Spider-Man and Greenday-loving asses. Or you could just walk away shaking your head.
Another argument I hear all the time from my conservative friends is “If people think your art is worth paying for, you’ll get paid for it. And if you’re really not in it for the money, why would you care even if they don’t?” There’s something to the second point. Most artists I know would say they’d still be doing some iteration of what they’re doing now even if there was no money involved. (And I don’t believe I know any MBAs who’d say the same.) Even so, I don’t think people comprehend just how bleak a purely free market arts scene would be, or how easy it would be to at least slightly level the playing field. Gutting turns to Minnesota to illustrate the point. “To cite just one striking example, the Minnesota State Legislature recently appropriated over $500 million to help build the Vikings a new stadium. At the same time, the Minnesota Orchestra is close to financial disaster because it can’t erase a $6 million deficit. If the Legislature had diverted only 10 percent of its support for football, it would have covered that deficit for the next eight years.”
So what’s to be done? It’s nearly impossible to put a price tag on the societal benefit of, say, a
