Where is the economic stimulus for writers and artists? One of the main stories in the New York Times for the last few days is about how A.I.G. is giving out millions of dollars in bonuses to the failed businessmen and women responsible in part to A.I.G.’s demise. Millions in bonuses!
I could live for years on what one of these failed businessmen at A.I.G. get as a bonus for, duh, failing. Of course some would say that I am a failed writer. I haven’t, as yet, been able to support myself by writing and selling books, even though that’s what I feel compelled to do. I’ve been told I have talent, that I have the ability to inspire people with my writing. So why isn’t someone throwing a little bailout money my way so they don’t lose my “talent?”
William Blake said, “Nations decay when the arts decay.” And I read somewhere (I wish I could remember where) that you can judge the vibrancy and sustainability of a culture by how they treat their artists. If this is the case, I think we’re in big trouble.
From where I sit, the world is upside down. Most of our poets, writers, artists, and musicians live like paupers instead of princes and princesses. However, we are the paupers who carry the substance of the culture.
In The Gift by Lewis Hyde, he states:
…every modern artist who has chosen to labor with a gift must sooner or later wonder how he or she is to survive in a society dominated by market exchange. And if the fruits of a gift are gifts themselves, how is the artist to nourish himself, spiritually as well as materially, in an age whose values are market values and whose commerce consists almost exclusively in the purchase and sale of commodities?…
…The mythology of a market society reverses the picture: getting rather than giving is the mark of a substantial person, and the hero is “self-possessed,” “self-made.” So long as these assumptions rule, a disquieting sense of triviality, of worthlessness even, will nag the man or woman who labors in the service of a gift and whose products are not adequately described as commodities. Where we reckon our substance by our acquisitions, the gifts of the gifted man [and woman] are powerless to make him [or her] substantial.
Are artists wrong to want bailout money, too? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
P.S. My first novel, Seeking Sara Summers , is available on Kindle, as well as iBooks and Barnes and Noble (on the Nook).
