The Chronicle of Artistic Failure in America

When downturns happen, when people are shocked out of their regular ruts, when the bombing starts and buildings are knocked down–whenever something bad happens on a large scale in the country, the arts are the first thing that goes out the window.

Case in point for today (March 4, 2008), as the collective economic hand-wringing mounts to a deafening pitch:

• Critic Sasha Anwalt, on the NAJP blog, yesterday pointed out that the L.A. Times is canning its long-time dance critic Lewis Segal. Anwalt writes, “this signals a gigantic disconnect between the people and press…. and his loss is worth protesting on many fronts.”
• Last week, Douglas McLennan wrote on the same blog about the Hartford Courant’s buyout of its television critic. McLennan also posted, a few days ago, an analysis of the ongoing failure of newspapers in this country.
• Andrew Taylor, on his Art Journal blog on arts management, wrote about the need for nonprofit mission-driven organizations to consider when to close their doors. (This relates to a story CAFA has been following out of Boston, where the Boston Foundation has suggested that the directors of “struggling arts groups” should perhaps begin seeking “exit strategies.”)
• The arts & architecture blog of the Guardian Unlimited recently posted about the inevitability of suffering for artists, and, appropriately, about the British Arts Council’s painful upcoming funding cuts to arts organizations.
• And, to top it all off and tie it all together, a recent story in the New York Times examines the quaint American habit to eschew all things intellectual. To quote the main subject of the story, Susan Jacoby, author of several books on this subject of American anti-intellectualism: “Now… something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that “too much learning can be a dangerous thing”) and anti-rationalism (“the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion”) have fused in a particularly insidious way. Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don’t think it matters.”

Be wary of walking under windows, lest you be hit in the head with all the art and culture we’re tossing out.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 4th, 2008 at 1:17 pm and is filed under Americans pretty much hate artists, Art is killed by American anti-elitism, Failure of arts journalism in America, Death of arts publishing, Art is the first thing that goes out the window, Decline of art criticism, Decline of reading, Artistic failure in America, Commerce and the failure of art, Decline of human culture, The death of a literate society, Decline of art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.