By Andrew Lehman
This is the final installment of Mr. Lehman’s three-part series on Media, Education and Art. Part one, the media, can be found here. Part two, government nurtured education, can be found here.
There is a paradox of government-funded arts in the West. We in the West don’t believe we should encourage failure. Too often art reveals where we don’t succeed. Why would government support those that don’t agree with the ideology of success?
Ostensibly, government supports “free markets,” or the cult of the entrepreneur, by allowing the imaginative cutthroats to cut throats imaginatively, resulting in the financial debacle we observe today. Americans revere the man that makes money, seeing the vibrant corporation as a symbol of independence, liberty and freedom.
Then there are the artists. The Western artist also depicts the American obsession with independence, liberty and freedom. Only the artist through his and her very life and work depicts the repercussion of a desire to integrate the artistic default experience of feeling-part-of-something-larger-than-the-self with the American experience of separation, monetary stratification, independence, liberty and freedom. The Western artist is presented with a paradox. How does he or she manifest interconnection, or connection to that which transcends normal experience, in a society that deifies the alone?
Art often calls attention to this paradox, what might be also expressed as a cultural incongruity. The Left does not see a problem with paying people to share their insights on those struggles that make up our lives. The Right generally is against funding perspectives that don’t share in the myth of our entrepreneurial independence.
Of the many ways available to describe the transformation that is underway, the phrases “return of the commons” and “media is the message” summarize where we are headed. We are becoming horizontal at breakneck speed as national and international consciousness refocuses on safety nets, government-supported programs and job creation. High degrees of stratification are about to flatten as the zeitgeist turns toward punishing the capitalist mythology that the wealthy represent, those that have achieved our dream.
Our dreams are changing. We are growing to revere relationship. The commons emphasizes the utilization of our connections to engender security. The wealthy are on the brink of being demonized. Watch how the wealthy respond when the government penalizes wealth. Observe the media response. The commons is coming back with a vengeance.
The media that is the message for our time is the many-to-many new technologies such as the net and cell phone communications. Transparency, diversity and horizontal communication are integral to this new wave in interaction. How can the government use these new technologies as we transition to a “commons” frame of reference so that artists can be employed and supported?
Former barriers to artist employment are being shattered by the destruction of the entrepreneurial paradigm. Artists will no longer be pariahs suggesting where our hypocrisies are buried. We can again turn to those who specialize in providing insight into our predicament. The Internet can enhance and encourage our turning in our artists’ direction.
Right now art is proliferating across the web at an astonishing rate and is being produced by “amateurs,” young people paying their bills in other ways. Consider how the government can best reward those whose work is receiving acclaim in the form of website hits and visitor duration. Don’t let the government decide who receives a basic wage to produce art full time. Let traffic make that decision. By government rewarding those that have gathered the respect of their net peers, art as a profession exponentially increases and others are encouraged to participate, thus fertilizing a new online institution and the world economy.
Consider that there are fewer than 100 comic strip and panel artists in this country making a living selling work to be reproduced in print. If the government funded this minuscule profession to make it possible for 1,000 comic artists to receive a basic living by providing a penny for every visitor to their site, the comic arts would proliferate across the planet with hundreds of millions of people profiting from the artwork and insights that would result.
What if government rewarded dancers by paying dance troupes wages based on video viewings? Those dance videos with the widest audiences could receive fees based upon traffic hits and duration. Government does not decide who gets paid. Government only creates the opportunities for distance to become no barrier to aesthetics, with people anywhere voting their approval by their arrival upon a site. Then the artist is rewarded with a government micro-commission.
Music, comedy and storytelling become three areas easily reimbursed. Government allots funds for distribution. Institutions are created. Not only the artists, but society, are rewarded.
The paradox of art in the West is being resolved by a society that is discovering its humanity. As the message bearers of our humanity again become respected, government can get into the business of rewarding that respect and making possible the distribution of their work.
There is no barrier to government-funded art when it again becomes possible to respect government as an institution that seeks to make lives better.
I’ve been exploring the federal government founding, funding and maintaining new job-creation institutions. The government would reward individuals gathering respect in the form of traffic and time spent on websites serving media, education and art. The government would not decide who would receive micropayments for each visitor and how long they spent on the site or watching a video. That would be decided by the traffic numbers. This is a model that trusts the wisdom of the crowd’s redistributing the crowd’s tax dollars to those whose work the crowd admires.
There would be the generation of high quality news by amateurs and professionals across the planet, high quality educational pieces as determined by the testing scores of viewers and popular art as determined by the number of people lingering over the artists’ work.
Performers might be employed to act out an academic’s lecture scripts. News might be describing surges in a particular artist’s traffic numbers. Performers might be reading news. Art might bleed into academia. Synergies among the different institutions are inevitable. Government rewards for traffic and duration will encourage innovation and novelty.
As these new institutions acquire mass, government funding for their providers can moderate. Consistent high traffic sites can survive on ad revenue models. Regardless, a redistribution of dollars from taxpayers to these providers of content enhances the experience of taxpayers and the academics, journalists and artists participating in the model.
As the consumer economy continues to deteriorate, the focus of the individual will not be on what he or she owns and does not yet own. Their attention will be on their personal experience. The aesthetic economy, the economy driven by enhanced personal experience, will be nurtured by a surge in teachers, news providers and artists that are paid to perform.
Aesthetics belongs to just the elites no longer. In the aesthetic economy everybody plays.
Andrew Lehman, a regular contributor to The Public Record, operates Andrew Lehman Design, Ltd., a web firm with over 400 clients specializing in local businesses and non profits. He is co-director and founder of the 1100 organization, Peace, Justice and Environment Project. Andrew is on the board of directors of In These Times. He blogs daily at neoteny.org and can be reached at
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