The Uselessness of Anything That Won't Make You Rich

From Animal comes a biting commentary on a recent article in The Daily Beast which lists arts as among the most "useless" college majors.

So put down your easels and notebooks and get to… Mining and Mineral Engineering, Metallurgical Engineering, Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and Administration and, uh, Petroleum Engineering. That’s what you should be doing because, clearly, whether your college education is ”useless” or not is measurable by yearly income only, and not the graduate’s contribution to society or self-fulfillment. If you’re not good at math, too bad.

Authentic Culture vs. Creative Culture: Malcom McClaren

In a karaoke world everyone and everything is for sale... in a world that struggles to find something authentic, and maybe you do... invariably it's not for sale. So what do most artists, what do most creative people do? They spend their whole lives trying to authenticate a karaoke culture. But to do that, you have to be some kind of alchemist, a magician. to make that happen and those people are very rare today.

Starving Artist Quote of the Day: The Grumpy Version

“I could see the road ahead of me. I was poor and I was going to stay poor. But I didn’t particularly want money. I didn’t know what I wanted. Yes, I did. I wanted someplace to hide out, someplace where one didn’t have to do anything. The thought of being something didn’t only appall me, it sickened me…To do things, to be part of family picnics, Christmas, the 4th of July, Labor Day, Mother’s Day…was a man born just to endure those things and then die? I would rather be a dishwasher, return alone to a tiny room and drink myself to sleep.”

—	Charles Bukowski

Is Vocational Ed the Most Valuable Education We Can Offer?

Excellent article at The Times Higher Education on the vocationalism of higher education.  Phil Baty writes:

A wise person, according to the psychologist Barry Schwartz, is like a jazz musician. Both refer to the notes on the page "but dance around them, inventing combinations that are appropriate to the situation and people at hand".

They know "when and how to make the exception to every rule" and "when and how to improvise", Schwartz explained in a 2009 talk for the ideas network, TED. The wise person can handle real-world problems - those complex, ill-defined challenges whose contexts and parameters shift constantly.

His riff was picked up by another Schwartz - Steven, the vice-chancellor of Macquarie University in Australia. In his 2010 vice-chancellor's lecture, he said the sector had to "wise up" and "restore wisdom to universities".

Professor Schwartz lamented that universities "were once about character building but now...are about money". In this "age of money", he continued, courses are increasingly vocational, designed to train graduates for their first job: in law, accounting and pharmacy, "but also golf-course management, contemporary circus performance, hairdressing salon management...
"Politicians and universities often refer to skills shortages. Apparently we need more circus performers and salon managers. But no one seems to worry about a shortage of philosophers, historians and ethicists."

The UK government's higher education reforms place English universities more squarely than ever in the "age of money", with a market and a bottom line to mind.

With evidence already emerging that a drive to introduce more vocationalism into the curriculum is pushing out arts, humanities and social science degrees ahead of the total removal of public funding from such courses, Schwartz's warnings have proved prescient.

 You can read the full article by following the link above.

The Dumpster Project

Wealthy Poets: The Riches of the Artistic Life

Over at The Life Poetic, a fellow writer, Sage Cohen, puts the "broke and beautiful" life in poetic terms arguing that "starving poets" should stop buying into the notion that artists are supposed to struggle and that less money equals less wealth. (Remember the origin of the world "wealth" is simply "well being" and you don't need money to have it.)

If we don’t question the popular paradigm that aligns “wealth” with money and we make the pursuit of cash a primary goal, we may find that we have little time left over for poetry. And on the flip side, if we neglect our material needs in pursuit of a life poetic, we are likely to end up in real, uninspiring distress.

But if we agree that a prosperous life is one with time to literally and figuratively smell the roses, and then luxuriate in the time to write about it, then we are establishing a root system for a new “poetry of prosperity” — one which we feed and water with our attention and our words. By recognizing, welcoming and prioritizing both our material and creative needs, we have a far better chance of striking a balance that feels like true wealth and can sustain us over the long term.

While you're at it, you can visit Cohen's blog at Writing the Life Poetic.

In Defense of Humanities

“If, because of cutbacks and lack of support from the federal government, literature and the arts and other aspects of the humanities become just parlor musings of the wealthy, we would have made a huge mistake,’’ Dartmouth’s president, Dr. Jim Yong Kim, said in an interview. “Literature and the arts should not only be for kids who go to cotillion balls to make polite conversation at parties.’’

Read the full article at The Boston Globe

Take Some Time to Do the Things You Never Have Ooh Ooh

A couple of weeks ago, I posed a question about ways to avoid one of the main pitfalls of the broke life: retreating from social activity.  It is such a central question that I dealt with it in the first chapter of my book.

So you have to be proactive and do the inviting.  Come up with cheery free stuff to do and you suggest the activity.  Have a potluck.  Plan a scavenger hunt. Go mushroom hunting in the woods and cook up your crop.  If you do it early and often, your friends will think of you as a creative person who suggests out of the ordinary activities, and they’ll actually feel positively about you.

Social activities do not have to be extravagant; they just need to be done together.  Philip Simmons author of Learning to Fall gets nostalgic when he’s around garbage.  “When I was spending summers [in New Hampshire] as a child, about the only time I got to spend with my father was while we were working together on something, and so I have fond memories of our trips to the dump.  The work was tedious and smelly, and I don’t suppose we talked a whole lot, but it was good simply to be in my father’s presence…”

 For some reason, my millions of readers did not jump in with their amazing ideas and suggestions.  So I will add one here.  Join a choir.

As I noted in The Elvis Impersonation Kit: "For inexpensive musical instruction, try auditioning for your church choir and practice, practice, practice.  Elvis Presley got his start this way.  He sang in the choir at the First Assembly of God Church in Tupelo, MS, and it was here that he gave his first public performances as a singer.  In fact, his earliest musical influences may have been the pastors who played guitar along with church services."

Minnesota Public Radio concurs.  Their article "Singing in a Choir is Good for You" reports on the findings of a new study by Chorus America:

Americans like to think of themselves as folks involved in their communities, who give back and are good sports about it. A new study out by Chorus America shows that these attributes are particularly pronounced in American choral singers.

Choral singers are more likely to vote, give money to philanthropies, and also to volunteer; they're the kind of people you want on your team. These civic-minded, socially adept folks are in enormous numbers in the U.S. Some 32.5 million adults sing in 270,000 choruses.

What draws people to singing -- beyond the sheer artistic experience and communal expression -- is partly the accessibility of singing. There are few economic or educational barriers. And a singer need not possess the level of skill of an instrumentalist to still feel like a contributor to the creation of art.

What a singer gets in return is an intangible mix of pride and joy. But this particular study has found that singers in choruses also develop positive attributes that can be measured. 

 

Greater civic involvement, discipline, teamwork, increased social skills, volunteerism, philanthropy, and support of other art forms are some of the very tangible qualities that increase when a person sings in a chorus.

I mean, don't these guys look like they're having fun?

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Consumerism vs. Creativity

The premise of Broke is Beautiful is that the cash strapped life is the creative life. Further support for this concept comes from the blog 99% which has an article Is Consumerism Killing Our Creativity. The article argues that we're using up our creative impulses in the pursuit of bargains and stuff.

The consumerist search capitalizes on the same “seeking” part of the brain that fuels the creative rush. Of course, while consumerism can serve as an addictive substitute for the stimulation of creative activity, it offers nowhere near the same reward in the long term.

...No external thing can prompt creativity, and there’s no substitute for just getting down to doing the work. In fact, it’s been proven that hardship – being deprived of things – stimulates creativity more than being well-off. A recent Newsweek article on America's declining creativity reported:

“Highly creative adults frequently grew up with hardship. Hardship by itself doesn’t lead to creativity, but it does force kids to become more flexible—and flexibility helps with creativity.”

For more on the subject of creation and consumerism, see my article from last week: Is Art What You Do or What You Consume.




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Is Art What You Do, or What You Consume?

For most of human history artistic production consisted of telling stories or dancing or singing songs within a community, around the fire, at church gatherings. Anyone who wished to participate could, and stories evolved in the telling, music gained verses as it moved from community to community. Tales took on a collective richness and who they "belonged to" and exactly who had "created" them was fluid and a bit vague.

As I wrote in Broke is Beautiful:

These days we’ve become accustomed to the idea that entertainment is something you consume, not something you make. We buy records, we rent DVDs and generally leave imagination to the professionals. Much of modern life, in fact, seems to be a rebellion against daydreaming. We listen radio on the way to and from work; we switch on the TV the minute we get home. There are now even screens to entertain us in restaurants and at the gas pump, as if we would become so bored in the five minutes it takes to pump gas that we would just give up and go home. They should know that’s never going to happen. That’s what iPods are for.

How are we ever to find a moment for quality daydreaming with the CNN airport network and the CNN grocery store check-out line network and CNN monitors at the post office? Recent surveys show that children everywhere now spend up to 80 percent of their free time outside of school watching television. Not surprisingly kids who are heavy TV viewers are less imaginative than children who watch only one hour a day. We no longer value our own fantasies; we pay other people to show us theirs.

I came across another example of this in a fascinating article in The New Republic, Ellen Handler Spitz reviews a new collection of Grimm's Fairy Tales called "The Grimm Reader." She points out that the movement from stories as oral tradition to written form made them static.

Fairy tales were originally recited aloud, and that format gave the listeners considerable power. They were able to exercise a direct and partially controlling effect on each recounting. If attention waned, stories were modified. They could be spiced, embellished, or curtailed. But contemporary American adults rarely tell fairy tales to children anymore. We read, slavishly adhering to a text. Such reliance denotes a diminished narrative inventiveness among us, even a dereliction in regards to the sacred task of passing on our cultural heritage.

We have internalized the idea that art is a product created by talented professionals, and forgotten about the community tradition in art so thoroughly that we think of Internet media that allow broad amateur participation and two way and collective communication as new and novel.




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Art of Making Do is the Subject of New Museum Exhibit

"Skint! Making do in the Great Depression", opens March 27 at Museum of Sydney, Australia. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the exhibit will display the folk art and crafts of the 1930s.

Items like furniture made from boxes, rugs made from rags, and toy trains made from scrap wood, stowed away for years by specialist collectors of Depression-era art will be on display.

Annie Campbell, notes...

"These creative activities not only helped many people to brighten their homes but also provided an enjoyable diversion to pass the time," she says.

She adds that the Depression tradition of "making do" continued to thrive after the recession had passed.

Civility Crisis

James Leach, the new chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, believes that America is facing a "civility crisis." The former Republican congressman from Iowa supports greater funding of the humanities as a way to move the nation beyond bitter partisan rancor. Perhaps if people knew their history better, the Omaha World Herald reports, they would not be so quick to compare modern legislators to Stalin or Hitler. Humanities education, Leach says, is an "investment in democracy."

Some participants in last summer's health care town meetings talked of “secession,” and used words like “fascist” to describe their opponents.

“We fought a Civil War that cost 600,000 lives over the issue of secession, and fought a world war to defeat fascism,” Leach said. “History teaches us that those issues are settled.”

Leach also cited history in his call for increased financial support for the NEH.

He noted that during the country's darkest strategic hour during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln invested in education, signing the land-grant colleges act.

And during the nation's darkest economic crisis of the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt spent money on the arts and humanities through various public works projects.

“That was all an investment in democracy,” Leach said.

The NEH's current budget, appropriated by Congress, is $155 million, up from $110 million a decade ago. Still, Leach noted that when adjusted for inflation, NEH funding is down a third from 1979.

Leach would like to see more support for the humanities to promote, among other things, more study of comparative religions, cultures and histories.

“We live in perilous times,” Leach said. “But nothing can be more costly than shortchanging the humanities.”

So let us begin anew -- remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.

Let both sides explore what problems unite us instead of belaboring those problems which divide us.-John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address

The Practical in the Impractical

According an article in the current edition of The American Scholar, the number of young men and women majoring in English has dropped dramatically; the same is true of philosophy, foreign languages, art history, and history.

Meanwhile business has become, by far, the most popular major in the nation’s colleges and universities with more than twice the majors of any other course of study.

William M. Chace, the article's author, argues that changes in the teaching of humanities are largely to blame, but he also lists that the rising cost of a college education as a culprit:

In an educational collapse of this magnitude, other forces must also be at play. The first of these is the surging growth of public higher education and the relatively slower growth of private colleges and universities.

During the most recent period for which good figures are available (from 1972 to 2005), more young people entered the world of higher education than at any time in American history. Where did they go? Increasingly into public, not private, schools. In the space of that one generation, public colleges and universities wound up with more than 13 million students in their classrooms while private institutions enrolled about 4.5 million. Students in public schools tended toward majors in managerial, technical, and pre-professional fields while students in private schools pursued more traditional and less practical academic subjects...private schools have until now been the most secure home of the humanities. But today even some liberal arts colleges are offering fewer courses in the liberal arts and more courses that are “practical.”

...an obvious external cause: money. With the cost of a college degree surging upward during the last quarter century—tuition itself increasing far beyond any measure of inflation—and with consequent growth in loan debt after graduation, parents have become anxious about the relative earning power of a humanities degree.

Our cultural trend towards measuring the value of education almost entirely in terms of earning potential is something I have discussed in my sister blog dedicated to my ballet business. Last September, in an article titled A Question of Arts Education, I wrote:

One of the arguments that is often put forward for arts funding is that studying the arts improves performance in other academic areas. For example, music increases math proficiency. Why do we resort to this argument instead of arguing that arts education increases art proficiency?

We are, perhaps, used to making economic arguments for educaton. Go to school, get an education, and you'll make more money over the course of your life. We're hard pressed to argue that years of focus on ballet or poetry will increase someone's earning potential.

And why is a philosopher, poet, musician or dancer likely to have a lower income? Here we get back to the Rand study (Cultivating Demand for the Arts), which argues that we don't fund arts because we didn't learn their value in school.

As I noted in an article in that blog last December, Former National Endowment for the Arts chairman Bill Ivey told the Utne Reader, that he is concerned that Americans have become consumers of art rather than creators.

"We feel that sports are invigorated when many people can play at many levels. While we understand that amateur basketball players are not going to be as good as a superstar, there’s no sense that they shouldn’t be doing what they’re doing. But in the arts, around the fourth or fifth grade, we find people who have special talent, we separate them, give them special attention, and create some terrific artists who serve society—but we tend to denigrate the amateur."

Ivey, for one, believes that artists could be a much more important part of the economy. "If we’re talking about a new sewage disposal system, there should be an artist on that panel; there should be artists on school boards and neighborhood commissions, not to make the project look pretty, but to bring a unique approach. Artists are very good at metaphor, at seeing less-obvious links, at right-brain thinking that might not be linear but that gets you to a good result by making an imaginative leap."

What do you think? Is the decline in enrollment in humanities courses a problem and, if so, what are the potential solutions? By seeing the arts as "impractical" are we missing out on practical applications of artists unique perspective in our communities?

Random Blog of the Day

From time to time I hit the "next blog" navigation tool to see what random blog appears. Today's fun find is:YOUR STUDIO BLOG. Its proprietor is fascinated by artists' work spaces. The site is a collection of photos of such spaces.

An Act of Imagination

Sojourners Magazine, an online publication with a mission to "articulate the biblical call to social justice," features an article by Danny Duncan Collum on a new Poor People's campaign. Duncan writes:

The campaign, made up of more than 90 organizations around the country, aims to “unite the poor across color lines as the leadership base for a broad movement to abolish poverty … through advancing economic human rights as named in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, such as the rights to food, housing, health, education, communication and a living wage job.”

...They seem to be picking up the banner of the Poor People’s Campaign that fell after Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968...

...presidents don’t change the world. People do. Presidents are pulled along behind great waves of popular uprising. That’s what happened during our last Great Depression, and Franklin Roosevelt knew it. That’s why he once famously told a group of progressive activists that he agreed with their proposal. “Now,” he said, “go make me do it.” And that’s what happened again in the 1960s when the civil rights movement forced President Kennedy to become a better man than he ever meant to be...

The Poor People’s Campaign meeting I attended this summer focused on the role of artists in a grassroots movement for economic human rights. Again, looking back at those two great periods of social change in the 20th century, they both were accompanied by a renaissance of popular art. Writers, artists, actors, painters, and photographers all had a place in the New Deal and the labor movement that fueled it. In the 1960s, African-American religion and music fueled the civil rights movement and all the ripples of social change it inspired. Acting for a better world requires, first and foremost, an act of imagination. You have to see the potential for change—in yourself and in your community...

Hobos Lullaby (2007 Remastered LP Version) - Emmylou Harris

Art Gone Bad

The life of an artist can be tough. You wait for inspiration, work to perfect your craft, and make yourself vulnerable by revealing your creative brain-child to the world in the hopes that you will be showered with love and admiration in return. But what if your attempts at opera are met with snickers instead of sighs? What if your dazzling dance produces only red faced embarassment?

With any luck, your friends will go on with life and be polite enough to never bring up the moronic free verse poem about the guy who dumped you, or your off-key karaoke again. But occasionally someone's level of incompetence in the fine arts rises to a stunning level. While we dither unproductively, achieving only moderate embarrassment, there are the gloriously incompetent performers and artists who elevate a lack of talent to dizzying new heights. They possess the magic qualities that separate a William Hung (the American Idol reject with a record contract) from all the other folks who were axed for singing flat. Their badness makes us cringe so much that it turns into a smile and a kind of stunned admiration that a person who clearly has so little talent could put himself out there with complete abandon.

Schadenfreude, Baby! has an entire section devoted to these heroes of artistic incompetence. Yesterday I learned of another entrant to this unenviable hall of fame. The play was "Moose Murders." Directed by Arthur Bicknell, it opened and closed on the same night and went down in history in the words of the New York Times as "the standard of awfulness against which all Broadway flops are judged."

New York Magazine said it appeared to have been staged by “a blind director repeatedly kicked in the groin.”

Its reputation for badness has given it a second life with performances at community theaters, staged readings at bowling alleys, and a "performance art" version at the Contemporary Art Center in Rochester, New York and at the famous restaurant for the New York theater set, Sardi's.

I learned about this achievement in theatrical incompetence when it was used as the subject of one of the quizzes on NPR's game show Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me. For a short time, you'll be able to use this link to listen to the panelists observations on this Broadway classic.