No More Starving Artists!
(Listen to Ann's "Marketplace" commentary. This requires RealAudio. If it is not already installed on your computer, it is free to download.)
Poetry Magazine, the long-struggling publication, got a 100 million dollar bequest recently from pharmaceutical fortune heir Ruth Lilly. It’s stirred up a hornet’s nest in circles that frown on mixing art and money. But commentator and arts critic Ann Daly says it’s about time.
SCRIPT:
At a recent dinner party, my host, an engineer with a poetic soul, shook his head over Poetry Magazine’s good fortune. "Let's just hope," he said, ferrying plates off the table, "that they don't squander it."
Squander it? What ever could he mean?
Well, he explained, to handle all that money, you'd need to set up a foundation. His voice trailed off, implying an infinite regression of money managers and paper pushers steadily draining the pot of gold.
He could have added that the true artist is a poverty-stricken Bohemian who sacrifices health and hearth for a higher calling. Uncorrupted by commercial pressure, that artist speaks truth to power and saves culture from itself.
It’s all a myth. But that’s been the prevailing view in America for a century.
Well, the scales have fallen from artists’ eyes. Even the most subversive ones I know want a living wage, health insurance, and affordable housing. Our entire culture's relationship to money has transformed. Money is no longer the root of all evil. It can be the creative means to increased personal autonomy. Just think the term "free agent."
There IS a new economy out there. It’s founded on seeing nothing wrong with valuing creativity and attracting the capital to fuel it. Leading universities are setting up whole institutes to study how to transfer profit know-how to non-profits.
Artists are doing the same. When avant-garde theatre director Julie Taymor teamed up with Disney to make "The Lion King" on Broadway in 1997, Disney brought Taymor cash and Taymor brought Disney artistic cache. It was already obvious: art and money are no longer mutually exclusive. In fact, businesses need content just as much as artists need paychecks.
Now Michelangelo, he had it figured out way before our time. He was a real estate mogul of princely proportions, but that didn’t stop him from filling the Sistine Chapel with heavenly content. Poetry Magazine, too, may prove to the skeptics that art and money, like the occasional metaphor, can indeed be mixed, with unexpectedly rich results.
In Austin, this is Ann Daly for "Marketplace."