Jim Munroe Needs Slaves

...'cuz no one wants to buy the art he and his friends make.

In defence of free money

That's what arts grants are, right? Free money. You know this guy who used his grant as a down payment on an SUV. Heard of this other woman who used hers to make grapefruits talk to each other and someone else who made lesbian porn with public money. Taxpayer money! Your money and my money!

All of this makes for a great bitch session at the bar after a hard week taking the boss' shit and doing real work while the artists get up at noon for an hour's scribbling in a notebook. Or making a potato sculpture. Or whatever it is they do between their afternoon absinthe binges and picking up their grant cheques.

I can think of better reasons why people shouldn't be taxed to provide for others...

It's fun to lampoon artists, even though I am one myself. And given the kind of unpleasant and undignified things people have to do to pay the rent, it's understandable that those of us who get to do what we are passionate about take a certain amount of flak. Especially when even the artists I've talked to are a little vague on why grants are important.

Because arts grants aren't just a good thing. They aren't a form of charity for the fey and sensitive and suffering souls. A touchy-feely impression that they're nice is not going to stand up to the winds of change. There needs to be a well-rounded analysis of their social value.

A grant is essentially a monetary gift given to someone in order to fund that person's activities in some area. The idea of a grant doesn't ruffle my feathers. The idea of a public-funded grant does. The "social value" of a private grant is, of course, a subjective thing between the grantee and the granter. If the grant helps a legitimate enterprise that becomes successful, the value to the rest of us is positive.

However, stealing from others, regardless of the uses that wealth is put towards, is a negative social value and one that is spread across the society. We can argue whether some public-funded art makes up for the theft that is taxation, but that line of argument is moot in any moral analysis. If:

1. I liked the artist's prior work;
   
2. I wanted to see more produced;
   
3. and I had the extra money to pay for it,

then I might consider commissioning him or her to do a piece or two. Perhaps this artist is a friend and I want to see a wider distribution of his or her work. There are a number of reasons why I might donate money to unknown or local artists.

And they are all based on the premise that I own my wealth and property and no one else has the right to appropriate it for themselves or for others. Anyone claiming otherwise wants you to be their slave.

On my trips to the dystopia to the south, I hang out with my American counterparts in the indie-press community. They're struggling, and they'll always be struggling. Even if they develop an audience of thousands of people they'll still have to supplement their incomes by teaching or doing something else. No access to grants makes their lives harder: pretty much all of them have full-time jobs, and the idea that I don't is as amazing to them as our healthcare system. (Since 9/11, I've also had five or six people confess that they've checked out the Canadian immigration website.) When I explain that the two grants I've received over the last eight years gave me the opportunity to work on projects that didn't have to make money, they're confused.

I explain it this way: arts grants fund the R&D wing of our cultural operations. Just like research and development in the scientific community, this allows for new methodologies and new strategies to be investigated without having to turn a profit. But in science, experimentation is a valued part of the process. When an artist is called "experimental," it's often derogatory. There's this idea that if it's not understandable to a mass audience or a layperson, it's fraudulent.

Mr. Munroe 's attempt to fight against immutable economic laws of human nature is admirable, but dangerous and stupid. To be successful, you have to have products and services that enough people want to buy in order to offset your expenses. By their very definition, these indie artists work outside the hated "industrial corporate media complex" making it hard to achieve success. If they want to be truly independent, they should make a living for themselves and take responsibility for their actions and mistakes. If they want to produce art but don't want to (or can't) make a living at it, they need to find another job to pay for their desires.

It's a shame that the conventional wisdom assumes fringe artists and independents make crap or worse. A lot of the music I love would be dissed by the arbiters of culture.

But I don't demand that people in Indiana and California and Dallas pay for Blue Noise Band's roadie gear or for Austin's Techno Spraypaint Guy and his costs for working on 6th Street.

Mr. Munroe's comparison to private industry R&D is misleading. That effort goes towards something with the potential of making money and it's funded through mutual exchange. Federal, state, and local grants are funded through coercion and the money is distributed through a political process. That process is political whether the money is handed out directly from the mayor, from a firm the government sets up, from a council of uninterested advisors, or from an elected board. The nature of the money's acquirement and the nature of the state are fundamentally opposed to the way the research arms of GlaxoSmithKline, Sony, and Ford work.

But mass culture doesn't spring from a vacuum. The arts and the sciences are both communal activities -- everyone's building on and reacting to the stuff around them. So that neat camerawork in a blockbuster summer movie was inspired by some more obscure film the director saw, which in turn was inspired by an underground photo exhibit, which in turn was inspired by something else... but only the person at the end of the chain of inspiration gets paid -- the guy at the head of the line is the only one who isn't invisible.

Here's a particularly ugly example of the application of the principle of externalities. Do I owe someone money because a long time ago, they did something that inspired someone who did something that inspired someone who did something that inspired me? Even worse, do I owe someone money because what they do today may influence someone to do something in the future that I may enjoy or derive a benefit from?

Grants address this blind spot of pure market capitalism. As much as economists like to present it as a force of nature, capitalism is a construct we made, a robot that can't tell the difference between things that we feel are priceless and things that are valueless unless we step in. Clean air, for instance, has less inherent market value than a can of Coke. Grants are a little like speculation. By supporting projects and propagating ideas that are currently too far ahead of the curve to make money, we're investing in an artistic legacy that we all benefit from.

This isn't a "blind spot" in real capitalism. In pure market capitalism, individuals are free to pursue what they wish provided they don't aggress against anyone along the way. Individuals would be more free than they are now to spend their money and associate with others as they see fit. Charity doesn't meet it's end in free market capitalism: it very likely would increase as our wealth would be greater than it is now, allowing us to consider donating to causes and people we support.

Personalizing capitalism is a fool's errand. It's a description of a process. It itself does nothing. Only the people working behind it matter because it is they who set prices and attach value to items. Mr. Munroe's claim that clean air has less value on the market than a can of Coke is silly because the marginal value of air is less than the marginal value of a Coke...given today's context. If clean air became less abundant, then it's value would rise.

Anyway, it's not "investment" when I don't have the choice of investing or not.

There are some problems with the grants system -- people can get dependent on public money and make passionless art for a committee rather than for an audience. But hell, people get hooked on private money, too, and make derivative art trying to please an imagined demographic. Pitting the grant-funded artist against the market-funded entertainer usually ignores the fact that the people who do R&D and the people who find applications for it are both working towards our cultural enrichment. Whether it's a corporation or a council paying for it has an effect on both the artist and the art, naturally, but at least a diversity of sources in Canada means that the artist needn't feel beholden to just one of them. Private sources are varied, but all of them have to toe the bottom line -- I'm happy that when I get sick of hustling for private cash there's the option of navigating the public bureaucracy for funds, boring as this is.

Giving people more freedom in this respect makes for better art. And, yeah, some of it will be self-indulgent crap. But I'd rather feed a few frauds if it means not starving our geniuses.

© 1991-2004 eye

So since this guy hates having to adhere to economic reality, since he feels artists should be unhindered in their pursuit for their work, and since he doesn't mind deliberately, openly wasting tax money on frauds...he wants the freedom to take away some of your money.

Jim Munroe needs slaves. To those Canadians reading this, beware.

Posted by Drizzten at June 17, 2004 09:56 AM