Support the Arts
While reading the Arts Beat column “Jim Tarbell, Half-Off Arts Czar” (issue of Dec. 15-21), I got the feeling that its gist was to point out Tarbell’s failing strength as arts czar inside the greater failing strength of city council in the area of funding local arts projects. Both these points might be accurate, but I’m not sure if they’re newsworthy because they point out fading funding for the arts by the city or because the combined inability of city council and Tarbell to fund the arts will force responsibility for the ways and means to create art back into the hands of the artists.
I hesitiate to call myself an artist — I do thrive on creating things with my own hands and receive a feeling of accomplishment from them when I do, so who knows? In my own experience, while I in no way question the need for city-based financial and moral support for the arts, I’ve always viewed that support with a skeptical eye.
The role of public funding in the area of the arts should be to promote the arts, not be responsible for providing the arts. Although on the surface there might not seem to be a diffence between the two, in reality they’re as different as night and day.
In a city with a healthy arts community, artists intentionally refuse to rely on public funding for anything other than promotion. The reason is simple: Once public funding comes to be relied on, the administrators of that funding (aka city council) become not only the boss of the arts but the art director as well. When public funding becomes dominant, artists start to produce art that will “sell” as opposed to the type of art they’re complelled to create. At that point the art produced might be a successful product, but it isn’t art.
Given the structure of government in the city of Cincinnati, the loss of funding for the arts is inevitable. Even though those funds should be available and their availablity fought for, it would be a mistake to say the existence of an art community depends on them.
My impression of Tarbell — I have to say impression, because I’ve never met him — is that he’s interested in art for art’s sake. If this is true, at a time when funding is slumping he’s exactly the kind of person who should be in a position to maximize the dollars that are available. Better to have less money promoting the arts than more money blindly paying for it.
Blue Christmas
Tell me it doesn’t bother you that we Americans sit here this Christmas, fat and sassy and self-indulgent, knowing the misery we’ve created for millions in Iraq, while our reasons for creating that quagmire have melted away one by one, leaving only faith that we might be doing the right thing.
Our faith, someone else’s misery — it’s a common Christian theme. I hope that lofty ideal isn’t applied to us someday. I doubt happiness for the Iraqi people was ever ours to impose.
We seem at odds with most of the world this Christmas. We’re right and everyone else is wrong? That’s becoming a common Christian theme too.
Three thousand Afghan “suspects” rounded up and held incommunicado in a Gitmo gulag. Human beings despicably treated at Abu Gahraib. An occupation in search of a reason spawns only violence. America votes its moral values; the economy picks up, taxes go down and soldiers pick through garbage for what they need. Mistakes are made, but nobody’s responsible.
Governments deficit-spend and send the tab to future generations. Forty-five million go without health insurance as the country worries about Hollywood hijinks. Tight budgets shrink funds for charity, and stores chase Salvation Army Santas off the premises.
The tinsel doesn’t move me so much this Christmas. Lights flash, but I can’t turn my feelings on and off to suit the season.
I would wish everyone a Merry Christmas, but I don’t know what the day means anymore.
Tale of the Taser
When Mayor Charlie Luken and the Cincinnati Police Department first came up with the idea of giving police officers Taser guns, we in the The Black Fist protested. We spoke out about the wicked plot that’s contributed to executing black people in Cincinnati. Now instead of using a 9 mm pistol that could — and has — killed our black asses, they prefer to taze us, thus perpetuating systemic police brutality against us.
We said in council chambers to the mayor and coucil members that the police would misuse and abuse the Tasers on blacks, and we were correct. Of the total of 447 people tazed this year by Cincinnati Police, about 80 percent were black. And according to an Enquirer article, Asst. Chief Richard Janke explained “that figure mirrors demographics of the department’s arrest statistics.”
Of course it would. When you have individual officers racially profiling black men, the numbers of those arrested and being tazed would be consistent. It’s up to each officer as to who will be stopped, let go, cited, arrested, tazed, beaten and even killed.
We’ve got to wake up. There’s a paradigm of police brutalizing blacks in Cincinnati.
This article appears in Dec 22-28, 2004.
