I have been listening to a show on National Public Radio, where they are talking to Roger Kennedy, the author of "When Art Worked: The New Deal, Art and Democracy". This book is about a program that existed under Roosevelt's New Deal which paid artists to do public works (murals, etc.) as part of the WPA. And this made me think about how people view art today, that it is seen as a hobby, as not necessary as a part of our culture. I run into this problem all of the time, and I'm sure some people on DA hear this argument too.

The reason FDR paid artists to work is that people then, as stressed as they were by the Great Depression, were still capable of seeing art as an integral part of American culture, so important that they/we could not live without it. They couldn't imagine having a culture without art, music and dance. So they made it part of the WPA, and employed artists to work because artists needed to eat too. And their work was a job, it was a valid career, no less than engineering, medicine or making people's daily bread. My, how things have changed!

These days I have had people try to "help" me, talking to me as if I were a child, by telling me that art is a fine hobby, but is not real work and that I needed to get a real job. I am a professional illustrator and painter. I am not the best in the world at that, but I scrape by, and I would prefer to scrape by as an artist than while away my days on earth typing or filing instead of doing what I was born to do. Hobby my ass. And the same people have told me that artists who get paid a wage or a decent sum for their work are not as noble as the ones who have to steal an hour here and there to do their art; they feel that art that is well paid is not as "real" or respectable as art that is forced to fit into the spare corners of a person's life. What utter, ignorant rubbish. Obviously these people would never have paid Leonardo or Michelangelo to paint, but would rather have made them dig ditches or pull a plow, and fit their art into their spare moments. I have also had people tell me that being a freelance artist is the same as being unemployed, just being a lazy slacker who doesn't want to do "real" work like they do. Gee, Leonardo sure was a freelancer, it seems to me, and he didn't seem lazy to me...I should be so lazy.

I once consulted with a special psychologist who treats artists. He told me that these de-motivators (as he calls them) are a common problem, and to not let these people get away with their uninformed illusions. Better to question them about art history, and to remind them about how humans are quite different from other animals in that we aren't just limited to survival activities or instinctive behaviors.

The argument against paying artists usually involves something about art not being necessary like farming, building or medicine. Sure, those things are very important for infrastructure, but you can't compare art to emergency-room medicine or growing grain. Not even close. But art is food for the soul of society, and as far as we know, we are the only animals that create art purely for its own sake. Among the other animals, yes, chimps do have real culture; they come up with inventive tools and behaviors, and pass those on to others generation after generation. Yes, some animals either have language, or the crucial building blocks of language. But none of them make art the way we do. Whales sing, but they all sing the same song. Cranes dance, but it is all the same dance. Bees dance to give directions, not to spin a tale about sentient swans or living nutcrackers. Only humans do that. It is our birthright to paint, dance and write stories. To reduce it to whether or not it grows food or fights off enemies is like comparing a bee's hive to a Gothic cathedral (I like beehives and wasp nests too, but come on, be honest!). The hive is for bare survival, while the cathedral is what we call biological exuberance. Biological exuberance is what you do just because you can, and darn it, humans are so good at it! You'll never see a bee building Gothic arches or rose windows.

So if these human de-motivators don't want to see or pay for artwork, fine, but arguing that it isn't real work, that it isn't worth money or effort or time, shows some rather vast ignorance and lack of sophistication. Obviously they don't know what Americans living in the Great Depression still knew, which is that while art cannot fill your belly, music can help get you through hard times like nothing else. I say let these morons join the cranes or the bees, to follow their script and their programming, and let the rest of us get down to the very real, human work of the arts. Don't let the bastards get you down.