Yesterday I learned of a thing called MetaFilter. Someone in the MetaFilter community subsumed my recent blog posts into a MetaPost about theater economics.

The ensuing conversation is great fun to read, although a little difficult to follow; coherency suffers in the age of aggregated essays. Clarity also suffers: “Is this sentence addressed to me? To a different blog? To a previous comment?”

I have to say, though, that compared to other aggregators this discussion on MetaFilter has a downright respectable signal-to-noise ratio. The thread is full of good comments, but I was especially curious to find the critiques. One of them that caught my attention was from Alexandra Nelson. Not all of her comments are directed at me, but some of them are, and they’re the valuable kind that make me a little uncomfortable with what I’ve written. (Discomfort: the sure sign that someone is making a point that matters.)

Xan takes me to task as follows:

You cannot find a poorly written grant proposal and then use it to condemn an entire industry. Every single grantwriter worth her salt knows that “It’s not about me.” That’s grant writing 101. The people writing the navel-gazing proposals are not getting the grants, because the philanthropic community also knows that.

Is the proposal I focused on particularly poor? Sure. But is it particularly unique? I’d say no. It is unique only in the clarity and severity of its shortcomings, not in the fact that it exists. It was easy enough for me to cite four other proposals infused with fragments of the same core problems in the space of two sentences, and I stopped there because there didn’t seem much reason to belabor the point. These weren’t all proposals culled from the hidden cracks of the artistic landscape, they’re samples of a national dialog. Proposals found in Newsweek are not, unfortunately, just a case of “bad development directors whin[ing] on poorly written blogs”. It’s an interesting point that the grant-writers themselves, if they are to be successful, will be the least vulnerable to these notions. But the cultural conversation is not, apparently, dominated by the enlightened grant-writers.

If I have insulted the innocent by lobbing the “self-centered” label at an industry that is not entirely self-centered, it’s because I see enough of it blabbing in a self-centered way to make me feel the spillover can be excused.

In a later comment Xan says:

Artists have been asked to save public education, rehabilitate prisoners, stop drug abuse, revitalise the cities and for all I know, fill potholes. So many funders, public and private alike, insist that the art itself must pay for itself, and that social uses of the arts are the only acceptable uses of public or tax-supported dollars. There needs to be some understanding that while these very worthwhile uses of the arts do not happen without artists who are trained to be artists, and who are willing to accept low salaries and lousy hours. But you have to train the artists. [...] The artist will work for love (up to a point), which is great for those who want them to do prison reform. But you’ve got to pay for them to be artists, too.

And after that:

The contortion that the business model pulls us into, is convincing the source of 20 to 40% of a our revenues, the donors and foundations, that there is a larger societal good from putting this on a stage (in a gallery, wherever art happens). I think this is one of the places where [Chris Ashworth] goes wrong. The policy value of the arts can be exactly a good reason why “it’s not about me.”

With due respect (and I mean that), I don’t think Xan read my post through to the end. All of this is a reasonable defense of tax-funded art—even tax-funded art created for its own sake. But it assumes the premise that the arts are a particularly good way to accomplish all these things. That they are directly, evidently, and uniquely essential to a healthy human community in a way comparable to other government services. My explicit argument in the post Xan objects to is that that’s a really hard argument to make¹. That doesn’t necessarily mean I think it’s false, it just means I think that right now, in America, that argument is poorly supported in the public discourse. It is axiomatic in the minds of artists, worthy of deep suspicion in the minds of non-artists, and is for that reason a kind of self-centeredness on the part of the artists who refuse to allow for the possibility that the axiom may be poison.

Public funding for the arts may be a morally and practically supportable function of government. It may not. But if we’re not convincing big swaths of our country about the value of, say, the NEA, I’d much rather we spend the energy on other important things, because it’s getting between us and the community we’re trying to animate. Which is to say it’s getting between us and ourselves.

1. I figure I can confidently assume that Xan has successfully made some of those arguments in her 30 years in the indusrty, and as such has been a force for good in her community. To that I would say: awesome, well done.