what do you mean "don't use the highway"? if you don't drive on it yrself, chances are most of the food,clothes,tvs and whatever else you buy were in a truck on the highway at some point, that's using it

the fact is health care and social programs among other things are underfunded in most countries around the world, i think it's ridiculous to spend public money on funding a few people's ambitions when millions of other people can barely survive

arts funding is not to fund some people's ambitions, but to better the lives of every single citizen, whether through access to visual arts, performance arts, music, public broadcasting of performances, etc.

I fancy Sarah Lucas.

sure, but i think it's better to do that in a natural way than getting it from the same people who make jails and wars, plus more accessible art is going to benefit almost exclusively from such programs, i hate to think of how many truly great creations are left to sit in the makers basement because a grant went to some hack instead

the bottom line for me is that you can't better somebody's life if they die from hunger or a disease(imagine walking in the city center and not seeing anyone passed out on the sidewalk,sounds like art to me!), and i don't want the corrupt and already far too powerful govt to push themselves into every tiny aspect of our lives

the "people who make jails and wars" are US you know.
the people are the government. they elect the reps and they bombard them with calls for tougher on crime, bigger jails, more jails, etc. those voices are heard and acted upon. if the same amount of passion was directed at them with charges to feed the hungry or clothe and shlter the homeless, the same amount of work would be done for that.
it seems there is no way to make money off of feeding the hungry, caring for the poor, or shekltering the homeless, and that is why the fucking assholes will never support such measures.

more jails means more free/cheap labor for the many companies that utilize the 3-4 million in prison at this moment.

Moast great works of art prior to the 20th century were done under government/church patronage. imagine the loss for our human culture if they had not gotten such money from the government/church?

it's not like people getting the grants burn the money you know

they spend it in the work and recirculate it in the economy. they buy groceries and pay rent.

some of these grants require you to do a public service and what not

it's like the government hires a "cultural worker" to do things

we have people like the poet laureate of the u.s. and others who do that who live off government salaries

same shit with people teaching poetry, art, and music in public universities-- they get paid with tax dollars. it's great to be able to be a poet or a painter and not have to be homeless and live in a shelter or wait for "charity". wellcharge sounds like those yahoos who like to cut arts education

sorry but the people voted to keep it alive-- art makes life better for all-- even for yahoos.

thats not dancing in the streets..

this is dancin in the streets my friend:








They'll be dancin in the streets..they're dancin in the streets.. all the way down in LA, california.. not to mention Halifax..

I agree with that to an extent. However, I think it's the same mentality that allows athletes to hit their ridiculous salaries. Some jobs just don't need to be well-funded (a big issue with politicians and pastors). If a real artist is going to do art, they will just go into it knowing they'll need some other form of support.

At the same time, I'm not at all against funding artists. I just don't think it's necessary or extremely beneficial for artist output. Unless of course we're talking structural art or something, in which the work itself requires more money than the artist can fund. But besides that.

I wouldn't call someone who wrote a manifesto of angry womanhood an artist. She did write 'Up Your Ass', which apprently isn't even a good play according to the few who happened to read it, but Andy Warhol seemed to like it, not enough not to 'lose it'. She was certainly good at torturing insects as a laboratory assistant, and getting knocked about by her one time sailor boyfriend, which might explain tha manifesto in the first place.