Welfare Artists
(er, I mean Wealthy Artists)

by Greg Perry

Liberals would have you believe that art world needs funding to survive. True conservatives will tell you, correctly, that if art should survive, it will. If nobody wants art enough to pay for it voluntarily, then art will die a valid death.

Let me ask you, what would virtually any thinking historian say was the most productive art period in history? It was the Renaissance in the 1700s that produced the world's greatest art, before or after. The David statue, the Sistine Chapel, the Pieta', you name it – it's still the best.

Who made this art possible?

These two groups commissioned the best art in history:

    1. Wealthy individuals
    2. Churches

Who are the two groups that liberals and most artists continually vilify?

    1. Wealthy individuals
    2. Churches

If liberals truly wanted art to thrive, they would stop bashing the rich and they would stop trying to remove the church from every single walk of life. But liberals are not honest. They want art to be another welfare program. They would have YOU pay "starving artists" and support the institutes that cannot make it on the turnstile ticket sales alone.

But your tax dollars are not paying starving artists. And art institutes are not art destitutes.

Consider the following table from FORBES magazine, April 16, 2001, page 30:

Art Institute Leader Annual Salary
J. Paul Getty Museum, LA John Walsh $1,403,543
Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY Phillipe de Montebello 1,134,762
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Peter C. Marzio 547,181
Whitney Museum of American Art, NY Maxwell L. Anderson 507,790
National Gallery of Art, Washington Earl A. Powell, III 447,718
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Malcolm A. Rogers 439,022
Brooklyn Museum, NY Arnold Lehman 435,038
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago James N. Wood 408,890

It turns out that if welfare for art stops, that rich won't be getting richer.

We learn two things from this table:

    1. The leaders of America's major art institutes are some of the wealthiest individuals in the country and are subsidized by the American taxpayer.
    2. Liberal art supporters are hypocritically chauvinistic and refuse to put women in leadership roles.

April 26, 2001

Greg Perry [send him mail] is the author of 70 books on computer programming.

Copyright © 2001 LewRockwell.com
 
Back to LewRockwell.com Home Page