By now, you know that Congress has voted to take back more than $1 billion dollars of previously approved public media funding. The gutting will mean the loss of beloved programs, as well as local PPS and NPR affiliate stations around the country.
Following in the wake of cuts at the National Endowment for the Arts, the recissions make it harder than it already was to produce good art in the United States.
Art—whether writing, music, painting, or yes, improv—requires investment. Dancers put in years at the studio. Sculptors buy stone and mallets. In some parts of the world, government views itself as an investment partner, channeling money and resources to the arts to support those hours of practice and piles of supplies.
In America, it does not.
And yet, somehow, great art gets made. Beautiful murals appear on subway walls. The sound of an ukelele, purchased on a whim during the pandemic, floats down from an open window on Lakeville Road. A group of strangers invests months of their time learning improv and brings the house down at Midway Café. All of it done without government money.
Why do we do it? Why do we invest so much of our time, effort, and income into making art, in an environment that often seems indifferent or actively hostile to it?
I think it’s because we can’t stop.
During six years spent in solitary confinement, without access to traditional art supplies, artist Jesse Krimes created portraits out of soap, toilet paper, and newsprint. Five Mualimm-Ak drew faces of his fellow inmates. Even when everything else is taken away, many prisoners still try to create beautiful things.
Art is not the product—the clay pot, or the sonnet. It is the process—the days, months, and decades of struggling with ideas and raw materials to bring beauty into the world. The impulse to create remains, even when the means to do so are kept out of reach. When we ignore or stifle that impusle, we turn into bland, mush-brained lunatics. People, in other words, will make art with whatever is in front of us, in a process as natural as breathing.
Defund that.