Taxpayer dollars that go toward The National Endowment for The Arts:
Approx. $100,000,000 (one hundred million dollars), or about $0.25 (one quarter) per U.S. citizen per year.
Taxpayer dollars that are going toward bailing out banks that engaged in wreckless investment practices:
Approx. $1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion dollars), or about $2,500 per U.S. citizen in total.
That means that even if we increased the current budget of the NEA tenfold, it would still take one thousand years to equal this single financial bailout for these banks.
Kind of makes The Waterfalls look like the investment of the millenium.
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I agree with you, but I think you meant “reckless”. The incompetent, greedy, grasping opportunists and crony capitalists on Wall Street and the relentless deregulators and their ilk in Washington have caused far too many wrecks lately…
Thanks for the correction, Afrit007.
yeah, but i still don’t want more waterfalls…
Maybe only if we get to play in them.
Hi CC,
some some similar thoughts:
http://www.reflectionsondance.blogspot.com/
Hey Aynsley-
Yes, the abuse of language and the skirting of truth is kind of appalling right now.
It’s not like investment bankers are exactly working the mines. Nor are they really creating anything, other than excess wealth that actually does not exist; or shouldn’t have existed, as far as I understand what’s happened.
At least in terms of visual art, that’s probably why that market isn’t mirroring the credit market, because a work of art is a real thing. Gold, similarly, has only increased in value during this crisis.
But performance is another matter altogether. If only we could figure out how to make people understand that a performance is an object, in a way–a thing you can have–that by experiencing the performance, you actually come away owning some of it.
I would argue that a dance company is a more stable investment than, say, debt swap derivatives (or whatever)…A company isn’t a derivative. It’s a real thing that creates real things.
Your comments remind me of this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/22/opinion/22cohen.html?ref=opinion
Let me know when you figure out how to market performance as a stable investment, something that people can feel ownership of rather than bafflement or separation!