|
Post by John B on Apr 15, 2024 11:36:28 GMT -5
I don't understand the suggestion that concern about the climate is "woke." I suspect that I have put more effort into understanding the science and the evidence surrounding climate change than most people here. I'm very concerned. That concern has little or nothing to do with my view of any other issues. It's a product of the evidence. I don't have the view I have because I was swept up in trendy groupthink. I continue to be puzzled about how "wokeness," which I understand to mean awareness of and sensitivity to injustice, has become a sneered epithet. Indifference to injustice is no virtue. Sarcastic put-downs of people we disagree with don't get us anywhere. I'm not sneering. It's their word and they're proud of it. Am I not allowed to use it? Side note: who is "They"?
|
|
|
Post by t-bob on Apr 15, 2024 11:46:07 GMT -5
Art - for - grant (stars)
yup, yup, yup !!!
howling a wolf - (music, eh)
|
|
|
Post by Russell Letson on Apr 15, 2024 12:02:02 GMT -5
B) How much a country supports the arts isn't indicated by those numbers that the NEA provided. How much Americans support the arts is measured by the number of self-supporting artist we have relative to the rest of those countries. If by THAT measure you prove that we are yet again inferior (as we are with health care and climate awareness and gender sensitivity ... as we appear to be by every other woke measure under the sun) then perhaps we are due the scolding. I suppose "scolding" is a matter of reception--the vibe I get from that NEA document is mostly explanatory, though obviously with an eye toward advocacy. One of the through-lines is that organized arts support in the US is decentralized (the point of the opening pie chart). In any case, the document is from 2012, so linking it to current hot issues (particularly anything "woke") is a bit of a reach. Now about that "open market by which most artist/craftsmen are thriving" from the original post. The two areas I know well are literature and music, and while there are certainly practitioners in both who thrive and more, there are overwhelmingly more for whom the day job (or the spouse who has one) is the only way to avoid poverty and/or have medical insurance. Without CMAB grant money, the Folk Society would not be able to mount a 19-concert season. In fact, without grant support, there would be no acoustic music in St. Cloud beyond tip-jar or play-for-food gigs. (In pre-grant days, concert overhead was carried by the music-loving venue owner and artist pay was entirely from ticket sales. Now we offer decent guarantees and maintain a cushion for concerts that don't break even.) The local Chamber Music Society operates on a similar model, though with much more expensive artists and a correspondingly bigger budget and array of public and private funders. On the literary end, I can guarantee that just about nobody makes a living writing short fiction (as for poetry, it is to laugh), and even producing "commercial" novels is unlikely to generate a living wage.* I'm not a big believer in public support for individual writers, but the free market is no friend to the scribbler. Gainful employment that offers a bit of space for writing--or even subsidizes it, as some universities do by hiring writers to teach in MFA programs--is about as good a deal as most writers can expect. And despite the number of self-publishing writers who claim to have made decent (or even big) money, I can guarantee that most of them are doing about as well as poets, financially. And the ones who claim to have built writing careers are spending at least as much time in marketing and other functions once carried out by the publisher as they do in writing. Being an indie novelist means also being an indie agent, editor, proofreader, and designer--or contracting out those functions, which reduces income. * We've been tracking this for a good 40 years and are personally acquainted with a number of professionals. C never counseled her students to expect to make a living writing fiction.
|
|
|
Post by james on Apr 15, 2024 13:14:21 GMT -5
Since the word "woke" was separated from its African-American origins and repurposed into a sneering insult, not unlike SJW, by conservative culture warriors, politicians* and media, I have heard it used unironically by fewer and fewer serious commentators.
* Even being used in Florida's odious and reactionary W.O.K.E Act
|
|