Special pleading unsupported by a good argument

From Creative Destruction:Is it still possible to survive as an artist in America? by William Giraldi. A sustained exercise in special pleading. The article is actually a book review of Culture Crash by Scott Timberg, but Giraldi completely accepts Timberg's argument and adds his own special pleading to it.

The basic argument is that despite its prosperity, American culture ignores, denigrates and starves American artists. That it is, unlike in times past, impossible for artists to live a middle class life in America.

Let’s forget about starving artist for a moment and get right to a more accurate, and ominous, conjugation: The artist in America is being starved, systemically and without shame. In this land of untold bounty—what is usually called, in a kind of blustering spasm, the richest empire on earth—the American creative class has been forced to brook a historic economic burden while also being sunk into sunless irrelevancy. When it came to artists, Comrade Stalin knew all about a bounty of a different sort—he stuck it on the heads of those whose pens and brushes might transgress against his galactic hubris. Remember Osip Mandelstam’s quip about how Mother Russia reveres her poets enough to murder them? Well, with our consummate lack of reverence, we in America kill our poets in quite another way: We ignore them to death.

There is a head nod towards trying to construct an empirical argument with a spasmodic effort to fling a lot of statistics of varied quality and relevance against the metaphorical wall with the hope that some might stick.

Here’s a paragraph grim enough to wreck your week, a sortie of distressing numbers about the arbiters, facilitators, and creators of culture: Between 2008 and September 2012, there were 66 No. 1 songs, almost half of which were performed by only six artists (Katy Perry, Rihanna, Flo Rida, The Black Eyed Peas, Adele, and Lady Gaga); in 2011, Adele’s debut album sold more than 70 percent of all classical albums combined, and more than 60 percent of all jazz albums. Between 1982 and 2002, the number of Americans reading fiction withered by nearly 30 percent. In a 1966 UCLA study, 86 percent of students across the country declared that they intended to have a “meaningful philosophy of life”; by 2013, that percentage was amputated by half, “meaningful” no doubt replaced by “moneyful.” Over the past two decades, the number of English majors graduating from Yale University has plummeted by 60 percent; at Stanford University in 2013, only 15 percent of students majored in the humanities. In American universities, more than 50 percent of faculty is adjuncts, pittance-paid laborers with no medical insurance and barely a prayer to bolster them. In the publishing and journalism trades, 260,000 jobs were nixed between 2007 and 2009. Since the turn of the century, around 80 percent of cultural critics writing for newspapers have lost their jobs. There are only two remaining full-time dance critics in the entire United States of America. A not untypical yearly salary in 2008 for a professional dancer was $15,000.

There is the clever word smithing.

Renovate that bromide making ends meet and you might be nearer the mark: Members of the creative class are meeting their ends. What does it mean when the middle-class makers of art are relegated to a socioeconomic purgatory? The dearth of public funding for the arts mirrors the dearth of public ardor for the arts, and yet, somehow, we’re awash in dilettantes decanting their wares on the midden of American culture. Everyone, it seems, is an artist. Toss a stone into any crowd and you’ll hit someone who’s writing a novel. (Yeats once opened his address to the Rhymers’ Club with: “The only thing certain about us is that we are too many.”) The vestal and very simple concept of supply and demand will not be debauched out of its simplicity: When everyone’s an artist and no one spends money on art, art is stripped of any economic traction and serious artists can’t earn a living. Couple that with a population that overwhelmingly doesn’t mind if art and artists go extinct and you have, ladies and gentlemen, what can be fairly called a crisis.

Ah yes. the de rigeur crisis. The bugle call to arms. But after that snide insider/elitist observation that "we’re awash in dilettantes decanting their wares on the midden of American culture. Everyone, it seems, is an artist." Who is this "we" of whom you speak, Giraldi? This is revealing. Giraldi is not celebrating that more people have more time and means to produce art. He is railing that this is creating competition for those select few whom he considers to be true artists. Giraldi is no different than any other producer seeking protection from the free market and support from the state in terms of either subsidies or grants of monopolistic protection.

The crux is that this is not peculiar to the arts. These issues have been stalking all fields of endeavor since the mid-1970s and the initial pangs of globalization: winner-take-all-economies, global competition, and technological displacement.

First it was felt by blue collar workers and everyone regretted the disruptions but hoped that the sop of worker retraining would mitigate the consequences. Then it began to encroach on the managerial middle class and the wails got louder and there was hope that legislation might constrain outsourcing, but in the event that was an empty hope. Now lawyers, doctors and engineers are being threatened and there are dizzying discussions without any real focus on productive solutions of how to help large classes of people to become more productive in a globally variable and fast changing environment. The impact on artists is as regrettable as it is on all the others but there is nothing that particularly distinguishes their travails from anyone elses.

Giraldi wants to cast this as fundamentally a reflection of a weak culture that refuses to stand by its artists. The sum of his solution is take money from everyone else and redirect that money to artists as a special class. Gak! How transparently self-serving can you get and how demonstrably ignorant and/or inconsiderate of others? This is cultural elitism at its shallowest and most despicable.

There are real issues here and Giraldi raises some valid points such as, for example, what to do about the culture of expropriating intellectual property.

But never in this long diatribe is there any discussion of the central issue. Why are people no longer willing to purchase the products of the creative class? We are far richer than we have ever been in history. There is more disposable income than ever before. Our poorest quintile have income levels equivalent to that of the middle quintile in the 1970s. There is more disposable income around than ever before. Granted, it is never as much as we would want or might have expected, but it is there.

Why are people not spending those increasing levels of disposable income on artists? That is what Giraldi needs to answer.

Instead Giraldi constructs an elaborate confectionary of an argument with many hot-buttons pushed but never in a way that establishes a coherent and robust evidence based argument.

When Robert Lowell was reconfiguring American poetry in 1950s Boston, “a life of genteel poverty was still possible.” Let me tell you, as a Bostonian—a life of genteel poverty is no longer possible, and hasn’t been for a long time.

Whenever the argument weakens, Giraldi plays the No True Scotsman fallacy. For example, Giraldi wants to exclude from artisthood, the tens of thousands of "dilettante" poets and literary writers with MFAs ensconced in universities across the land. Their existence would completely invalidate his argument that artists cannot enjoy a middle class livelihood.

But when you’re an artist in academia, you’re only a part-time artist, at best.

Giraldi reveals his totalitarian Gramscian colors towards the end of this long jeremiad. According to Giraldi, the fault lies not in the artists and their disengagement from the consuming public but with the state and the bankers.

Because the artist’s woe has its origin in Washington and on Wall Street, in the very strands of our socioeconomic structure, and in the unkillable throbbing of the electronic marketplace, reversing that woe will take a revolution.

Who else gets to do what they want without having to collaborate, cooperate and serve others? That is the heart of commerce and it produces wonders. It worked in the past with other artists, including all the ones mentioned in the article. But in all eras, artists who have followed their own muse different from the tastes of the public have suffered. Their names and numbers are legion and are not infrequently now among the pantheon of our revered greats today: Poe, Melville, Whistler, Picasso, van Gogh, etc. They all suffered either prolonged periods of marginal financial existence or lived their entire lifetimes on the verge of financial calamity.

Giraldi is unpersuasive in his argument and by its one-sidedness and wilful ignorance of the lives of those outside the artistic community and outside the narrow circles of the elite, inadvertently makes the case that artists are not yet sufficiently engaged with the reality with which we are all engaged to deserve any special consideration at all.

Before asking for money and protection perhaps Giraldi can address the two irreconcilable issues:

Artists are unwilling to produce the art for which people are willing to pay.
People are unwilling to pay for much of the art that artists wish to produce.