Why Arts? Making the Case

Following are a few excerpts from a lunchtime plenary forum at GIA's 2003 conference in Seattle. Melanie Beene led the discussion and encouraged conference participants to share their personal connections to the arts and the arguments they use for funding arts and culture. "There's no unified field theory on why we should fund the arts," she said. "One person's old stale argument might be fresh for somebody else."

John Kreidler

March 2004, 27 pages. Project on Regional and Industrial Economics, Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota, 301 19th Avenue, Room 231, Minneapolis, MN 55455, (612) 625-8092, amarkusen@hhh.umn.edu or gshrock@hhh.umn.edu or mcameron@hhh.umn.edu, www.hhh.umn.edu

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Edited by Barbara Rich, Ed.D, Jane L. Polin, Stephen J. Marcus

2003, 164 pages. The Dana Foundation, 745 Fifth Avenue, Suite 900, New York, NY 10151, 212-223-4040, daninfo@dana.org, www.dana.org.

2002, 20 pages. Americans for the Arts, 203.371.2830, www.AmericansForTheArts.org

"When we hear talk about reducing support for the arts," writes Robert Lynch, president of Americans for the Arts, "we should ask: Who will make up for the lost economic activity?" The gist of the message of that group's Arts & Economic Prosperity report is simple and catchy: "the arts mean business."

July 2003, 25 pages. Project on Regional and Industrial Economics, Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota, 301 S. 19th Avenue, room 231, Minneapolis, MN 55455, (612) 625-8092

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   The Artistic Dividend (1.6Mb)

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Some say the world will end by fire. Others say by ice. Here in Alaska, the land of snow and ice, we're beginning to feel the fire.

In the summer of 2000 the Iñupiat community of Barrow—the farthest north settlement on the mainland of North America—had its first thunderstorm in history. Tuna were sighted in the Arctic Ocean. No one had ever seen them this far North before.

The Animating Democracy National Exchange on Art and Civic Dialogue
Flint, Michigan, October 9-12, 2003

I. Me, You, and Us: The Rise of Something New

In the six years I have served at the Center, this past season has been the most dramatic. The dot.com collapse, declining economy, terrorist threats and subsequent drop in tourism, tempered the wild-eyed entrepreneurship that had invigorated our city.

Postmodernist irony may have collapsed along with the World Trade Center, but the role artists play in creating metaphor, defining space (real and imagined), commemorating losses and victories, and articulating the unconscious can never be underestimated.