"Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life." ~ Henry Miller
"The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance." ~ Aristotle
For those who consume it, the Arts need no advocacy, the benefits are self-evident. Arts patrons intuitively understand the value the Arts play in their lives. They know there is joy in, as the quotes illustrate, finding and further understanding the significance of what it really means to be human. And therefore, as Socrates, Aristotle's teacher's teacher so aptly put it, an unexplored life is not worth living.
When public funds help support the arts however, we do need to make a case for the value we contribute to society. Support for the arts, until only recently, has been an integral component of the american Ethos. Political and social pressure has led to the need of expressly making the case for the value of the Arts outside of the intrinsic. Like all such goals, they must be measurable and shown to benefit society as a whole, not only those involved in the arts.
In a recent study by Americans for the Arts, they found that "Nationally, the nonprofit arts and culture industry generates $166.2 billion in economic activity every year—$63.1 billion in spending by organizations and an additional $103.1 billion in event-related spending by their audiences."
During a time where a mere (in proportion to the whole package) $50 million is grudgingly added to the stimulus package, I find the second figure the most telling - $103.1 billion in event-related spending. These are dollars that are spent in the community at large outside of the arts institution or venue. Even removing the incalcuable intrinsic value, given the relativly small portion of government investment that goes into most Arts organizations, that is quite a return to the society as a whole.
WHAT BENEFITS DOES AN ARTS EDUCATION PROVIDE?
“[Arts education] benefits the student because it cultivates the whole child, gradually building many kinds of literacy while developing intuition, reasoning, imagination, and dexterity into unique forms of expression and communication. This process requires not merely an active mind but a trained one. Arts education also helps students by initiating them into a variety of ways of perceiving and thinking. Because so much of a child's education in the early years is devoted to acquiring the skills of language and mathematics, children gradually learn, unconsciously, that the "normal" way to think is linear and sequential, that the pathway to understanding moves from beginning to end, from cause to effect. In this dominant early mode, students soon learn to trust mainly those symbol systems, usually in the form of words, numbers, and abstract concepts, that separate the experiencing person from what that person experiences.
But the arts teach a different lesson. They sometimes travel along a road that moves in a direction similar to the one described above, but more often they start from a different place. The arts cultivate the direct experience of the senses; they trust the unmediated flash of insight as a legitimate source of knowledge. Their goal is to connect person and experience directly, to build the bridge between verbal and nonverbal, between the strictly logical and the emotional--the better to gain an understanding of the whole. Both approaches are powerful and both are necessary; to deny students either is to disable them.
- Ponick, Frances S. National Standards for Arts Education: What Every Young American Should Know and Be Able to Do in the Arts. New York, NY: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007. (pg. 6).
(Published in 2007 by Rowman & Littlefield in partnership with MENC: The National Association for Music Education)
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