From today’s Pionerr Press:
http://www.twincities.com/soucheray/ci_23856476/joe-soucheray-your-tax-dollars-buy-art-10
When voters passed the Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment in 2008, did you think you were going to provide $10,000 to some woman to hang a sheet in her yard?
I didn’t think so. The voters had only one thought in their heads. They were thinking of that old Hamm’s Beer sign behind the bar that shows the rippling, pure, blue water of a northwoods lake with towering pines hugging the shoreline. Why, in voting to additionally tax themselves, the voters practically could smell the campfires.
Who wouldn’t want clean water and towering pines?
I was dismissed as possibly too radical to be offering counsel, but no real good can come from giving a government a new pot of money because the government will only grow in such a way to use the money up.
Oh, the voters knew there was something in the amendment about funding the arts, but the important thing was to save those pine trees and those deep blue lakes, and if a few people got a few bucks to create a bronze sculpture of some famous Minnesotan, so be it.
Did you sign up for some woman to get $10,000 to hang up a sheet in her yard? In an eye-opening piece in Sunday’s Pioneer Press, we learned that the expansive Minnesota State Arts Board has multiple tens of millions of dollars of legacy money to disperse as part of the arts and cultural component of the amendment.
The woman who hung up the sheet, Barbara Claussen, apparently had a dispute with a neighbor. She felt threatened. She decided that she would establish a “barrier” in her yard that consisted of a piece of cloth about the size of a closet door. She hung the cloth on a contrivance of aluminum tent poles.
Why she thought that was an effective barrier or how it occurred to her to apply for public money is anybody’s guess, but why the state arts board actually granted her $10,000 is not a mystery at all.
We learned something crucial in that Sunday story. An unelected group of people who make up the board have no standards whatsoever that apply to proposals for public money. Yes, they turn down proposals, but the board’s director, Sue Gens, said the board does not decide what is good art but intends instead to provide artistic experiences.
In other words, we, the great unwashed, do not understand art and have been told that we will be expected to provide experiences so that art — which can be quite literally anything — should be accommodated with public funding. Art — which can be quite literally anything — needs to be made available to more of the public and so on.
But there is a fatal flaw right from the get-go. There is nothing public about Claussen hanging up a sheet with a butterfly on it, or whatever, in her own yard. And as for the $10,000, shouldn’t the board go back to her and reclaim about $9,992? A couple of aluminum poles and a sheet couldn’t cost much more than about $8. Even then, why should she get $8 for something in her own yard, which is not public?
Other examples of grant winners include a guy in Ely who got $10,000 so he could paddle around on Lake Superior in the hopes of getting inspired for the furniture he wishes to make, and an author who got $10,000 to develop her social-media skills to strengthen her identity and grow her audience. That’s what happens when you give the government a new pot of money. They will spend that money.
The other morning, on the corner of Fourth and Wabasha streets, a young guy had set up about five overturned five-gallon plastic tubs. He was beating on them with drumsticks. But he wasn’t any good. He had no rhythm. There was nothing that suggested syncopation. He was just banging the sticks on the tubs.
With no standards in place, no means to measure worth and credibility, that guy is as good a bet as anybody to get $10,000 from the arts board “to demonstrate the nature of random sound in an urban environment.”
And all you saw was that Hamm’s Beer sign behind the bar at that place up at the lake.
Joe Soucheray can be reached at [email protected] or 651-228-5474. Soucheray is heard from 1 to 4 p.m. weekdays on 1500ESPN.
Caption for the photo used:
Quote:
Barbara Claussen shows the barrier Wednesday that she built to separate her Lauderdale yard from a neighbor’s. After the neighbor threatened to harm her if she stepped on his property, Claussen used a $10,000 grant from the state’s funding for the arts to build the barrier. The neighbor has moved away, but Claussen said she kept the barrier up to see how it weathers. (Pioneer Press: Jean Pieri)
But noooooooo. It’s freaking true!
