The Tears of Things

Not To Be

by Jerome du Bois

Readers may have noticed, in our blunted correspondence with Dwight Walth, that he attaches a loud little template blurb at the end of every email, in caps:

THE ARTS MEAN BUSINESS IN PHOENIX!

Cleary the work of some PR genius. But it gave me the idea to add our own signature of departure to the outgoing emails, which Catherine appropriated from the evil Islamists:

WE WILL NOT BE SILENCED.

We don't need the exclamation point.

So I used that when I sent out final emails about our Creative Capital / Partnership For Innovation piece to seven more members of said Partnership, most of whom also work at The Arizona Commission on the Arts. These people:

Gregory Sale, now back at ASU in some capacity (perhaps his career strategy is modeled on the yo-yo); Claire West (now at Ballet Arizona); Robert Booker (the Big Man at the Commission); Christopher Burawa; Casey Blake; Jill Tsukayama; and SMoCA's Susan Krane. As well as a final wave to Dwight Walth. All sent out last week, and the reader can guess the number of responses.

Zero.

But before the usual bozos begin their braying about how we're nobody and nobody cares and nobody reads us and what do you expect, the other readers, the readers who care about high standards for art and a positive image for humanity, might want to reflect on this refusal to engage in any debate about art and its official support.

Yes, my original piece was angry: I swore, and I called people names. Well? Grow up, you big babies. You don't want to know what people have called us for the last four years, with wearying consistency. I'm willing and ready to back up my epithets. Operators? Damn right. Operators are always looking out for their own narrow angle, and never for a greater good, or even any good at all unless it coincides with their interest, which is always the yoked pair of advancement and security. They bandy about the word initiative as if they had some, but it should turn to ashes in their mouths. All they do is try to think up new ways to skim public money (lottery, casinos), and gull the affluent to voluntarily create "arts support" organizations so they can dun the legislature for art money. You follow? Operators.

As I explained in the first piece, neither Catherine nor I had any notion for the longest time that the CC and the PFI had trashed us peremptorily in a single sentence. Well, I was going to take care of that in a short posting, but after I read the published report the piece opened up so that it wasn't about us. Instead, it raised the question:

Do the arts suffer in quality if they depend on public support?

And a related one:

Do art-school artists deserve public support just because they're art-school graduates?

And finally:

Do the arts suffer due to the uniformly abject and antihuman educational bent of teachers in arts institutions?

We still haven't got any answers from anybody about these questions.

All the officials have ignored us, but the commenters have focused on us. Actually, these outriders seemed obsessed with convincing us that we are nothing and nobody and everybody knows it. Wait--huh?

I began this piece yesterday morning, and that's when I wrote

the usual bozos begin their braying about how we're nobody and nobody cares and nobody reads us and what do you expect

--and lo and behold, last night we get a comment that expresses exactly that. You can read it in the last posting; I don't feel like copying it. The person --a pop-culture blurb writer for the Phoenix New Times-- ignores everything we've written in the last four postings on these questions and these people, and just goes on about how pathetic we are and how nobody agrees with us. Catherine said it best:

The belief that one can find the right words to open another heart is a forlorn one. Noble, but it's never gonna happen. It doesn't work that way. Haven't I written about this before? If there is anyone out there who believes that if only they could craft their statement the right way, custom-tailoring it to the specific learning styles of each and every individual . . . You need to be very carefull with how you spend your energy. And heed my warning: these unscrupulous characters would turn your desire to communicate and understand and use it against you.

Catherine also writes:

And you're going to have to stand up for yourself, because there won't be anyone else, except your significant other if you're blessed like me, to object to your shoddy treatment, but this in no way means you're wrong. It's the culture.

The blurb writer reveals her real agenda when she writes:

Whether you're mistaken is beside the point.

Because she doesn't give a damn about reason or policy or art, or standards or quality or dignity. That would require thinking on her part, and that's far beyond her capacity. She just wants to make sure that we know we're unpopular in this town.

You think she might be a little late to the venue? As if we don't already know that many arts people in this town wish we would just shut up and go away; further, they wish we just weren't here. But wishing won't make it so; it's not to be. That Lemonhead creep at the New Times actually wrote something about us "daring to show our faces in public." I'd like to see that fat ass try to stop us.

We've been running around this town long before these big fat babies were even born, and we'll keep on doing so for the foreseeable future, if the gods be willing. And we will not be silenced.

Posted by Jerome at October 2, 2007 08:30 PM | TrackBack