Randy Pausch gave good advice to his computer science students at Carnegie Mellon: When you know you are in pissing contest it, get out of it as fast as you can. So in the Pauschian spirit, I offer this delicious cartoon, sent by Mr. Eyeballs as both a free gift and a chastisement.
The previous post grew, in some curious way, out of Arty Bollocks, the earlier waltz over artistic pretension. Just how things sidled into corporate greed, is a bit murky. It is certainly not the ditch to die in. Greed is one of the seven deadly sins, to be sure. So is envy. And forgive me, please, if I tend to see much of artists’ moral indignation aimed at profit-making enterprises to be tetthered—by however gossamer the thread—to something very close to envy.
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The reason I suspect so—doubtless someone will correct me if I am wrong—is that the greed and corruption of our political class does not draw equal ire. (Charlie Rangel, anyone? Nancy Pelosi, whose personal wealth increased 62% over the last two years while in public service? John Kerry, who keeps his yacht in a tax haven even though his wife’s net worth is larger than that of some island nations? The list is long.)
Believe me, I carry no brief for Goldman Sachs. Any who has browsed the selection of published essays on my website knows that. I simply pointed out that asset management is one of their functions. Every one of us who has a pension fund, an IRA (the container for stocks, treasury bills, bonds, mutual funds, etc.), or a 401(k) is a shareholder in corporate profits. You want to be solvent in your old age? Then you want the corporations in your retirement basket to make as much money as possible.
Artists often seem to want it both ways. They want to protect their retirement—a legitimate need—while they pull their skirts back from the taint of corporate profit. That, in a nut shell, is all I was groping to say in the previous post.
Judging from email, some of you got it. As reader Gail Reiser put it:
If a place like SCAD is not delivering on its promise to turn out employable graduates, it should return tuitions. If it is, then it serves a real purpose. So do the Art Institutes if their grads have a leg up in the job market. Whether of not their CEOs are overpaid is a different issue. But it is fun to feel righteous, isn’t it?
Grandstanding is an enduring temptation to artists. Why is that? Art itself is neither moral nor charitable and, as Jacques Barzun reminds us, has no superior warrant for denouncing the world.
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© 2011 Maureen Mullarkey
