On their recent visit to Southern California, Prince William and
wife Catherine and about 1,300 bodyguards toured Skid Row. Nothing
too unusual about that. We expect British monarchs-in-training to
spend an hour or two slumming it when they visit their former
possessions. Such expeditions give a boost to their innate British
snobbishness while providing a great photo opportunity: (“Kate, how
about a hug for that half-starved rickety lad with the big eyes!”)
What is more, it shows that today’s aristocrats really, really care
about the underclass, unlike yesterday’s aristocrats who used them
for target practice.
On Skid Row, the royal
couple visited Inner-City Arts, a nonprofit organization that for
two decades has provided free arts instruction to poor, starving,
chronically abused children. The visit highlighted two of Prince
William’s main interests: promoting the arts and doing absolutely
nothing useful.
Cynthia Harnisch, president of Inner-City Arts, spoke to
the royal couple about Skid Row and the challenges of poverty and
homelessness faced by many students at the school, to which Prince
William responded, “Yes, but how are finger painting lessons going
to help them escape all that?”
Just kidding. The prince would never say that.
Now that I’ve got out my wet blanket, go ahead and ask
what’s wrong with some British aristocrats (or anyone else, for
that matter) promoting arts training for poor kids?
Actually, just about everything.
I live down the street from several of these inner-city
arts centers set up to teach poor kids dance, art and music
education, all of them run by guilt-stricken trust fund babies who
want to “give back.” Their idea of giving back is to teach
traditional capoeira
Angola to inner city kids.
Of course, what inner city kids really need is for a trade
unionist to “give back” and take them on as apprentices and teach
them practical skills, especially since the city’s public schools
won’t. (Public schools likewise like to teach the “visual
and performing arts.” It’s so much more fun than, say,
fractions.) What these poor kids do not need to learn is how to
make esoteric conceptual art. How is that going to help them end
the cycle of poverty? Even if they became artists or musicians they
will still be dirt poor.
More artists, we don’t need. According to the National
Endowment for the Arts, the number of artists in America increases
about 50 percent per decade. The NEA apparently thinks this is a
good thing. Meanwhile we have to look to India and China for our
engineers and doctors.
EVER WONDER HOW many artists thrived during the High
Renaissance? Probably about
70 first-rate ones, of which a dozen are still
remembered by art historians. Today, there are nearly two million
hacks who call themselves professional artists. And by no one’s
reckoning are we living through a High Renaissance.
The arts-as-cure-all remains an enduring and
popular brand of snake oil. Recently, my wife gave me an article
that describes how to nurture your child’s “spark”:
As a parent, you can help your child discover her spark
[that thing that makes them light up from inside], and watch this
unique characteristic develop over time. One of the side benefits
of helping your child discover and develop their spark is that you
can reconnect with your own spark by going on the spark journey together!
It’s a good bet that any paragraph that includes the word
“journey” and isn’t about a bad Seventies rock band is going to be
meaningless. But this is exactly the kind of thing the
trust-funders down at the Community, Arts & Movement
Project tell each other every day while they are
teaching fatherless minority kids how to “”convey a concept to the perceiver, rejecting the creation or
appreciation of a traditional art object.” Parents and teachers who
encourage this sort of behavior should be held responsible, morally
and financially, for ruining these kids’ ability to find
well-paying, meaningful work.
Middle-class kids can afford to waste their time learning
to pirouette or to play electric violin. They are
going to go to college and eventually, hopefully, go into business
or medicine (or more likely marketing or law). But for a lot of the
kids in my neighborhood, arts education is like rearranging the
deck chairs on the Titanic. It’s a luxury they can’t afford. And
the last thing Skid Row needs is another out-of-work musician
singing the blues.
