A Call for Letting ‘Voting by Pocketbook’ Determine the Value of Artworks

Regarding the Dec. 23 cover-story questions, “What is art? Who decides? Who pays?”:

Not one of the 23 prominent individuals asked to grapple with these issues, which have surfaced in the wake of the NEA fundings controversy, stopped to question whether we should actually be using public resources to support the arts.

The arts are usually said to deserve public support because they are believed to have intrinsic social value--but to whom? In reality, those who enjoy and benefit from the arts are a relatively small minority, and those who enjoy and benefit from the work of contemporary artists are an even smaller minority.

Forcing people to subsidize the kind of self-indulgent trash they wouldn’t pay a nickel at the door to see is what is obscene.

The only way out of the political morass currently engulfing us is to let each patron of the arts vote with his own pocketbook, making the dollar the sole arbiter of social value, and removing this status from the hands of a small, bureaucratic elite.

Some say that commercializing the arts would trivialize or degrade them, but it is hard to imagine how works of art could be more trivial or degrading than they already are under the current system.

RANDALL DAVIDSON

Hawthorne