I Give Up.

Forget it. I've had this nagging desire to follow up that last post with something intelligent, even drafted a huge essay, and then scrapped it because all I could say was that neither way works. I've satisfied myself, below, with the notion that true art cannot thrive (note: it can exist) in a modern capitalist society, and in fact the decline we see now is likely to continue. However, I cannot come up with a solution to the problem that does not involve a group of elites forcing their aesthetic notions onto the rest of the world.

Mind you, that's a great idea as long as the elites are doing their job right. The problem is selecting new elites. Because fifty years from now I might be forced to underwrite Justin Timberlake with my tax dollars because the Bubblegum Music Association got a member on the board of the new, fully empowered NEA. See what I'm talking about? This is why I keep searching for new forms of government but keep coming up dry. It is a choice between three-hundred-million idiots or just a few doing the ruling, but at least if there are three-hundred-million, a lot of them might cancel each other out.

For the record: Robert Hamilton considers the State of the Arts Question to be a complete, unsolveable Catch-22. That is hopefully not going to be a life-long position, so stay tuned.