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Arts funding shouldn’t be first to go

Published 12:04am Thursday, July 5, 2012

Nearly four years after the Great Recession began and worries over our country’s banking system nearly sent the economy over a cliff, the damage is still being felt across the Miss-Lou.

The most recent blow came in the form of a $12,000 cut in state funding to the Concordia Parish Library. The library operates branches in Clayton, Ferriday and Vidalia, as well as operating a bookmobile.

The funding paid for technological resources, including computers with Internet access for public use.

Perhaps lawmakers think such things are so commonplace that “everyone” already has such access. The truth is many of our area’s residents still lack Internet access, and thus the library is their only avenue to help their children do school research or otherwise better their education.

Such state funding is important to the library, but parish residents are fortunate that most of the library’s funding comes in the form of a local tax in effect until 2018.

Louisiana’s recent budget cuts included doing away with nearly $1 million in funding to state libraries.

Similar budget cuts crippled many state museums including Ferriday’s Delta Music Museum.

Politicians wring their hands about such issues and suggest that they support educational efforts and cultural improvements for the state at the same time they’re cutting funding for the very same groups.

Unfortunately libraries and museums aren’t typically big players in political circles. They don’t make large donations to politicians, and they wield very little political power.

So they’re among the first to be cut. The public should demand that such cuts be restored quickly. Failing to invest in libraries and museums is likely to bite the state squarely on the rump in the long run.

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  • Anonymous

    Arts funding should be the FIRST to go.  Don’t lump libraries in with “art”, either.

    I, the taxpayer, should have no duty to prop up “the arts”.  That which has value as art can stand on its own.

    Thanks to public funding, delivery workers can now make deliveries to art galleries and watch as the patrons “Oooh” and “Ahhh” over the great work of art that is, in actuality, nothing but a stand for a piece of art to eventually sit on.  Yes, that happens.  People now cannot tell human-made “art” from the works of an Indian elephant randomly slinging paint with its trunk or a chimpanzee’s finger-paintings.  Real events.  The “art” world is riddled with stories like these.  THAT is the state of “art” today and it is because of public funding making anyone who can apply for a grant an “artist” on your dime, even if they can’t do more than drop a crucifix in a cup of urine or smear an American flag with motor oil.  People are revered as great artists these days when their works look like my shop rags in a frame.

    Public funding of art has destroyed art.

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