Here’s one of the truly magical things about music.

Remember the movie Jurassic Park? If you do, then you remember that the plot of the movie revolves around DNA, the tiny chemical master plan for creating a whole you that exists in every cell of our bodies.

 So in the movie, a team of scientists finds a mosquito millions of years old preserved in amber right next to a dinosaur skeleton. This mosquito had apparently been enjoying a little drink of dinosaur blood when it got stuck in a drop of amber (sort of like sticky honey). When 20^th century scientists find that amber with the mosquito inside (now 65 million years dead) and look into its little mosquito tummy, guess what they find? Dinosaur blood cells! So they stick a needle into one of those cells, suck out the DNA chemical master plan for a dinosaur, transfer it into a living egg cell, and voila! The egg cell develops into a dinosaur that gets up and walks around in our own time!

 MAGIC!

Pretty amazing, eh? All they had was a tiny piece of DNA code — but that was enough to bring back to life one of the largest creatures ever to walk on the earth.

 Now here’s the really interesting part. Think about a musical score. It’s a pattern too, just like DNA. In fact, it’s the musical master plan for describing a human experience that someone, maybe a long time ago, actually FELT. By writing down notes onto a musical score, that person encoded a lived experience into a pattern — a kind of DNA code for their own inner feeling and experience — that could travel across centuries to people far distant from them in time and space. People like us, for example.

 And when we now take that score, and bring to it our own living energy as singers and players (like the egg, remember?), that original experience comes to life again! The sound that person encoded long ago is in our room now, maybe a thousand years later — and through that code of a musical score, we are connected again to the inner experience of a person who lived perhaps centuries before us, and maybe half way around the world. They might have been dead for a thousand years – but we can live for a moment inside their thought, their feeling, their mind and their heart.

MAGIC!

The eternal question, what is art? seems to me, like a good place to kick start my first blog post here at Artists United. This is a personal blog, and does not reflect the values of everybody at Artists United. With luck it will strike some universal chords and cause the reader to reconsider the burning question, what (is) art? Please forgive any error in judgement.      

Firstly, I would like to address the question of what ‘is’ is, by paraphrasing the response of Bill Clinton to a tricky question: “it depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is.” Plato, Buddha, and others throughout history have robustly questioned the essence demanded by the concept of isness, or beingness, and challenged the authority of certitude. What objective certainty? Where can we find certainty to go ahead and claim, absolutely, that something ‘is’ or equally and oppositely, ‘is not’? Semanticist Alfred Korzybski inferred that “isness is an illness”, and I agree with his prognosis, and would extend his advice beyond the question about Art. When we distinguish between ‘things’ we make sense, and can begin to use a limited certainty of convenience to enable a fair discussion. The menu is not the meal, the categories and labels are used for convenience, not for ultimate truths.     

When confronted with the question, is it art? I try to first reframe the question into something bound to space and time. With two polar opposite examples, one may view the Universe and all things in it as art, and from either a secular, and/or theological standpoint, another may perceive nothing as art, again, from either a secular, and/or theological perspective. Ignorance and certainty feed into each other, no matter the particular social, cultural, psychological foundations. What “is” to one man, simply isn’t to another, and as long as we keep a two-valued logic system of language in place, this dichotomy will flourish.    

The philosopher Nietzsche once remarked that we are all greater artists than we may at first realise, in the context that we create, filter and engineer our realities, for the most part based on our perpetual efforts to artifice, to recreate, and to project realities inside of our own heads (if we do indeed truly own our heads and the contents inside?) we tell ourselves fabulous stories most the time, and then communicate these projected realities, remarkably, to others. Some see the world like a great collaborative artwork of dazzling fiction, the question, “is it real or not?”, like the question, “is it art or not?” is meaningless. How can it be anything else but art? Perhaps then, the artists are trying to remind everybody else of their hidden creative abilities, eclipsed by the language of those who do not consider themselves an artist, and break any stereotypes. To perform by example, teaching the craft of the art to empower the individual with a new toolkit, a new skill for expressing the subtle with shades of meaning and nuanced harmonies. To build and collaborate in a unified symphony of shared experience.         

Artists who I have met and that I have read about, often commit to the daily practice of creative interpretations of their sense impressions, “is it still true, today?” Dedicated artists acknowledge openly that realities, in the plural, extend way beyond everyday speech and the written word. Artists tend to inhabit a multitude of sensory worlds, made accessible by using the vehicle of experiment, coupled with technical skill and craft. She who dares toward unity of being, a concrescence of self.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that words are devoid of art, or cannot be used with artistic expression, on the contrary poetry in the best case can charge language to a higher degree of meaning, by using techniques like juxtaposition, alliteration, synecdoche, metaphor, imagism, and onomatopoeia. Some could argue that sacred scripture is art, or perhaps a financial report can be viewed as art? Lao Tzu mixed up art and war, and I wonder how and by what means and and by what measure, art and war mix?   

Taking this idea further, some scholars might argue that the (slice of life) literary style, innovated by James Joyce in his books Dubliners and A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, was borrowed and/or stolen, by popular magazine writers and soon after that large publishing houses, and so on eventually to the modern day newspapers, until it trickled down to every aspect of modern literature, fiction and nonfiction alike. The artistic methods developed by James Joyce have influenced the global perception of language, and enriched it en masse. Joyce managed to make literary fiction seem hyper-real, fusing external and internal experiences to reach a new unity, a wholeness. Let us make multiple points of view great again. 

The same may be said for Picasso and the impact of Cubism, and arguably Einstein’s relativity, and special relativity. Art, in the context of trans-disciplinary activity such as painting, physics and literature, includes playful exploration, free spirited willingness to study the rules and traditions, and then break them to attain a new level of coherence, the opposite of disorder. To produce something obviously beneficial to all humanity, to help rekindle the inner artist in everybody and evolve toward a balanced superposition of mask and anti-mask. Toward Unity Of Being.    

I’ve seen paintings made by clever elephants which arguably deserve to be called art, equally appealing to my eye as what passes for human art in some galleries today. To compare an elephant painting with the works of M.C Escher, causes one to extrapolate good art from the mediocre, and to begin to distinguish the difference clearly, toward a hierarchy of values. 

Could DNA be considered high art? I suppose that to code and transcribe information into biological matter, that’s some good and functional art work right there, the question remains who’s the artist? Who made DNA that way? At this point, some people might be attracted to anthropomorphize the artist responsible for DNA, and go down a theological route to rationalise what appears to me a very unlikely event: the evolution of human DNA RNA transcription. Some species of Octopus have been recently discovered to edit their own DNA-RNA transcription process which I think deserves a Turner prize, at least. 

“What if it were true that nature speaks in signs and that the secret to understanding its language consists in noticing similarities in shape or in form?–Jeremy Narby, The Cosmic Serpent. 

What is art? Whatever you want it to be? To begin to find out, follow the process of reaching further and deeper to find some measure of appreciation for the artists and fine artworks that came before, and that influenced the specific thing which you deem to be worthy of that exalted title, art. 

After we are all skilled artists what happens next? what of social justice and change and agency in our community, equal to political powers? To paraphrase Alan Moore, artists and magicians are similar in that they trick themselves into altered states of consciousness, using words, symbols, images, sounds, at a busy crossroads all of the senses. The will to transform yourself and your surroundings for the enrichment of both. The artist and the magician express an alternative, non-linear, intuitive script for processing reality, like that exhibited by the traditional shaman, storyteller, artist. 

Some artists and magicians may delude themselves with fiction, often intentional, to join forces with the little man or women inside your head making up all this stuff. Small changes are often seen to be insignificant by those  unable to fathom how tiny acts of beautification or provocation, celebrated by the artist, can produce results on a macro scale. Some art strives to transform the cosmos beyond the physical limitations of the medium, for example the dashes, dots and symbols of familiar writing, as transcended by the hologrammic prose poetry of Joyce.    

Magicians and artists both entertain the possibility of the transformation of realities through a creative act of will. Morphogenetic Resonance, as defined by Rupert Sheldrake, and principles of Quantum Entanglement, lend evidence to this intuition, which is popular with many professional artists I’ve met personally. To repeat, playfulness seems inherent in the modus operandi of the artist and magician. A focused and sustained will power to enchant the mind of oneself, and of others, to dazzle and illuminate, and provide a launchpad for new inquiry and investigations.    

Shakespeare championed poetry for the people through innovating poetic arts. James Joyce, together with other modernist writers, each in their new way, helped to remix gems of literary history and secure them all onto the page, and by osmosis out there, into the realities of everyday people. I think epic literature and other arts, synthesize both the high-brow and low-brow elements into the work, so as to remain relative and meaningful to the working class, not just art to entertain a few Ivy league academics and wealthy collectors. Language itself (is) often employed as a weapon in class warfare, and as Norbert Wiener observed…poems contain high information, political speeches low. Surprise = Information. Innovate!  

“Bad critics judge a work of art by comparing it to pre-existing theories. They always go wrong when confronted with a masterpiece because masterpieces make their own rules.–Robert Anton Wilson.

The sense of time dilation in literature, exhibited and mastered by Russian and Balkan writers, created another literature of, and for the people. Detailing the struggle and complexity and sense of dread pushing down upon the shoulders of those who endured the war torn 19th and 20th centuries, the resilience of the people. in Russia or elsewhere. A new artform in literature can lead to a whole new style, and a new way of seeing. Highly charged writing can lift the spirits of a population, and be of comfort and guidance in challenging times. To go further, perhaps aspiring to have an IMPACT equal to a major religious texts, while being able to jettison unwanted dogma and absolutism. No small order, consider the following:

“We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first – rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity.–John Lennon.     

Artists strive to innovate, and once in a while some succeed in creating a whole new way of perceiving/conceiving the world, and get recognized for their contribution. Salvador Dali, for example, transformed the art of painting with his surrealism, Charlie Parker changed jazz music forever with his bebop riffs. The modernist trio of bebop jazz, beat poetry and Cubism (embodied by Thelonious Monk / Jack Kerouac / Picasso) encourage the kind of synesthesia I wish to invoke in my own attempt here to describe art. A little bit like the principle of cultural inheritance defined by Buckminster Fuller, art too is your birthright, and an inheritance from all who came before you, both the continuation of a tradition and the brevity to experiment and innovate new forms, always aiming to simplify the equation. Like in physics and the search for a grand unified theory, artists explore the totality of the theater of consciousness, to unite the arts in some sense. Make produce a tool that reveal something once hidden.    

Some might say, much of what passes for art today, when compared with the masters within each respective field, pales in comparison, and could be better described as a therapeutic pass time. However this view kicks up a stench of elitism and high-brow attitude. It helps to untangle our sometimes destructive tendency to compare ourselves to others, especially artists who may early on compare themselves with the great masters, and give up deflated or never get started. “Never give up giving it up”–Garaj Mahal.

 

 

Artists tend to actively pursue knowledge through direct experience, and custom to be neophilus: with a love and passion for new things and new experiences. Those with an aversion to art and artists, tend to be neophobic, conservative, afraid of new things and resistant to change, static as a noun. Art and artists strive to open up the senses like a verb, expand the create contrast and focus within the mindscape, pump up the heart and begin a broad discussion process, start a movement to create new connections, new neural pathways, more verbs, a melting pot of emotions and memories, senses and imagination. Artists, in my biased view, help to define the meaning of progressive, wrestling the term from muddy politics, to colour it with the spirit of fair play which it deserves. Art can bring you back to your senses, that seems like a form of progress, to me. 

Money and the means to populate the meme-sphere, go hand in hand. If you can pay for the ads, then you can get the message out there, whatever the message is. And I feel that the new age of money mad politics getting into bed with social media and internet based coercion, has left millions of incredibly talented artists left out in the cold, ignored, under funded, not given opportunity to play, work, create and collaborate. In countries across the developed world we see a decline in funding for public art projects and for artists themselves. What is wrong with the arts is rarely wrong ONLY with the arts. 

Jobs are increasingly digitally outsourced, as a direct result of the strategy that everything can be privatised, and so monetized, and those who already own most of the wealth can simply buy up, and control an ever increasing chunk of the ever decreasing planetary pie. This capitalist nightmare, in some sense, seems to me also driven by art and artists at its core. Marketing agencies and ad campaign groups who capitalized on the art of deception. Manipulating news headlines, and words and music and photography and film (the tools and trade of the artist since the first cave painter) to please the directive of some employer: Trump/Hillary political campaigns, Brexit leave campaign, and most election campaigns around the world. In my bold opinion, these are a memorable examples of the well paid and successful artists (if money and jobs for huge companies are the unit of measurement) those who weaponized art as a propaganda tool to incite hatred, the opposite of love, and to spread lies, the opposite of truth. This sad story can teach us the inherent power of art, and inspire artists when properly united and funded and focused to reclaim the long tradition of integral arts.   

“Love is metaphysical gravity–Buckminster Fuller        

The Art of deception, like the art of war, seems to me oxymoronic. Although art maybe the meeting of mask and anti-mask, fundamentally I feel it seeks truth and the real, the process oriented world of experience. Always searching, open for new signals, a friendly landing pad for the muse to stop by. Art for truth and beauty, artists for responsibility and balance. To encourage the imagination to soar and the feet to remain grounded. To create and share, to illuminate and to teach healthy scepticism, to be fair, drift, better able to spot a fake, explore, cut your own path forward. 

—Steve Fly

Amsterdam.

flyagaric23.com

“I believe that magic is art, and that art, whether that be music, writing, sculpture, or any other form, is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words or images, to achieve changes in consciousness… Indeed to cast a spell is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change people’s consciousness, and this is why I believe that an artist or writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world to a shaman.–Alan Moore.

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” — Scott Adams

The 18th century writer and statesman Wolfgang von Goethe once said, “All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times.”

At least that was the first half of his observation.

So then, how does one convince someone to steer themselves from a tweet, post, or text long enough to give attention to your take on the world?

It’s a tall order, no doubt, especially in a culture where detachment is as casual as Fridays.

We hear but no longer listen.

We see but don’t observe.

We communicate but real connection is too scary.

We record our lives rather than live them.

And what about those “communities” we do seek out?

How often do places masquerading as forums of fellowship end up just being a group of people who see the world as we do?

We cluster in echo chambers where the dins of our inflexible thoughts grow louder, drowning out reminders of all we don’t know.

But if we’re willing to illuminate our ignorance there is an opportunity to learn from one another and rediscover our shared humanity.

The world is well-supplied with information but starving for wisdom.

Within seconds we know the 7-day forecast in San Francisco, the elevation of Kilimanjaro, or the day the Titanic sank.

We can find out who said what about who, which restaurants to avoid, and when the new upgrade for the old toy we didn’t need to begin with hits stores.

But none of this deepens our understanding of people or what it means to fulfill a singular type of Being.

Some of the smartest people I’ve ever known wouldn’t know the first thing about being there for a friend who’s tumbled into an abyss of heartache.

And some of my wisest friends can’t put together a spreadsheet.

My point is, we all have different strengths and weaknesses, but something YOU know has the potential to improve another’s life.

That’s what the world needs now more than ever.

“Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared, even the people who seem to have it most together. They are much more like you than you would believe, so try not to compare your insides to other people’s outsides.” — Anne Lamott

Just as you are, your neighbor is looking for someone with a quiet courage to remind them their pain, doubts, triumphs, are woven deeply into the fabric of our shared human experience.

Why not shorten the learning curve of another soul stumbling through life with all you’ve learned?

Because no matter your age, cultural background, or whether you worship a thousand gods or no gods, nobody sees the world quite like you.

As author Anne Lamott observed, “Every single thing that happened to you is yours and you get to tell it.”

Whether you realize it or not, you’ve had an experience and lived a life, however long or imperfect, someone somewhere can learn from.

The first step is believing as much.

Here are 3 Ways to Trust You Have Something Worth Writing About

Don’t Shortchange Your Skill Set or Experiences

“Use your struggle to help someone else get stronger.”

Several months back, a student of mine casually mentioned she sketched traditional Pakistani mendhi designs in her spare time. I asked if she’d mind sharing her artwork with the class before a lecture one afternoon.

After a minute, she had the class in the palm of her hand. Nearly everyone, including myself, wanted to know how we could learn more.

I considered letting her teach class that day.

Another student who’d struggled with bouts of depression after the passing of her mother, brought in a therapy dog. She told the class how her little companion had helped lift the fog of darkness her life had become.

Her vulnerability and openness won the class over, offering an unspoken solace that we don’t need to navigate through life as mere bystanders of our despondency.

The point is, what may seem old hat to you may blow someone else’s mind.

Your talents, experiences, and the struggles you came through are not just for you.

Our victories and failures don’t always make us better but they never leave us quite the same.

And though the past may be a terrible master, it is a remarkable teacher.

Find your truth and recognize your capacity to influence.

Write About What Interests You

“We should not force ourselves to change by hammering our lives into any predetermined shape.” — John O’Donohue

Several months back when I started sharing my work on Medium, I tried writing articles on entrepreneurship because that’s what I thought readers wanted.

I talked about the pitfalls, perils, and triumphs of gradually building a business from the ground up.

The trouble was, it felt inauthentic. My heart, as it always does, somehow knew it was being duped.

The truth was, I had no credibility in that space. What’s worse, I didn’t trust my knowledge came through a very different, but equally valuable lens of the world.

And the minute I stopped writing what I thought others wanted to hear, but about topics and experiences I felt worth illuminating, the whole process became much more enjoyable.

I felt liberated to do work I found meaningful without the angst of having to kowtow to the blogging gatekeepers.

Instead of being consumed with the number of claps, shares, or names added to my subscriber list, I tried to throw myself whole-heartedly into the wondrous chaos of thoughts, ideas, and desires I felt worth sharing.

Too often we misinterpret losing our zest for life with falling prey to some small interpretation of how life ought to be lived.

And because writing is just another way of Being in the world, I’ve found the same rules often apply.

Share courageously about what interests YOU.

Avoid Depending on Validation from Others

“Base yourself on what you feel, even when you alone feel it.” — Henri Michaux

It’s never been more difficult to start and finish your day without feeling wholly inadequate.

We are constantly besieged with an artillery of snapshots and ads of what beach we should be on, car we should drive, or the 3 numbers we should see when we step on a scale.

If we’re not especially conscious, life can quickly become one big mood swing.

This is why being yourself today is not as courageous as it is revolutionary.

Comparing ourselves and seeking validation from others is a natural inclination but it’s also a way of harassing our singular spirits.

As author Fabrice Midal observed, “We convince ourselves we stand out from the crowd by buying this particular car, wearing these shoes, carrying this bag, or going to this restaurant. But all we’re really doing is following the flock, contributing even more to the dictatorship of general uniformity.”

I’ve discovered the way to escape the need for testimony your writing is acceptable to the world, is by caring more about the people you help rather than the recognition you receive.

When you write about topics that matter to you, no matter how well received, the process somehow becomes its own reward.

Writing on subjects you care about also expands your imaginative intelligence and somehow does the same for others.

By the way, the second half of Wolfgang von Goethe’s observation, “All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times,” was the following:

“but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, until they take root in our personal experience.”

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My family came to California by covered wagon in 1849, so I know a bit about pioneer spirit and have faith in the notion it is woven into the fabric of every Californian, regardless of how long they’ve lived here. It is with a trust in that spirit that I appear before you today.

Included in the background materials for the Joint Committee’s Annual Report on California’s Creative Economy, is a piece I wrote entitled “Judgement and the Ghost Ship Tragedy.” I wrote it through tears at 3AM, the night after the fire. I am a performer and writer, and a member of Actor’s Equity living in the Bay Area. Several of my friends and family members had connections to the space and those who perished. And like many in my social network who have lived in or logged numerous hours in quasi-legal live/work warehouse spaces, I naturally thought, “There but for the grace of God go I”. I was also upset about the injustice of the toll artists often pay for living in what has pointlessly if unconsciously become a culturally impoverished nation. I bemoaned the fact that being an artist in the US is staggeringly more difficult than in so many other developed countries where artists are supported and celebrated as culture makers and shapers.

I cited statistics on the arts budgets of numerous countries across the globe. South Korea, with a population of 50 million, invests around $7 billion in its artists and cultural programs. France with its 67 million citizens, spends $10 billion on arts and culture. Tiny Northern Ireland, with a population of 2 million, awards over $21 million annually for arts, theatre, and literature projects.

To be on par with those economies, California, with our population of roughly 40 million, would need to pony up $6 Billion if we use the Korean or French model, a mere $400 million if we follow Northern Ireland’s lead.

As you well know, we are nowhere close to those numbers. The NEA’s very existence is back on the chopping block, though earlier this year we were all relieved it’s anemic budget of just under $150 million actually funded for 2017. On a state level, the California Arts Commission is set to invest $15 million across the state through several different grant programs. That is a bump up from last year, but it obviously pales in comparison to the investment made by far less monied nations that don’t systematically deny artists cultural legitimacy for their indisputable and deeply valuable contribution to society. This is not a partisan issue. There have been several administrations over decades, promoting a bipartisan disregard for financially supporting the arts on a Federal level.

 

Thanks to the newly released 2017 Otis Report on the Creative Economy, in concert with reports from the California Arts Commission, ArtSpace, the NEA, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics and a number of generous foundations, we do have measurable proof the arts have a significant, positive impact on California’s economy. The creative economy is a massive economic driver for the Golden State, accounting for over $400 billion in total economic output — nearly 12% of our state’s gross product. We also know the arts foster skills that are universally valued across multiple disciplines like team building, listening and empathy skills, leadership and project management skills, self confidence and the ability to communicate across cultural, religious, race, class, gender, age and miraculously, even partisan divides.

A significant percentage of artists, especially those of us in smaller markets, don’t necessarily have full time employment in our chosen field, nor can we afford to take those jobs when and if available, given their typically low pay and the high cost of living in those areas where one can actually find work and others artists with whom to collaborate. That makes the work we do no less valuable to the communities where we are. Every dollar spent on a ticket for a live performance, for instance, nets the surrounding community $5 to $7 dollars for parking, restaurants, construction materials for sets, fabric to build the costumes, etc. Over time, that amount rises in step with the rise in property values that inevitably occurs when the Arts revitalize previously blighted areas.

 

But artists usually only see a small fraction of that initial dollar. Indeed, they are often denied and made victims of the very revitalization they served to catalyze. Artists’ annual incomes are routinely inadequate to meet even basic needs. This gives rise to a host of problems, many of which constellated so tragically in Oakland the night of the fire that cut so many talented, young lives short.

We are in the midst of what many in the Arts feel is a Reformation; a massive shift both in how we define culture and how we determine who participates in creating it. Technology has brought about an amazing democratization within our field. Equipment that was once prohibitively expensive can now be downloaded for pennies on a smartphone. Anyone with access to the internet is a potential artist, actor or author. That is in turns tremendously exciting and, for professionals watching as people leap from the bleachers to crowd the field, a bit terrifying.

 

But the fact we have increasing percentages of people participating in culture instead of simply passively consuming it, is not a signal of the “end of days” for the Arts. Quite the opposite! There are wonderful synergies and collaborations resulting from this lowered bar to worldwide arts distribution and the ensuing explosion it has caused in the number of hybrid amateur/professional artists. We simply need to take inspiration from that energy to shape, not shun it. We also need to foster a less passive perception of the arts in general. Polls consistently show people do want to champion public arts funding. They are more likely to turn that passive want into an active need when the narrative shifts from “art as private experiences or goods” to “art as a good that ripples through our communities”.

As much as we would like to believe our heads rule our hearts, at our core we are emotional creatures. (There is a reason why the multi-billion dollar advertising industry plays to our emotions. It works!) The Arts directly message that emotional side, communicating to us on a deeper level – across disciplines and cultural and partisan divides – because they invite us to play, to imagine, to empathize with and listen to one another’s stories without cynicism, animus and fear, and they provide us a safe space within which to do that.

 

They invite us to reconnect with one another, as well as our own basic humanity, to leave behind our silos and echo chambers. I cannot think of anything we need more right now, than a safe place to understand our fellow citizens with the generosity of spirit the Arts engender and inspire.

I know it represents a paradigm shift to abandon our current commodity based model of seeing the Arts as frivolous, or an extraneous luxury. But during the Great Depression, in the midst of one of this country’s darkest hours, the government turned to the Arts as a legitimate sector to help heal the damage left in the wake of the then collapsed financial system. Forty percent unemployment rates were not uncommon and there were states where more than half of homeowners hadn’t paid their property taxes in years. Yet the Arts were no luxury. They were perceived and harnessed as a survival tool.

 

My great uncle Moya del Pino was a PWAP (Public Works of Art Project) artist in 1934. He painted murals in Coit Tower, post offices and other public buildings in and around San Francisco. PWAP Artists received between $36 to $46.50 per week. Annual inflation between 1934 and 2017 was about 3.56% which puts Moya’s weekly salary somewhere between $695.03 to $850.50 in today’s dollars.

The PWAP gave way to the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration which continued on to hire ten thousand artists until 1943, a full two years in to WWII. The pay was less than the PWAP at $23.60 per week, but it was still a healthy amount. In today’s dollars it would have been around $400 per week.

But now, the Arts in America are perceived as some kind of weird beggar; disconnected from reality, limping around aimlessly, wearing a monocle and a tuxedo, stopping only to blow kisses into a mirror. The Arts were once rightly understood as a vehicle to inspire and uplift communities at their most vulnerable. Imagine if we had responded to the 2008 financial crisis with programs that supported, reflected and empowered our broken communities the way the WPA did. There is no need to invent the wheel, here. Look to PWAP as a beta version of the WPA for your model. Provide California artists with universal basic income. Let us be your test population.

I am asking you to take a quantum leap, like those intrepid travelers who abandoned the safety of home back in 1849. As fellow Californians, as Pioneers… Lead this nation on the path that both returns the Arts to their legitimate and rightfully dignified place in society, and propels our State confidently forward with the assurance our creatives are on board to keep the engines humming far into a bright and innovative future.

As the Otis Report has shown every year for the last decade, though artists often work outside the market-only oriented economy, we consistently and considerably contribute to it. We rely not on noblesse oblige, but on the concept that those who prosper in the market-only oriented economy while benefiting off of artists efforts, understand they have an implicit moral and civic obligation to complete the circle and support those efforts in such a way that we can do our work without having to risk our very lives in substandard spaces. As mentioned earlier, the reality is people want to complete that circle.

A 2015 poll conducted by Americans for the Arts found 87% of Americans consider the arts an important factor in quality of life. 55% of us would actually double the NEA’s budget.

 

The problem lies in how the conversation about supporting the Arts is framed. Instead of seeing the Arts from the perspective of citizens concerned about the vitality of their communities, the argument tends to focus on economic benefits or personal enrichment. This approach reinforces a pattern of perception that predisposes people to think of the Arts from a passive consumer perspective. Those who prosper in the market economy, whose cultures are connected, whose communities are revitalized and made desirable, whose stories are told and experiences shared, whose children are inspired and educated to the power of metaphor and abstraction, need to hear clear messaging that investing in the Arts is not just about sparking imaginations and feeding spirits or indulging in personal experiences. It’s about ensuring the health, durability and vibrancy of their own communities. We need the help of citizens, not consumers.

Basic needs. Shelter. Safety. These should never be beyond a working artist’s reach — and yet so often they are. I am asking you to abandon a broken and deeply damaging model that perceives culture as a luxury and treats artists like second class citizens. Substantially increasing support of those responsible for making the goods that create the gains, should at the very least, be worth as much to California as one tenth of 1% of the creative economy’s total $406.5 Billion in economic output — or 2% of the $16.7 billion in taxes from the creative economy. That’s roughly $400 million dollars.

 

A new study by the finance site GOBankingRates finds that of the 50 most populous cities in the country, San Francisco requires the most income to reach a comfort level determined by the 50–30–20 budgeting rule. Under the rule, 50% of income covers necessities, 30% covers discretionary items and 20% is for savings. If your income is sufficient to cover your cost-of-living expenses, you can live comfortably. You’d need to earn over $110k to achieve that goal in San Francisco — more than New York, Honolulu or D.C. In fact, the three largest cities in the Bay Area ranked in the top four: San Jose was second ($87,153); New York third ($86,446) and Oakland fourth ($80,438). Renters in the Marin County/San Francisco metro area will spend more than 77% of their salary, on average, to pay rent in 2017. The national average is 38.7%.

 

Shelter is at the very base of Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs”. Providing affordable, safe spaces to work and live and perform is another great starting point to support the thousands of arts jobs that make the creative economy possible; jobs that cannot be outsourced or offshored.

We need to step up and embrace arts education as critical to our core competencies.

We need to proudly sponsor professional artistic development to forge the path ahead and stay competitive as leaders on the global creative stage. And we need to lift up those who dedicate their lives to honing the skills that shape not just how we see ourselves, but how we relate to others and how our communities interconnect; those who are the beating heart of the creative economy’s success: the artists themselves.

I believe California, with its long and storied history of forward thinking innovators, inspired visionaries and universe dent makers, is poised to lead the nation with a pioneering, comprehensive policy that takes the perilously thin thread from which artists now dangle, and weaves it back into the fabric of what makes this state so golden.