We live in times of excessive quantities and ever receding quality when it comes to artists and art.

One, rather surprising explanation for this, might be the central role the state has taken in the past century or so, through the public funding of artists and art in general.

The notion that the state, as a sort of paternalistic entity, is supposed to have a say in, regulate and fund the arts, and as a consequence, gain a significant control over the field, is in many ways destructive to the ability of the different art forms to naturally evolve, innovate and regulate themselves.

The centralized public funding of the arts, through the incentives it generates, the inherent conflicts of interests it creates and the corruption that comes with it, has created a distortion in the process of natural selection and the overall evolution of different art forms. The more a specific discipline is publicly funded (and contemporary dance is probably one of the most publicly funded art forms in terms of percentages), the more that distortion is apparent.

By placing itself in the space between artists and their audience, in the form of a bureaucratic, middle management sort of apparatus through its institutions, public funding and designated gate keepers, the state has created an inflationary system. It has gradually and over time, devalued and debased art and artists. It has lowered the intrinsic value artists and their work had within the society, simply by putting in place an artificially sustained, centralized system for the regulation of a thing, which is by nature, decentralized and self regulating. It has created a web of incentives for both artists and the bureaucrats of the art world, which are by definition, anti-art.    

The result? A massive inflation in the number of artists, art works, art schools, art institutions and the art industry as a whole, all of which translate to an ever growing artistic mediocrity. In a quite surprising turn of events, the state has done to art, what McDonald has done to food.

This reality, can’t be seen more clearly than in the contemporary dance world.

Most active choreographers nowadays, would never end up choosing a career in choreography in the absence of public funding, the many institutions dedicated to dance and the gate keepers which direct them (most of whom have little, or no understanding what so ever, of the art form). The majority of active choreographers under this system, were taught, pushed, selected and put in place by bureaucrats of sorts, whether they are teachers, artistic directors, bureaucrats of sorts and small time politicians, non of which are remotely able to asses a person’s talent and ability to produce value through art making (The current trend of legitimizing everything amateur, be it the performers or even the actual choreographers, as if there can be any artistic value in something simply because it resides outside that which is considered to be professional, is but one example to this twisted reality which is as destructive to the art form, as it is evil.)

What massive public funds do, is they pull people into the field for all the wrong reasons - artists, but also an entire class of parasitic bureaucrats who feed off of these ressources and the power that comes with them. It has created a parallel reality, where everything that makes someone an artists in a specific discipline, everything that is primordial, becomes almost irrelevant, while other aspects of a person’s personality, drive, motivations, skills and talents, all of which are completely unrelated to art making, become indispensable.

Public funding of art, controlled by the apparatus of the state, has a diluting effect. It compounds mediocrity, rather than excellence and merit, and It does so by pulling and letting in way too many players for the wrong reasons, and as a result, it dilutes the notion of art itself. It breeds stagnation and unchecked incompetence and by doing so, it corrupts the very notion of what art is.

What Art needs in order to do its thing, in order to be valuable, is scarcity.

The current catastrophic state of the choreographic art form, is to a large extend the result of its entanglement with the apparatus of the state’s central planning and control. The only way to save it, might be to separate the state from the arts.

By way of bottom/up observation, when looking at the end result in order to understand the system which enables it, one needs only examine the level of the works being presented and who are the leading, most subsidized makers in the states which heavily fund contemporary dance, in order to realize how badly this dysfunctional, panoptic system, has failed.

The arts for that matter, are no different than any other aspect of society where trying to provide something in a blanket governmental manner, leads inevitably to it being destroyed by misallocation, over management, hyper regulation, centralized planning and so on.

The answer to - why does the state wishes to take upon itself this role in the first place?, holds the key to two other primordial questions:

What is art?

Why do people and societies need it?

When examining the two models for funding and regulating art in the western world of the past few centuries, the main striking difference which emerges is - the church wanted the best art and the best artists to serve its domination purposes. While the state who replaced it, wants the worse art, worse artists and as many of them as possible, as a strategy for its domination and control over the masses. 

The apparatus of the modern state in the west, heavily influenced by post modernist ideas, has made art un-important by design. It has made it common, cheap, shallow, insignificant. It has followed the same trajectory it has taken regarding money and its financial systems.

In the same way and very much for the same reasons all modern nation states have abandoned the gold standard, or any other notion of sound, hard money and shifted to a corrupted, easily manipulated, centrally controlled system of hyper inflated worthless fiat currencies, stepping away from a system which was based on a thing of undeniable hard value by way of its scarcity and natural, unmistakable signature of authenticity, the state has abandoned the hard value art had since the dawn of time, and replaced it with an inflationary, corrupted, easily manipulated, centrally controlled and worthless artistic like currency.

The church was about enslavement through the spiritual realm, while the state aims for economical enslavement and therefore, it must erase the spiritual. With the decline of religion in the west and the rise of post-modernism, the eradication of the spiritual had to go through the impoverishment of art.

The first thing that needs to come back into the equation, for Art to be able to re-align with its fundamental role within society, is the spiritual. Not as a tool for control, but rather as the indispensable aspect of human existence that it is.  And the spiritual, in relations to the arts, can only flourish in direct relation to scarcity.

We need a new model. One which doesn’t take art, artists and the audience hostages in the service of interests that are all foreign to the raison d’être of art.

We need a new model for our society which produces less artists and less art. We need less quantities in order for notions such as craftsmanship, excellence, quality, originality, rarity and spirituality to once again be the defining ones when it comes to art.

The quality of art, is a reflection of the quality of the culture and civilization it enables. Craft-less, self indulgent, low quality, narcissistic, hedonistic, nihilistic art, makes for a disoriented, confused, dysfunctional, low quality society, and conversely, competent, well crafted, virtuous, high quality, spiritually driven art, makes for a strong, functional and high quality society.

The current crisis in the arts, is but a reflection (or maybe it is the source?) of the larger crisis our civilization has plunged into. It is primarily, a spiritual crisis.

We need a change.

“Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government.

Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth cannot be produced by human institutions. In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions, to grant titles, gratuities, and exclusive privileges, to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society—the farmers, mechanics, and laborers—who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government. There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing.”

Andrew Jackson