This little cartoon by Peter Bagge, surprisingly linked to with approval from BoingBoing, really rubbed me the wrong way.

It's about the triteness of the message. Dude: just because modern art's not your thing doesn't make it worthless. The fact that its value may not be readily apparent to you doesn't necessarily make it "self-important nonsense." (And even if it is, so what? Who made Peter Bagge Aesthetic Sheriff? I want that job.)

It's the absurd caricature of a strawman "Fine Art Establishment" elite, as if a) any such collective actually existed and b) that Fine Art people actually have any kind of influence over anybody. Bagge is in an imaginary argument with imaginary aesthetic oppressors who tell him how to think and what to value. Back in reality, artists are trying to scrape up two dimes to rub together.

It's the strip's real agenda, a typically whiny libertarian rant about arts funding. Yes, fifty cents from your tax bill went to the NEA. Live with it*.

It's the pointless (and objectively incorrect) jab at Shakespeare; I didn't like that one bit.

But mostly, it's the strip's "I-can't-drive-art-so-it-must-suck" functionalist mentality, although I take some comfort in the fact that surely Reason Magazine should be among the first things to go by that standard. (Little known fact: Obscure, semi-nonexistent literary journals can be driven, but they don't like to be.) Sorry: I like pop culture as much as the next person, but in fifty years no one is going to care about the PT Cruiser or the new Beetle, much less a candy wrapper. The thing about the arts (and about literary writing, for that matter) is that they're in dialogue with time.

Pop culture isn't. It's ephemeral; throw-away.

Art lasts.

That's the whole point.
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*NEA Funding, 2004: $120 million dollars
Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles Funding: 250 million dollars a year

The Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles was a seven year program, totaling 1.25 billion dollars, for developing a hybrid engine for better fuel efficiency and emissions. Guess what? They never did. They got the money anyway.

And that's just one subsidy program among the many that go to the Big Three automakers every year, who are themselves just a few among the many recipients of billions of dollars in annual corporate welfare from the federal and state governments. But no: for Bagge, cars just spring up naturally, a source of spontaneously occurring "beauty" we can all enjoy. It's art that can't compete in the marketplace. We have candy wrappers, for God's sake. We have "Fraiser." Art museums? Who needs those?