The Nazis were so afraid of the German-Danish painter, Emil Nolde, that they confiscated his paint brushes. A lot of his most famous watercolors were done with cotton swabs.
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For the last nine years, I’ve had a small nonprofit, ArtHouse, dedicated to creating co-op artists’ housing and venues in San Francisco. Over these years, I’ve brought forward a lot of good reasons why we need to do this— sociological, psychological, economic, and personal. Since the election, a new and potent reason becomes obvious: of all the people on earth, artists are the most powerful source of speaking truth to power.
Artists have been systematically driven from San Francisco in the last few decades, in favor of tenants with lucrative jobs, who pay lots of taxes. The current rental policy, both private and governmental, is to only rent to people with regular paychecks that at least double or triple the rent each month, and the rents are astronomical. This doesn’t apply to the formerly homeless, who need to be removed from the streets, where they speak loudly to the failure of government and offend the sensibilities of the financially secure. If you are self-employed, as are most people in the arts—the gig economy—don’t even bother applying for housing here. You won’t get it.
The city has allowed the once huge creative community to slowly slip away, die off, and get evicted, with no options available. Unlike every other country on the planet, ours fails to see that the arts are part of the common good and deserve support. I’ve explained all the reasons why this is true repeatedly. The presence of art and art making improves people’s psychological well-being. Regular exposure has been proven to increase life-expectancy. An enclave of creatives in a run-down neighborhood makes it trendy and soon gentrified. An artists’ community attracts foot traffic that supports small businesses around it. None of these truths made any change in our government policy of only seeing value in dollars. As Dickens wrote in his novel set partially in the United States, Martin Chuzzlewit, America is all about money.
But here’s an argument in favor of artists that’s harder to dismiss: fascists hate them. Artists are dangerous for totalitarian regimes because they can convey powerfully how awful fascism is in a single image to a nation that is increasingly uninformed or misinformed. Republicans have been working to make American education worse since the ’70s. Recent studies have shown that a third of the people in this country read at the same level as a 10-year-old. Half the people in this country don’t get the pleasure of reading at all, and so they can be hoodwinked by Fox “News.” Maybe the unpleasant Mr. Ramaswamy was correct, and too many Americans are too stupid. But if you’re reading this, you’re clearly not one of them.
If you’re one of those people who wants to combat the fascist takeover, please consider supporting the arts, and especially in San Francisco, where so much positive social change and creative ferment was launched over the years—and where, now, the artists that spurred those changes are no longer allowed to live. If you’ve never read the ArtHouse web page, please do: https://arthousesf.org/. And if you can, please help us bring artists back to San Francisco, where they can fight the fascists in the most powerful way possible.
https://arthousesf.org/donate-3
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“Thus, the truth in politics… eludes one.”
—The Guermantes Way
#artists, #fascism, #San Francisco, #life expectancy, #art, #ArtHouse, #Emil Nolde, #education, #reading, #housing
Proust Said That 