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How to spend $68 million
Dan Rottenberg
What do artists want?
DAN ROTTENBERG
Elsewhere in this website my friend the local artist Burnell Yow! Implores Philadelphians to think of all the better uses to which we could have put that $68 million that was paid to keep The Gross Clinic within our city limits.
“Sixty-eight million dollars would have purchased a lot of work by living Philadelphia artists— those creative souls on the front line of the struggle to make this city an artistic Mecca,” Burnell writes.
This is a variation on a cry that seems to arise whenever anyone spends big money on a cause other than one’s own. The complaint was probably best articulated in 1889, when the heiress Katharine Drexel stunned Philadelphia society by giving her fortune to charity and joining a convent. “Why is she giving away all that money?” her playboy cousin, Colonel Anthony Drexel Jr., inquired, only partly in jest. “Why doesn’t she give it to me?”
I agree it’s a shame that local tycoons and foundations want to spend $68 million on The Gross Clinic rather than, say, on Broad Street Review. On the other hand, a century ago Philadelphia’s elite wasn’t willing to spend more than $200 on The Gross Clinic. Is this not progress?
And of course it would be a better world if creative right-brain people who can’t balance a checkbook could raise funds with the alacrity of buttoned-down left-brain investment bankers. But they can’t, and it’s a good thing, because money inevitably clutters up one’s creativity. Thomas Eakins supported himself on an art instructor’s salary. He probably got less than $200 for painting The Gross Clinic. But he did lead a creative and rewarding life. And he did land one other small benefit that eludes most bankers: immortality.
Whenever I hear anybody— artist or otherwise— complain about how other people spend their money, I think of Ray Kroc’s response to a vegetarian activist who asked why Kroc didn’t add vegetarian items to the menu at McDonald’s. “Because I don’t like vegetarian food,” Kroc replied. “I like hamburgers.”
If you covet the life of an artist as well as a middle-class lifestyle— that is, if you want to eat your cake and have it too— what can you do? Three suggestions:
1. Become an arts consultant at a charitable foundation. Here you will join ranks with others who are skilled at giving away money that’s not their own.
2. Have faith in technology’s astonishing ability to create new marketing tools for folks who are clueless about marketing. See, for example, Patrick Hazard’s article on Charles Saatchi’s on-line art gallery elsewhere in this website.
3. Take comfort from the words of Martin Luther: “Riches are the least worthy gifts which God can give men. Therefore, God commonly gives riches to foolish people, to whom he gives nothing else.”
To read responses, click here.
DAN ROTTENBERG
Elsewhere in this website my friend the local artist Burnell Yow! Implores Philadelphians to think of all the better uses to which we could have put that $68 million that was paid to keep The Gross Clinic within our city limits.
“Sixty-eight million dollars would have purchased a lot of work by living Philadelphia artists— those creative souls on the front line of the struggle to make this city an artistic Mecca,” Burnell writes.
This is a variation on a cry that seems to arise whenever anyone spends big money on a cause other than one’s own. The complaint was probably best articulated in 1889, when the heiress Katharine Drexel stunned Philadelphia society by giving her fortune to charity and joining a convent. “Why is she giving away all that money?” her playboy cousin, Colonel Anthony Drexel Jr., inquired, only partly in jest. “Why doesn’t she give it to me?”
I agree it’s a shame that local tycoons and foundations want to spend $68 million on The Gross Clinic rather than, say, on Broad Street Review. On the other hand, a century ago Philadelphia’s elite wasn’t willing to spend more than $200 on The Gross Clinic. Is this not progress?
And of course it would be a better world if creative right-brain people who can’t balance a checkbook could raise funds with the alacrity of buttoned-down left-brain investment bankers. But they can’t, and it’s a good thing, because money inevitably clutters up one’s creativity. Thomas Eakins supported himself on an art instructor’s salary. He probably got less than $200 for painting The Gross Clinic. But he did lead a creative and rewarding life. And he did land one other small benefit that eludes most bankers: immortality.
Whenever I hear anybody— artist or otherwise— complain about how other people spend their money, I think of Ray Kroc’s response to a vegetarian activist who asked why Kroc didn’t add vegetarian items to the menu at McDonald’s. “Because I don’t like vegetarian food,” Kroc replied. “I like hamburgers.”
If you covet the life of an artist as well as a middle-class lifestyle— that is, if you want to eat your cake and have it too— what can you do? Three suggestions:
1. Become an arts consultant at a charitable foundation. Here you will join ranks with others who are skilled at giving away money that’s not their own.
2. Have faith in technology’s astonishing ability to create new marketing tools for folks who are clueless about marketing. See, for example, Patrick Hazard’s article on Charles Saatchi’s on-line art gallery elsewhere in this website.
3. Take comfort from the words of Martin Luther: “Riches are the least worthy gifts which God can give men. Therefore, God commonly gives riches to foolish people, to whom he gives nothing else.”
To read responses, click here.
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