Is it a valid argument to say that a dollar that goes to support the local museum or arts council is a dollar misspent in the face of poverty and illness?  How do we place an opportunity cost, as the economists might put it, on that which through the ages has moved us emotionally, or provided insight, inspiration, or surcease from pain?

Were his subsequent writings worth Solzhenitsyn having been thrown into the Soviet gulag?  Was the Ninth Symphony worth Beethoven’s deafness? How about “Starry Night” measured against the mental anguish that finally drove Van Gogh to suicide? Such questions point to the impossibility of dealing with art in purely material or, what’s even more in play in our current political culture, economic terms.  Pitting art against the practical is unproductive at best, misleading and disingenuous at worst.

In a materialistic society, however, such questions prey upon our inability to quantify precisely the contribution of the arts to life, and therefore, resisting quantification, the arts become downgraded to something less important.  Ultimately, this is in large part the reason why the arts are disappearing from our schools–they simply don’t fit with our determination to make things practical. But that’s more a problem with our culture itself, not a failing of the arts.