Art Held Hostage at Council Meeting

Andy Warhol

The legendary artist Jackson Pollock, while in the middle of a contentious argument as to the nature of art, grabbed a hammer and a nail and banged the nail into the hard wood floor of the room while bellowing, “You want art? That’s art!”
Art truly does appear to be in the eye of the beholder, in spite of what the mob told the city council for nearly three hours last week.

For those three hours, they held art hostage in their little world where they paint and sing and strum their guitar. Yes, all of that can be art, but so is getting off your dead ass and just doing it; doing it because you believe in yourself, and don’t expect anyone to subsidize you as an “artiste.”

Jackson Pollock never took a dime of public money for producing his work, and neither did Charlie Parker or Jack Kerouac or Alexander Calder, artists, musicians, authors and sculptors who helped shape the way Americans saw things during the 20th Century.

In the real world, artists see things others don’t. They break down walls and they break balls and they stick a finger in the collective eye of our society.

But not here in Niagara Falls. Here in the falls, they huddle in a government-sanctioned mass, create a womblike world, courtesy of the taxpayer, and lash out at those who dare to reduce their subsidy.

How funny it is, that these alleged creative souls, more sensitive to the world than you or me, have come to be so dependent on the public dollar?

Can anyone even imagine Vincent Van Gogh, Edgar Allen Poe, Andy Warhol, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso or Leonardo Da Vinci having anything in common with a tenth-rate mind that says “unless the working people are forced to subsidize me, I cannot create my art which the world needs so badly.”

The idea of converting a small town high school into an arts Mecca is a wonderful, grand idea, provided that, in creating your Mecca, you do not snatch one more morsel from the mouths of the taxpayers.

With that understanding, we not only wish NACC well, but hope that some or all of the artists who rent there create some lasting and wondrous works of art and leave a legacy that time will never forget.