Why Arts? Making the Case

“Philanthropy hasn’t done a lot for poetry,” said Elizabeth Alexander, poet and president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to The New York Times. Her words are a strong reminder of how underfunded is poetry. But this week, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation announced that it awarded $2.2 million to the Academy of American Poets.

More community college students in the Northeast Ohio region will have a path to complete a bachelor's degree at Case Western Reserve University or an associate’s degree at Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C), thanks to a $2 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, reported Crain's Cleveland.

The Kenneth Rainin Foundation announced it awarded $3.775 million in arts grants to ten organizations that support artists and the creative process.

British Health Secretary Matt Hancock unveiled this month an initiative that may soon enable the country’s doctors to prescribe therapeutic art- or hobby-based treatments for ailments ranging from dementia to psychosis, lung conditions, and mental health issues, reported Smithsonian Magazine.

On November 6, an article in Vulture explored the "unprecedented sense of mission" in the art world that "something must change, and that, perhaps, artists could help" achieve that change, following the election of Donald Trump as president.

Americans continue to be highly engaged in the arts and believe the arts promote personal well-being, that they help us understand other cultures, that they are essential to a well-rounded education, and that government has an important role in funding the arts, according to Americans Speak Out About the Arts in 2018, a research Americans for the Arts recently released.

Artist Titus Kaphar; Wu Tsang, filmmaker and performance artist; Becca Heller, human rights lawyer; William Barber Jr., pastor and activist, and Vijay Gupta, violinist and social-justice advocate, are among the 2018 MacArthur Foundation's 'Genius' fellows.

“The decimation of federal support is the coup de grâce of a long campaign carefully crafted to mislead the public into believing that the arts are irrelevant to most Americans,” says a recent study by the National Center for Arts Research.

Arts are a key part of our emotional and intellectual life, and they also play a significant role in our economy. A recent report from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), with support from the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA), found that arts and cultural economic activity in the United States contributed $763.6 billion, in one year.

An American lady traveling to Paris in 1913 — the kind of American lady who will still be traveling to Paris in 2013 — asked Ezra Pound what he thought art was for. Pound replied: “Ask me what a rose bush is for.”

Europe was on the edge of war. Do rose bushes matter in a war? What can art do for us now, in the likelihood of another war?