...The freedom to read
That's an interesting point. Wondering if there is need for an external agent to drive interest in art. Comments please!
The late Ray Bradbury reacted sharply when readers told him that Fahrenheit 451 (“Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner”) was a parable of censorship. It wasn’t, he said often and with heat. For him, Fahrenheit 451 was a cautionary fable about the way sucking on the glass teat of television had destroyed, or would destroy, reading, books and literature. If you accept his view of the story he wrote, sometimes the real censor isn’t the man with the gun; it’s the indifference of the marketplace.
Well, you need some authority, either institutional or personal, to say this is valuable, this is not. Call them book awards, Amazon recommendations, bloggers, book reviewers, traffickers in gossip, movies and TV shows, pop culture references.
ReplyDeleteHi Bill, what about government patronage of the arts versus private funding? Traditionally, the latter has served the arts well. Roy in this article focuses on the need for publicly-funded libraries. As a libertarian who believes that the government ought to be present in only the most sensitive sectors such as defence, I am ideologically indisposed to supporting public funding of art. And yet...
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