Pity party …

… Scott Timberg 'Culture Clash' Review: America's Creative Destruction | The New Republic. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

A generation after Arnold, English philosopher and novelist John Cowper Powys2 penned The Meaning of Culture (1929), an updated version of Arnold’s spiced polemic, one that emphasized the redoubtable benefits and felicities of art among a bloated consumer and populist vulgarity. “The aim of culture,” Powys wrote, “is to nourish within us”—that word again, nourish—“a sturdy yet sensitive organism that shall be able to deal with the eternal recurrences of life and death.” In other words, art and culture are “equipment for living,” in Kenneth Burke’s unimprovable definition of literature, but also equipment for dying, for a dignified acquiescence to the fate of all flesh. Reconcile yourself to your own death and nothing in life can reduce you.

Well, you have to have art that is more than soup cans, too.  Oh, and the Internet is blame, eh? Then why is the article on the Internet? Isn't that sleeping with enemy. And if you think more public funding is what is needed, you haven't been watching PBS lately.