A recent Nation article was pilloried for its portrayal of Joe Therrien, an OWS activist who left a job to get a degree in puppetry and is now unemployed and saddled with debt. Michael Baron doesn't believe the government could offer any help to an artist like Therrien. Will Wilkinson reframes the debate:
Conservatives sometimes bitch about the National Endowment for the Arts, but they rarely bitch about the fact that State U employs a healthy handful of poets, sculptors, violists, and other artists totally extraneous to the goal of winning the economic future from the Red Chinese. For the past half-century at least, government, in the form of the public university system, has been a pretty damn reliable complement to the private sector when it comes to subsidizing artists and the arts. It's just as accurate to say that Joe's problem is that there's only one puppeteering MFA program. If there were a raft of them, as there is in music, theater, dance, creative writing, and so on, then maybe he could land a gig as an assistant professor of puppeteering at some cozy State U somewhere, which sounds like a nice life to me.
The Dish 