I find this statement baffling and disheartening: “This makes me wonder: Is there a real future for arts organizations, even if they come through this recession unscathed? Or are they simply whistling past the graveyard?”

That’s not the critic’s problem, unless criticism is the only function the writer has in society. ;>

The arts will never die. There’s a period of dormancy, rediscovery, regeneration, but never death.

The closure of a long-cherished arts institution is a painful experience for the artists, its benefactors and even its managers. But the loss of an institution doesn’t mean the loss of an art.

What happens when a Philharmonic or theater company closes? Do the musicians throw their instruments and sheet music into a pyre? Does an acting troupe take shears to its costumes and sledgehammers to its sets and lights once the curtain falls? No, unless they were psychotic or nihilistic.

Each loss of a work of art, or its creator(s), helps to make the survivors more valuable. The closure of an art museum does not mean a precious painting is lost to the ages. The folding of a symphony orchestra allows its musicians the opportunity to find new places to play or time to build upon their own talents.

They didn’t die, and aren’t dying, because pop culture “devoured” fine arts. There was never a famine in the arts in the first place.

Pop culture serves a different purpose. Pop culture became so highly evolved that it was able to transcend being an art form into a polished commodity. Cooklis might appreciate this analogy, being from Cincinnati and all: Columbia Records is the Procter & Gamble of the music world, and Beyonce is its Tide detergent.

Pop culture is applying the mass marketing model to creative endeavors. And even critics must acknolwedge a rightful place for pop culture, because:
1. Pop culture allows a genuinely gifted artist to be rewarded with fame and fortune.
2. Conversely, it gives a pop star a chance to transition from a manufactured product to a bona fide artist.
3. Pop culture provides subsidies both tangible (a hot-selling pop culture product can underwrite the losses of a genre with limited appeal) and intangible (pop culture can spawn a generation of inspired followers, as well as iconoclastic reactionaries, and both camps will enhance the field as a whole).

You don’t need to quote all of Cooklis opinion piece to see this is the same old tune.

Waller won’t be the one to show you my own response to this, so I will.

http://cincy-artsnob.blogspot.com/2010/02/cincinnatis-new-art-dialogue-is-playing.html