It would appear to me that the time for centralized arts districts is either over or will be vastly sparser than we previously imagined, and Nicolai Ouroussoff seems to agree with me. What does it mean when American (or European, or Commonwealth) cities no longer have the money to fund the arts themselves? Where do we as a society- no, as a species, go from here? What happens next?

I think we’ll start to see exactly what happened in Italy during the Quattrocento: the only ones able and willing to commission new art will be those with the Drive To Proselytize. Yes, Renaissance Humanism was originally directed at the populace at large, but it was co-opted very early on by the Church, and used to reinforce a message of total domination and fear. The Middle Ages weren’t truly over in Rome until the forces of the Risorgimento ended the Index of Banned Books and the Syllabus of Errors by overthrowing the rule of the Popes.

What magnificent and life-altering visions Michelangelo could have come up with if his ceiling were over the Sistine Natural History Museum! To quote Richard Dawkins from “The God Delusion,”

Even great artists have to earn a living, and they will take commissions where they are to be had…Its enormous wealth had made the Church the dominant patron of the arts. If history had worked out differently, and Michelangelo had been commissioned to paint a ceiling for a giant Museum of Science, mightn’t he have produced something at least as inspirational as the Sistine Chapel? How sad that we shall never hear Beethoven’sMesozoic Symphony, or Mozart’s opera The Expanding Universe. And what a shame that we are deprived of Haydn’s Evolution Oratorio.

But we CAN and MUST prevent such things from happening in future. We can visit our local museums, and symphony halls, and performance spaces. We can give our time and money to those causes. We can say, definitively and without hesitation, that the purpose of art is a HUMAN purpose, to ennoble and edify ourselves, not to nominally praise a creator while covertly advertising the wealth or power of some church or bishop or prince.

I can’t think of anything more important than preserving and enriching our culture and thereby our everyday lives. But we have to direct our efforts where they truly belong: our fellow men and women. Otherwise, as has so often happened in the past, the rest is silence.