Art and the American Dream

In Virginia Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own, she states that the most basic needs for genius are money and privacy. If people have the money for the resources they need for genius and the privacy to do so, then they can achieve whatever they set their mind to. In American society, we are apt to say that this statement is not true--at least the part that talks about money--because we were taught from a very early age that anyone can achieve anything, no matter what their initial earning is. However, this expectation of artists is a detrimental one since it offers no support and, creates a skewed idea of art in American society.

Nowadays it is becoming extremely hard to create new, independent artists because we as a society have refused to provide the money or support for prospective artists. In our society, we believe that art and culture is merely a luxury and should not be prioritized. Schools are cutting more and more money from the budgets of their arts programs and are limiting the resources needed for artistic development. Not only that but arts colleges are quite hard to come by and can be extremely expensive. It is extremely difficult to create new artists in this society, especially those who come from low income backgrounds. What else is that art has taken a greater focus to making money than has to artistic expression. All the time we see artists today trying to create business in ways that artists would not have twenty or thirty years ago, with music videos sponsoring products and artists putting their songs on advertisements.

So it is clear: money has a greater sway over us as a society than art does, but art needs support of its own and it has a very important purpose. Art is a way of seeing the world in new and great perspectives, it shows what it is like to live the life of another and shared a little bit of truth about humanity. Where would we be as a society without the satirical writing of the seventeenth century, or the psychedelic rock bands of the nineteen-sixties? Our society needs to create a solution for this problem, and not just use the American dream to push it under the rug. What the artists in our society need is a support system that connects the successful to the aspirational and a better attitude towards art. We need to remove the idea that art is used to entertain and make money, but rather is meant to catalyze the progression of humanity.