In a buck-stops-here, brass-tacks era of hard economic choices, there will always be some who ask the inevitable question: What is the purpose of art? As it turns out, there are nearly as many answers to this question as there are artists. To Picasso, the purpose of art was “washing the dust of daily life off our souls.” Josef Albers thought art was for visualizing “the human attitude towards life, towards the world,” while Jean Anouilh thought art was meant “to give life a shape.” Even ancient Aristotle, when he wasn’t inventing logic, had an opinion on the matter. “The aim of art,” he said, “is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.”  

Despite this divergence of opinion, you’ll note that these answers agree on one thing. Art is definitively worth something. It’s not an idle pursuit meant “to waste time,” or “to fill empty space.” Art is about being engaged in the world, about grappling with what needs to be grappled with. And in fact, despite the grim view of policy makers, when times are tough people tend particularly to seek art out. During past national moments of crisis—the Great Depression of the 1930s, for instance, and the prolonged 1970s R ecession — a wide number of artists addressed the challenges of their times through their music, visual art, films, plays, and literature, and people soaked their art up.

Consider the song “This Land Is Your Land,” for a moment. Written by Woody Guthrie at the tail end of the Great Depression, just a year or so before the United States entered into World War II, it was meant as a response to the Irving Berlin’s blandly patriotic song, “God Bless America.” Though Berlin wrote his song in 1918, in 1938 he revised it for the singer Kate Smith to use on her weekly radio show. Guthrie grew tired of hearing Smith sing the song, which he considered insipid and out-of-touch, so he wrote a more realistic, if sweeping, portrait of the country that also encapsulated the feelings of people who had been shut out from the good life during the Great Depression. The genius of  “This Land Is Your Land,” perhaps, was that the Depression-inspired protest in the song’s central lyric (“This land is made for you and me”) was subtle, voiced not as a complaint or call to arms but as a positive (yet still socialistic) sentiment of equality and belonging.

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Losers from the Debt Deal: Students

Graduate students would be the hardest hit, as the bill proposes an elimination of the interest subsidy on federal student loans for “almost all” of them. This means that beginning July 1, 2012, grad students will be responsible for the interest on their loans while in school and during any subsequent deferment period.

Credit: AP Images

Did you know that in most states, hunting is more than an annual tradition—it’s the foundation of budgets to preserve wildlife and parklands? So news that hunting is on the decline is bad news for the environment. According to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service calculations, the number of hunters dropped from 17 million in 1975 to 12.5 million in 2006. Read more …

“Oh, the nostalgia of it all! As Nick Turse reminds us in his book The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, when the media went after the Pentagon in the 1980s for outrageous spending, at stake was “a $7,600 coffee pot, $9,600 Allen wrenches, and — the most famous pork barrel item of them all — those $640 toilet seats.” Same in the 1990s with the $2,187 the Department of Defense doled out for a C-17 door hinge otherwise purchasable for $31, the $5.41 screw thread inserts worth 29 cents, and the $75.60 screw sets priced in the ordinary world at 57 cents.

“Weren’t those the good old days?”

Did you like the NY Times editorial on Pentagon spending? If so, check out “Cow Most Sacred” by Andrew Bacevich, from which the previous passage is excerpted.