On hour ago, I posted this. In brief: The city gave $225,000 to some great local artists—including Stranger Genius winners—and isn't that great because the city used to give money to some crap local artists.

Fourteen minutes later, the first comment, from PC:

1. Other things are more important.
2. This is why the working class gets poached by the GOP.
3. This is insane. If you want to spend money on art buy paints and pay art teachers so kids get more art. Or pay for kids to go to well established plays or the ballet.

Dear PC, and all the PCs of the world, allow me to direct you to this column by Jen Graves from a few weeks ago, where she dissects this false choice between arts spending or social services spending.

An excerpt:

It's the same debate we had when the National Endowment for the Arts had to get on its knees and beg to be included, for the miniscule price tag of $50 million, in the $787 billion federal bailout. It's the same debate we've been having since Jesse Helms made it obvious that art, due to its subjective nature, would be the easiest target for public ire—the easiest way for politicians to distract the public from real problems.

PUBLIC-ART FUNDING IS A RED HERRING, PEOPLE. If we'd fined every politician who tried to use public art for his or her own gain in the last 20 years, we could have paid for art/music/dance/etc. teachers in public schools this whole time. Imagine!

The state spends about $2 million a year, out of an approximately $15 billion operating budget, on public art. Public-art spending accounts for .013 percent of the state's budget. Please ask your legislators to focus their time and money on fixing the other 99.987 percent of the budget. Please ask your newspapers and broadcasters to stop idiotic, ancient, false debates.

I'm sorry to be belligerent about this, but it is infuriating to have this dumb conversation year after year after year, whether the economy is up or down or in-between, and whether the politicians are Democrats, Republicans, or space invaders.

Read the rest here.

And I can't wait to see what John Osebold, Jen Zeyl, Keri Healey, KT Niehoff, Marya Sea Kaminski, Amelia Reeber, Haruko Nishimura, Robin Holcomb, and the rest of this year's OoACA gang are going to make with that money.