A vigorous nation invests in the arts not because it's cost efficient (a sort of seeding for a gross national product of mystery and magic) but because that's how we dream our Republic. These difficult people constitute an antimarket: Their business, instead of selling short, is to surprise us. If we could imagine what they will do next, we wouldn't need them, and we do, not only for pleasure and beauty, or to bind up our psychic wounds, but to bear witness and discover scruple and imagine the Other—all those archeologies of the unspoken and enciphered. And they are also stormbirds, early-warning systems on the seismic fault-lines of the Multiculture, before the cognitive dissonance and the underground tremors convulse us.
...and Mary Gordon writes in the same issue:
In a move that could connect public works programs with the support of the arts, the NEA should change its system of funding. Artists should be given housing and studio space in major cities, and subsidies to enable them to live there. This could revitalize some blasted urban areas—historically, artists have moved to unsavory places and turned them in the public mind from derelict to chic. And it would give artists a way of brushing up against one another in a place that allows for more unorthodox behavior than the academy allows.
