Art is starving, and only a handful of people seem to care.

Robert Redford visited Capitol Hill with singer John Legend and actress Kerry Washington. Their request: raise funding for the National Endowment of the Arts to $176 million dollars per year, the amount issued in 1992.

Currently, the agency receives $128 million dollars in funding, and that is after the Bush administration cut the amount from $144.7 million dollars. (At least current political administration can’t be blamed for all the missing money.)

However, Redford’s request to Congress could become a mute man’s charge against windmills. While some would consider money for the arts to be a good idea, writers like Michael Medved of Towhnhall.com, say, “If Tinseltown titans want more funding for the arts, then why don’t they spend their own damn money?”

Medved’s critical language aside, he makes a good point. Why should the government give money for the arts when celebrities have money to do it themselves?

Because celebrities aren’t the only people getting in the fight.

Honolulu Mayor Mufi Hanneman also believes in more money for art. He thinks that art is being pushed to the back burner of education and that it is a “need” in communities. Marek’s counterargument is that “Communist dictatorships granted great power to ‘art’s commissioners’ to nourish useful creativity that served the regime.”

Alluding to communism may be extreme when admitting that art has usually survived through payments and endowments of rich patrons throughout the ages. Even Michelangelo had to get paid to paint the Sistine Chapel. So shouldn’t Hanneman and his cronies just get some of their rich friends together and pay some schools to paint a mural or two? Wouldn’t that solve the problem?

Sadly, no, and NIU knows about this problem firsthand from controversy over the conditions of our Stevens Building. Art and theater students, you need to find some rich patrons before even thinking about asking Governor Blagojevich for money.

Surely those millions of dollars could be put to better use than the arts. There are roads to be built, I could use another economic stimulus check, and let’s not forget the money slipping out of Social Security. Redford means well, but I think he’s missing the point. While he has the power of Honolulu’s mayor on his side, that’s only one politician. The National Endowment of the Arts can’t survive on dwindling funds.

The problem is not that someone had the gall to raise their bowl and ask, “Can I have some more?” The issue is people continue to go to school in a country that doesn’t mind if art is picked last in the game of “Who Will Get This Grant.” The treatment of Redford’s plea by Medved suggests that doing is better than thinking, repetition is better than creation and knowing how to read and write is better than having something to read or write about.

If there is one sour lesson to take from this financial feud, it is simply that a society which does not value art does not value its ability to create and conceive, and I hope Congress proves Robert Redford wrong.