Thursday, November 04, 2010

Perspective

Amount of money Meg Whitman spent running for governor of California: $163 million

Amount of the 2010 budget of the National Endowment for the Arts: $161.4 million

(via Alex, who got it from a Bryant Turnage tweet)

8 comments:

Elaine Fine said...

Wow.

Anonymous said...

I guess everyone who thought we could fund the war in Afghanistan by cutting off support to the arts had better do some recalculating...

Lisa Hirsch said...

I read elsewhere that conductor Bill Eddins has posed a proposal that the NEA be killed entirely. He's a political liberal, so it's not knee-jerk anti-liberal-society-ism motivating him.

N6TQS - yeah, exactly. It is amazing what these billionaire guys spend their money on. (sez she whose billionaire bosses own a jetliner). If I had that kind of money, I'd have a personal composer-in-residence program, a personal string-quartet-in-residence program, and, hell- my own orchestra. Maybe it would be a chamber orchestra - but an orchestra!

Paul - yeah.

Anonymous said...

Here is the Bill Eddins piece:

http://www.insidethearts.com/sticksanddrones/2010/11/03/bill-eddins/2882/

Lisa Hirsch said...

Thanks!

Anonymous said...

I would hire Joseph Haydn as my personal composer, and tell him to write nothing in any key less eccentric than F-sharp minor.

Lisa Hirsch said...

You'd hire him even though he's dead? Eeeeeuuuwwww.

Anonymous said...

1) If I were a rich man (dydle diddy dydle etc), sufficiently rich ... Would Donald Trump let that stop him?

2) He could write Ghost Trios.

3) Shh! He's decomposing.