Art in Democracy is Essential

Most of the time, it’s only reported at market value

“Art is the great democrat,” wrote President John F. Kennedy, “calling forth creative genius from every sector of society, disregarding race or religion or wealth or color.” He believed that art and democracy went hand-in-hand. Poets, painters, musicians, architects, writers, and others were as important to American life as scientists, politicians, and businesspeople.

 The problem we have in America is that everything is valued by how much money it makes. Businesspeople consider the visual arts as not much more than decoration and only consider success in performing arts by how much money was made on a Taylor Swift concert. The news media makes the same mistake by mostly reporting on the gross weekend sales of the top 10 films without any sort of critique of the quality of the art form.

Locally, business elites only value the arts and entertainment for how many wallets it brings to the district, not that there isn’t some other intrinsic value that goes beyond the commercial value of a performance or a painting. Yes, there is some modest art collecting by a few of the upper class; in fact, the patrons of the arts are some of the wealthiest, like Eli Broad or J. Paul Getty, who collected so much art that they need museums to house it. However, you never hear about the value of art past the announcement by Sotheby’s about a Matisse selling for $100 million. Art does something else though — it creates an economy and stimulates innovation

Otis College of Art and Design releases an annual report of the creative economy. In 2025, they reported that “the creative economy employs more than 760,000 workers in California, who earn an average salary of $191,000 a year.” They go on to say, “These wages compare favorably to the economy-wide average of $87,000 in the state. California’s creative economy directly employs five percent of the state’s workforce. Yet as creative firms contract with other sectors of the economy and creative workers spend their wages in the state, additional jobs are created in other sectors of the economy.”

The report concludes that when these additional jobs are taken into consideration, the creative economy accounts for nearly one in every 10 jobs in California. And yet there’s more to the creative economy than just the numbers — it essentially is about intelligent design and innovation, something that is only appreciated afterwards.

Recently, there has been a move to bring the arts back into our schools after being disregarded for decades because it wasn’t math, science, or engineering. What is ignored is that some of the most ingenious creations were invented by artists, Leonardo DaVinci being a prime example, whose curiosity spans both the art, engineering and science. I argue that the basic skill of drawing should be taught alongside math and science and language, because visual art is a language of its own. And Americans are terribly “visually illiterate.” They know what they like, but they don’t know why.

The other advantage of promoting the arts is that it teaches people how to conceive of the world in a nonlinear fashion, which is very useful in solving complex problems. Not everything needs to line up A, B, C, D or 1, 2, 3, 4 to make sense in the natural world. In fact, I’d say that we are plagued with the accumulation of linear thinkers in business and politics.

Locally, the “arts district” is marketed by developers as a bonus to paying high rents, and yet I have yet to see where the One Percent development fee that they pay has gone to anything substantive in San Pedro. And yet art is considered nothing more than window dressing here in the shadow of the port’s industrial import enterprise. But there’s something else going on.

There’s a burgeoning recording business going on out of sight where bands of many flavors are producing albums in multiple studios around central San Pedro. Some of this is driven by the punk venue, The Sardine,  but it’s been happening much longer than that and goes back to the origins of the punk scene here; there is still this vibe that exists below the radar of the San Pedro Chamber of Commerce. One that is drawn to the fact that gentrification hasn’t totally consumed the grit and guts of this working-class town by the sea.

What’s amazing is that in the last census, for the first time, more people self-designated as “artists” than fishermen! Even still, this place has had a very long history of creative artists-writers, singers, painters, and actors — with the San Pedro Art Association now celebrating 90 years. There’s a partial list of the most notable artists under San Pedro’s Wikipedia listing if you’re curious, but none of them are celebrated with a statue or a plaque anywhere.

Still, the creative vibe persists even as architecturally bland buildings go up. At the U.S. Post Office on Beacon Street, one of the fabulous Works Progress Administration murals still stands as a testament to this place and its diversity. Standing in line there the other day, a younger man with a beard asked me, “Did Charles Bukowski ever work here?” No, but he had a P.O. Box down the hallway. When Buk was alive, no one at the post office even recognized him except me. Now every tourist from Germany comes looking for a trace of the LA bard, only to be directed to his grave stone.

Clearly the civic leaders of San Pedro don’t know what they have here or even how to cultivate something that is authentic that doesn’t add up on their tally sheet. The arts create an intangible vibration to a place that attracts people to come and be creative — it’s the vibe of a scene that makes it authentic and not phony.

What we now have because of the hype about West Harbor, which only has a non-union Starbucks, is a new crop of land speculators who in their wake, leave a kind of vacant lot or storefront blight. This should be dealt with by a higher assessed value on commercial property that stands empty for more than 12 months. Perhaps then landlords here will be motivated to charge true market rates rather than ones based upon the speculative prices. In Kennedy’s most important speech on the arts, delivered at the opening of the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College, he said, “I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist … art is not a form of propaganda, it is a form of truth.” 

This of course  is in contrast to Trump closing the Kennedy Center because he can’t put his name on it.