Art and numbers don’t always go together, especially art and numbers with dollar signs in front of them. Unless you’re, say, the Vermont Arts Council or the National Endowment for the Arts, and then you think about art and dollars rather a lot.
And that’s why the VAC was pleased to point out this week that the NEA is sending $252,000 in Art Works grants collectively to nine arts entities in Vermont. And they are — imagine drum roll here — Burlington City Arts, the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts, Brattleboro’s Vermont Performance Lab, Piper’s Gathering (yup, money for bagpipers), Sandglass Theater, the Shelburne Museum, Vermont Folklife Center, Vermont Symphony Orchestra and the Windham Regional Commission (not sure what’s arty about this last one, but anyone working on disaster prevention and relief certainly deserves an award).
A quarter-mill is not a lot of money, really, especially when divvied up nine ways. If that pot were distributed equally — which it isn’t — each Vermont recipient would get just $26,000. Compare that with the cost of, for example, the F-35: $207.6 million each, according to the Pentagon’s FY2012 budget.
Since this is an arts blog and not a political one, let’s consider some cultural crumbs, financially speaking, instead:
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