I was just informed today by my mother that a Music Education summer camp that has been running for the past ten or so years has reached its demise, as all of the remaining educators are either unavailable or not interested in teaching the arts programs they had once taught. I taught at Southwest Music School Camp for the past three years, and attended the hot summer classes for years with my mother as the director and head coordinator. The purpose of a particular program I had taught was World Music, expanding the horizon of childrens concepts on what music is and can be.

Art Lit and Music Lit were two public school programs created to teach the general public of elementary and middle-schoolers about the appreciation of the fine arts. These both, in the district I experienced them, have also met their demise. In Frivolity & Unction, Hickey approaches this supposed dilemma concurrently with the question of "What if art was silly, bad, and frivolous?" In the current resulting of my graduation class turning out minimal in it's artistic endeavor, are we really losing something with the removal of art programs? Should we just leave the art education to the home-schooled and alt.-schooled population and allow the general public to figure it out for themselves? Are we going to lose the small remainder of striving artists by taking out these programs? What if we took it all away?

The "good" of art, as Hickey approaches it, is optional to the public. Art doesn't have to be this great potential cure. "And what if art were considered bad for us?--more like cocaine that gives us pleasure while intensifying our desires, less than like penicillin that promises to cure us all, if we maintain proper dosage, give it time, and don't expect miracles? Might not this empower artists to be more sensitive to the power and promise of what they do, to be more concerned with good effects than with dramatizing their good intentions?"

I would imagine art would become even more intensified as a public attribute, rather than ignored and discluded, like a board game too difficult to learn. It would be so much more bad ass and cause art schools to become renegade to popularity. In the recent results of the lack of funding, I've seen the population of art schools become something startling: secular fragments of the underground, uprising in their own integrity to produce art. In the removal of art education, we receive a polarized (yet very unequal in quantity) appreciation for the arts.

So what would happen if art was bad, silly, and frivolous? Are art schools going to become outrageously polar to general education within the next 25 years? Could it lead to the point of masses separating themselves from general education and their concepts completely, and in return, have the general studies completely abolish art and artists?

-Colin Self