Portrait of The Struggling “CANDO” Artist, Miami Beach Mayor Dermer Thinks Earning $67,080 A Year Is Struggling

“All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses, for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight. For not only with a view to action, but even when we are not going to do anything, we prefer seeing, one might say, to everything else. The reason is that this, most of all the senses, makes us know and brings to light many differences between things.” Aristotle

Miami Beach July 2007 - Honorable Commissioners: As you know very well, your approval of zoning incentives to provide cultural arts workers with reduced housing costs in the historic Miami Beach area known as the Cultural Arts Neighborhood District Area is believed to be a foregone conclusion.

     According to the August 1, 2006 Miami Herald editorial re-published on Mayor David Dermer’s official website, his CANDO Blue Ribbon Committee “represents a broad range of personalities,” including, most importantly, “struggling artists.” I urge you to approve such zoning incentives with struggling artists mainly in mind, for they are the ones who are expected to renovate the foundation of the creative renaissance of the district – I believe ‘renaissance’ is the appropriate term; for instance, many of the applications of the Art Deco style that made Miami Beach famous were conceived during gatherings at the old library now housing the Bass Museum, itself the finest example of Art Deco around.

     It is to that end that I shall introduce to you Darwin Leon, a real Miami Beach struggling artist, that he may serve as a qualifying model for your equitable consideration. You are men and women of considerable experience, persons who, as Aristotle noted so well, “succeed even better than those who have theory without experience. The reason is that experience is knowledge of individuals, art of universals, and actions and productions are all concerned with the individual; for the physician does not cure Man, except in an incidental way. But Callias or Socrates or some other called by some such individual name, who happens to be a man.”

       We must belay the contemporary denial of the virtuous existence of the First Person and consider an individual example of the concrete universal if we are sincerely interested in a renaissance of the cultural arts in Miami Beach. Jacob Burckhardt associated the civilization of the Italian Renaissance with the development of the individual, who emerged from behind the veil “woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession.” If Miami would be the world-class city it is touted to be, we should recall that “the cosmopolitanism which grew up in the most gifted circles is in itself a high stage of individualism.” Note well “in Italy at the time of the Renaissance, we find artists who in every branch created new and perfect works, and who also made the greatest impression as men.”

     Of course, the rise of the individual coincided with the rise of the bourgeoisie whose leadership took pride in the fine arts that lent them and their cities so much prestige. Modern liberal thinkers such as Frédéric Bastiat, who feared socialism, and Benjamin Constant, who feared fascism and its penchant for war, thought classical individual liberty was highly overrated and outmoded, originally purchased by the ancients with slaves – in England Thomas Hobbes had already vociferated against the sedition and revolution inspired in the youth who took classical heroic tales to heart. Bastiat complained, “The subversive doctrines called socialism or communism are the fruit of a classical education,” and remarked of the ancient nobles that “those who live by plunder exert their action on other members of their species; what they ardently aspire to dominate are their fellow men.” On the other hand, he extols the economic individuals who want to subject Nature to their commercial control. Constant, like the Doctrinaires, French moderates who did not really have a set doctrine, wanted a dynamic synthesis of monarchical and democratic principles in a constitutional monarchy. He warned that the liberty of the ancients is not for modern individuals, for they would rather not be distracted by politics and war from the pursuit of their happiness: “Commerce inspires in men a vivid love of individual independence. Commerce supplies their needs, satisfies their desires, without the intervention of the authorities.”

     So let it be well known from previous renaissances that Miami Beach civic leaders have good cause to expect some salvation even from creative artists who might resent them, and that there is something in art for men of great practical experience. Men of experience, who know the ‘how’ of getting things done, said Aristotle, “suppose artists to be wiser than men of experience,” for artists might know the ‘why’ of things. Wherefore I pray for your attention to these few pages, knowing that your interest in them depends in part on their subject matter, which I am intensely interested in, while others might be more interested, for instance, in 100-page housing reports, or in watching television for three hours a day – I confess these to be among my interests as well.

      The need for equity in our cultural arts considerations was identified in the City of Austin’s 2002 ‘Identification of Public Cultural Arts Funding Best Practices and Benchmarks’, a 42-page evaluation of a survey of the practices of comparable cities including Miami, which was mentioned for its “very open and participatory process.”

     “EQUITY: For the purposes of this paper, equity alludes to the provision of equal access to arts resources for artists and arts organizations and to the broad participation of audiences in a diversity of arts experiences. Ensuring equity is, in itself, an activity that has its own intrinsic value. Further, as implied by Richard Florida in The Rise of the Creative Class, ensuring equity may be a key to attracting and retaining Creative Class people…”

     Whenever government favors one artist over another because of his or her household’s annual income, or for his or her political or aesthetic principles or avowed lack of them, the consequences in the long run may be inequitable for everyone concerned. Moreover, for a government to bestow substantial economic favor on an artist, not because of the quality of his or her artistry but because the artist’s income happens to be moderate or substantially above dire poverty, defames the noble artists who either unwillingly or willingly starved for their principles.

     Gustave Courbet pointed out, in his 1870 letter to the Napoleon III’s Minister of Fine Arts refusing the ribbon of the Legion of Honor: “The state is incompetent in matters of art. When it undertakes to reward, it usurps the public taste. Its intervention is altogether demoralizing, disastrous to the artist, whom it deceives concerning his own merit, which it encloses within official rules, and condemns to the most sterile mediocrity; it would be wisdom for it to abstain. The day the state leaves us free, it will have done its duty towards us.”

     Courbet at age 50 had good cause to be personally embittered. For example: the jury had excluded his most important works from the 1855 International Exhibition. He withdrew them all and set up his own successful show outside the gates of the World’s Fair – the public appreciated his realism and individualism. Perhaps Miami’s disgruntled fine artists should set up their own one-person shows, by way of demonstration against the mediocrity they privately protest but give public lip-service to, on the sidewalk in front of the great Miami Beach Art Basel exhibitions.

     We may be opposed to Coubet’s staunch conservative liberalism today. Darwin Leon, having personally experienced the socialist experiment in Cuba, appreciates Coubet’s libertarianism but he does not agree with his condemnation of abstraction – “An abstract object, invisible or nonexistent, does not belong to the domain of painting” – or his

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