"The MFA is the new MBA."

Nurse Fusion quotes an article that has this line, which I find terrifying. The notion is that the culture is becoming more art-friendly, more sensitive, more humane. I believe this is wishful thinking. To bring more and more MFA people into the corporate marketplace is more usurpation and a redefining of the degree's purpose than a great stride for humanity. Using high art to sell peanuts is still selling peanuts. It's like bringing Faulkner to Hollywood to write commercial movies, which had nothing to do with literature and everything to do with Hollywood trying to make a buck.

The MFA used to be an odd degree with which writers could get teaching jobs and thereby support their art. If it now becomes a business degree, this is good only to those wishing to have a business career and make a lot of money but it has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with the "health" of art in this country. The artist should be like Plato's gadfly, forever poking a finger into the ribs of the culture to force admission of its failings and secrets. Socrates in his own defense said:

"I am a sort of gadfly, given to the State by the gods; and the State is a great and noble steed who is tardy in his motions owing to his very size, and requires to be stirred into life. I am that gadfly which the gods have attached to the State, and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you. . . . You think that you might easily strike me dead . . . but then you would sleep on for the remainder of your lives, unless the gods in their care of you sent you another gadfly."

Artists are in charge of the spiritual life of the culture. Artists don't accept a culture's safe and easy notions about the nature of beauty, art, meaning. Artists are forever stirring the pot. This kind of individual eccentricity, this kind of private vision, does not lend itself to the mass-produced parameters of the corporate marketplace. If MFAs become the new MBAs, an old story will add another chapter: the ability of corporations to swallow up its most dangerous threats. Artists, of course, will be as dangerous as ever but they may not be adding MFA to their names so readily and they may be even more in the margins of culture than they are today. But they'll be there, and the good ones will be listening to themselves, not the culture, as deeply as ever.