Comments...and the arts!

I’ve had comments in the last couple weeks on the “Focus groups” letter that appeared in the Madison Daily Leader. The Internet still is inferior to genuine human contact in terms of getting local feedback.

An older woman who just moved to Madison a couple years ago called just to say she likes what I said and hopes I will keep speaking up. No problem there, although as you can tell, the beginning of the school year has cut into my writing time.

Local gravel, junk, and tree entrepreneur Lee Yager wrote a full letter to the editor of his own a week after mine. Offering a big hooray for my comments on the city’s wasteful use of tax dollars, he went on to lay bare the falsity of comment our mayor made once that Madison must “grow or die.” Lee may have gone a little overboard in declaring Madison a “metropolitan madhouse” (although the word choice impresses me), but his essential point that maybe Madison is just fine the size it is is worth considering. Growth is not inherently good. Organisms in nature reach an optimal adult size and maintain that size with relative stability until death. Perhaps cities and societies have an optimal size of their own, beyond which growth creates more problems than it solves.

Another local, Chrys Daniel, a contributor to the MDL, offered the most insightful criticism I've received yet on the issue of marketing Madison when she caught me at our local Chinese eatery. She said that while she appreciated my comments (as well as those of Gale Pifer in a three-day editorial series on the decline of music in Madison), she said I missed the mark. Our biggest attraction ought not be the lakes or Prairie Village or DSU. Our biggest attraction ought to be the arts. We have a number of skilled artists in town. John Green is regionally famous for his paintings of South Dakota life, particularly of hunting and wildlife. In his local studio, stained-glass artist Michael Hope creates beautiful windows that he sells worldwide. Rick Janssen produces abstract paintings and sculptures and exhibits around the state. Painters, jewellers, sculptors—this little town has genuine art coming out of its ears, yet the Chamber of Commerce seems blind to such creative endeavors. The Chamber views the world strictly through the traditional green-hued glasses of creating jobs and expanding the local economy. They want to draw more visitors here, but they haven’t figured out or even considered how to parlay all the local artistic talent into a marketable brand for the city. And Madison in general has been neglectful of the arts. There are supporters of Prairie Repertory Theater, which has come down from Brookings for over 30 years to present shows in Madison in the summer, but ticket purchases have been dwindling recently, with the proportion of season ticket holders from Madison with respect to the total population much smaller than the same proportion up in Brookings. The local “Art in the Park” festival held in July in conjunction with Crazy Days draws more crafts than real art, and the live music performances offered there drew hardly a dozen people to sit and listen in a shady tent on a pleasant summer afternoon. Even an arts event with a concomitant mission, a Christian music festival held at Prairie Village earlier in August, couldn’t draw the crowd of 300 the organizers had modestly hoped for. As Mrs. Daniel pointed out, Madison has a large pool of creative and expressive talent, but all too few members of the community seem to place any value on those artistic contributions.