 But a good friend of mine is a big fan of Steely Dan, a band from the 70s. I can't stand them. I have to leave the room when they're out. I just hate them, but listening to them, I understand that it is well done music. There's a lot of talent there. There's a lot of skill there. I understand why people who are not me would like it and would value it. It's very, you know, so it's good art. It's just good art that I really don't like, right? So you can have these three different categories operating all parallel to one another, right? The economic value of something, the artistic value of something, and then the subjective value that that thing has to you as a person when you're deciding how much economic value on it, whether you want it in your house or whether you want it on your stereo. But on other topics, outside of art, there are some things that people believe the value isn't subjective. For instance, there are a lot of people that believe things like gold have inherent value or people who believe that the amount of work that someone puts into something should matter and how much it's worth. We can talk a little bit about that because I think that's an important distinction as well from a theory that says that value is primarily subjective. Right. I think actually, Janet, that the labor theory of value is really interesting when you think about art. There's an art movement called Dada that was big in the 60s and Marcel Duchamp was famous for artistic stunts like taking a urinal from a men's room and mounting it in the Louvre as part of an artistic exhibit and I think it's called Fountain or something like that. People look at that and become outraged. All he did was take a urinal from a men's room and decide that it was art and then all of a sudden it's an artistic piece and it is worth, I don't even know what that would go for, probably hundreds of thousands of dollars. Probably a lot. Nothing except from one room to another room and declare that it is art and so they're mystified how with this little work something can gain that much in value. Yeah. Right. So what would be those paintings that are kind of a big block of color with a line through it? Yeah. Color field paintings. Yeah. Absolutely. When you have sort of like arrangement in blue and gray and it's a big blue square with a gray stripe across it and people say, well, my five-year-old could do that. Why is that? If there's no effort in it, how is it art? Yeah. And by contrast, Thomas Kincaid probably spends quite a bit of time because there's a lot of detail in those paintings. Yes. Enormously effort. There's definitely, that's a common theory of value and it's not quite right because for instance, things can be valued for quite a bit more and in the case of Thomas Kincaid or in the case of a lot of things, you can put a lot of labor into something and it's a little bit more obvious in things that aren't art. For instance, you could spend, I could spend a really long time doing some electrical work for you. It would not be very valuable. It might work, but the amount of work that I put into it is not what's important. What's important is whether or not it works for you, which is a lot more subjective. Do you have any thoughts on, I know how I feel about things like gold having some sort of intrinsic value. Do you have any thoughts on that? I don't think it's necessarily a settled question. I'm not getting out of my territory so I'm getting a little nervous here. I'm not quite sure what you mean by intrinsic value in that case. It seems to me that one of the reasons that it's valuable is because it's rare. One of the reasons it's valuable is because of the uses to which we put it, but if it was landed tomorrow with spaceships full of gold, we wouldn't suddenly be an incredibly rich, I mean, if suddenly everybody had buckets and buckets and buckets full of gold, gold wouldn't be worth that much anymore, right? Yeah, it's a lot, and I think that although you were out of your comfort zone, I think that was a good way of putting it because yeah, you're right. What matters is how useful it is to us and how easy it is for us to put it to the uses that we want to put it, which is not something that's intrinsic to gold. It really depends on us and how we value it. Right, and you can look at literary examples too. There's a great novel by Frank Norris called Mctige, which is about, among other things, the gold rush in California, and it ends. I'm going to spoil it for you guys now, I'm sorry, but the novel was written in 1901, so I feel like the spoiler warnings have kind of run out by now on this one. But it's a great novel, and you should read it because it's very strange and it's a wild ride, but it ends with two mortal enemies stuck together in Death Valley dying from thirst with all kinds of gold around them, right? I don't agree that tastes very, but sometimes people talk about art being priceless, and we talked a little bit about people saying, well, you know, some art, I don't like it, but it's worth quite a bit of money, or I don't understand why it's worth money, but it's worth a lot of money, but what's going on when people start saying that art is priceless? It's a really good question. I think sometimes it means I don't want to think about putting a price on it, right? But putting a price on it seems to sully it with all of that evil economic stuff that we don't like to talk about and that we don't like to think about, right? Artists, however, are perfectly happy most of the time to put a price on their art because they're trying to make money from it. They're trying to make a living from it. It's a tricky one. When Milton wrote Paradise Lost, the publisher paid him 10 pounds for it, and people tend to get outraged by that because to pay 10 pounds for this epic poem, that is one of the greatest works of English literature and that we are still reading 450 years later, it seems like it was a little low. It seems like he didn't get paid enough money, right, for that. Paradise Lost is priceless, right? But one of the things that makes it priceless is the stuff that Milton's publisher couldn't have known, right? One of the things that makes Paradise Lost priceless is that we're still reading it 450 years later. Milton's publisher did not know and could not have known that that was going to happen, right? He didn't know that it was going to become a major cultural touchstone for the 18th century and the 19th century and the 20th and the 21st century, right? So that's completely unpredictable. What he had on his hands was a really, really long poem about the Bible by a guy who had been in an extraordinary amount of trouble for being part of a rebellion against the government, right? So 10 pounds under that circumstances, with those considerations, it's a pretty good price for it. One of the things that happens in awful lot is that the government gets involved in art and you hear arguments that the government has to be involved in art because artists can go unappreciated in their time. I mean, there are a lot of examples of this and things are becoming more niche. So what's the problem with that? Why is it so controversial when the government gets involved in art? There are some very unpleasant things that happen when the government gets involved in art. There are unpleasant things that happen to art and there are unpleasant things that happen to artists when you have government involvement. So let's separate those out. In the essay that I wrote in Why Liberty that Atlas published and put out in combination with Students for Liberty, I began the essay with a long list of artists who had been exiled, persecuted, executed, put into prison, fined enormous amounts of money and so on because the government didn't like the art that they were producing. Quite often as a government tyrannizes, the artists are some of the first people who get into trouble because they have voices that are persuasive and they have voices that are individualistic and they have voices to which people attend and they are able to create persuasive works that can run counter to the things that the government would like them to produce. So you can think about Ai Weiwei in China and his dissident art. You can think about the punk band Pussy Riot in Russia who have been where they are now. I believe they are still in prison in Siberia. I think they have been released. I don't think so but I think they are still in prison. They were hunger striking. You can think within the U.S. a rap artist whose name is escaping me at the moment, something who wrote a rap about the sexist language that is common in other rap songs and was then fined by the FCC for using inappropriate language in her own rap. So she was not able to make the comment that she wanted and she refused radio play and so on and so on. These are some of the bad things that happen to artists. The more government, I don't want to say intervention, but the more government attention is given to art. The more that art and artists are under government scrutiny, I think the more chance there is for the heavy hand of the government to find artists and to use their power to simply squash things that they don't want to have said. What can happen to art is also a bad thing. If you think about art as a thing itself, the Nazis and the Soviets are famous for government-produced art and for government-funded, government-controlled artists and there are exhibits of this kind of art periodically and you see rapidly what happens to the kind of quality to the depth of the artistic work that is produced to the breadth of subject matter that can be covered. There's very often sort of one or two approved styles in which to paint or in which to write or in which to compose and you get a limited and constrained and confined kind of art that's produced for that. And so it is a good thing, Virginia Woolf says that in order to write you need to have money in a room of one's own. It is a good thing to have a source of support for artwork, whether that is a wealthy spouse, a wealthy family, whether it's having a day job in an insurance office like Kafka did or as a doctor like William Carlos Williams did. Or a friend with a room. Or a friend with a spare room or a way of sort of doing what Thoreau did and lessening your needs, cutting back on your needs and cutting back on your desires until you can provide with the minimal work for your basic needs so that you can do it all of your time to writing. That's good stuff. That does help art happen. But I think we have to be very cautious about saying the government needs to do that because once you open that door and you let the government in, they're in there and they're observing and they're controlling. They're a very powerful patron and they're a patron that has not historically been at all shy about executing the artists who were not fulfilling their job description for their satisfaction. Yeah. I'm going to play devil's advocate just a little bit and say that of course we saw terrible things happen under the Nazis and under communist governments. But governments today aren't that they're certainly not as bad as Nazi Germany or communism under Stalin, for instance. And they do provide support for the creation of art. Do you think that there's any way around, I mean, I know that there are some instances of censorship. Like the government will not support extremely controversial art, even if some people find it quite valuable. Do you think that those little instances of censorship are still important? I do. I mean, we can look at US government censorship in World War II. I mean, right? Rida, forgive me. You're Canadian. The US is the good guys. Right? In World War II. You were on your side. We've all seen the movies. You guys are good guys too. Right? And we're the good guys. And there was heavy, heavy censorship of artistic production during the war. There was, there's been heavy censorship in the movie industry since the late 20s or early 30s with the Hayes Code. And it's hard. It's hard to say what we would have if there were not that kind of interference. I mean, my childhood was filled with, oh, I'm going to lose the name of the organization. There was a mother's organization that was all about censoring the rock music that the children were listening to. It was very hell and lovejoy type stuff. And Frank Zappa was a big crusader against that because he was one of their main targets. And this is when you started seeing, you know, when I was a young teenager is when you started seeing warning labels on albums produced in the US about language and about content and about that kind of thing. And, you know, yes, it's milder, yes, funding the arts. You know, if you want to talk about things, I think the government should stop pouring money into, right? I got a whole long list and the arts are kind of down towards the bottom of it. I mean, if they're going to be spending money, I'd rather have them be spending money on art than on bombs. Yeah. For instance. I mean, for instance, for example, but, but I don't, I don't think it does, I don't think it does artistic production a lot of good. And I do think that it gets in the way of as with, as with other kinds of private funding, government funding crowds out the private funding. Yeah. And that's, that's always a problem. Yeah. That's, I mean, and you just also because of the nature of the government being something that's funded by everybody, it's going to be very difficult for small artists to appeal to only a few people, even if they are extraordinarily important to those few people to get funding from the kind of like the kind of base that the government needs to appeal to. So it's sort of hard to say that the types of people that we believe need the support whose value is hard to see are also the types of people where the value is very subjective and individualized that are going to get the art fund, arts funding from something like the government. Right. And if you think, as I do, that one of the useful things that art can do is to provide a voice for people who we don't hear, right, for people who's who don't, who we don't hear for voices that we don't know are out there, right, another, another big moment when I was growing up, I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio and South of Cleveland is Cincinnati, Ohio, which is a very conservative town. And there was an exhibit of Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs, right, and Mapplethorpe is a gay photographer whose many of his photographs are of nude or semi-nude gay men often with a BDSM theme to it, right. And his work was being exhibited in the Cincinnati Art Museum, which I believe is government funded. And the exhibit was, I also believe, and I didn't, I'm sorry, I didn't check my facts on this, because I didn't know that, I didn't know this was going to come up, but I believe that that exhibit was either shut down or censored or parts of it were made to be removed from the exhibit. And for me, that's a problem, because again, Mapplethorpe's work, like it or not, want to hang it in your living room or not, is artistically extraordinary and very important and well worth hanging in an art museum. And it's a voice that, you know, in the mid to late 80s as the AIDS epidemic was beginning to heat up and really beginning to spiral out of control and get a lot of attention. This was a voice that people needed to hear. This was an artist who people should pay attention to, and it was being shut down because it's a fringe voice. And that's a problem. So thank you so much, Sarah, for being on tonight. This was so much fun. Sarah has a column which she mentioned with the Freeman. I will be sharing that as well, because they're just some really interesting book reviews. It's unlikely that you will read another book review column that will make you think as hard and as unexpected ways as Sarah's does. Thank you very much. So I'm going to share it with everybody. And while Liberty is already out, you can find it through Students for Liberty, and Peace Love Liberty is forthcoming. Students are available, I believe. While Liberty I believe is available online as a PDF, and Peace Love Liberty should be as well. But you can also request copies. They are to be made available to spread the wonderful writing and ideas that are in them. It's for $0. Yeah, for zero monetary cost to you, you can have a copy of these lovely books. That's all for tonight. Thank you again, Sarah, and thanks everybody for joining us. Thanks for coming, everybody. Thanks for having me, Janet. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye