I was visiting recently with a friend about angels. Not the Gabriel types, with trumpets blaring, or the ones like Clarence waiting to get their wings, or the baseball players, or the celestial host hovering over millions of tiny creches at Christmas time.
No, we were talking about that critical group of patrons of the arts who invest their disposable income (or in some case their income that isn’t so disposable) to promote the Fine Arts and enrich our lives by elevating our universal culture.
Now I realize that some of these vital folks are merely gamblers hoping for a tidy profit on their speculation and a few do it for self-aggrandizement. However, many are genuinely altruistic and they beneficently donate to perpetuate the finer elements of our human endeavors. We know some of them as names scrolling past our screens before a Public Television program. Whatever their motivation, as the Arts become ever more costly and government support wanes, we are increasingly dependent on the generous beneficence of angels to fund artistic projects.
The problem often isn’t so much that the majority of our population is too busy or too self-centered to care. It is that people are i
