In France where the cultural exceptionalism is one of the highest values, the government supports artists rather vigorously. Once a French citizen is registered as an artist who pursues legit artistic activities regularly, she gets financial support from the government. It's a policy to help fostering art that they value so highly and it does help, but it also produces garbage arts and artists as byproducts; people without artistic enthusiasm or philosophy may claim to be artists while 'pursuing' 'artistic' activities that don't necessarily mean to anybody including themselves. It's a situation quite contrary to the situation here in the U.S. where the federal support for the art is very base as we learned in Winter's class.
But who is to say that a governmental support for art is too much or too little? And who is to define what's a true art and what's a garbage?
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