Suppose we begin with the idea that everyone can make art. After all, for example, we do assume everyone, of all ages and abilities, can play basketball. If sports build healthy bodies, we ought to be paying some attention to what develops healthy minds and spirits.

"Now days it's gotten to the place where people 'druther have somebody else do their singing for 'em," says Earl, the grumpy old man in Roadside's play, Leaving Egypt. It's a depressing fact, confirmed by survey after national survey, that most Americans think art is something someone else does, that it is beyond their reach. If people felt that way about the game of basketball, the NBA and ACC might be no better than the NEA. More to the point, the game itself wouldn't be played half as well-- even extraterrestrial Michael Jordan was once kicking up dust as a neighborhood amateur.

Some trace art's debilitating legacy of elitism to the 1700's when the science of aesthetics was invented, which quickly gave rise to art for art's sake. This doctrine, still much with us, holds that art is to be judged solely for its beauty, and then only by a knighted few. Would you want to watch a basketball game to which you could only aspire to react? Even more damaging, the art for art's sake code inevitably causes the quest for beauty to be separated from the search for truth. The result is deformed art.

Art is too important to the health of us all to leave to a few. The art-making of millions of Americansisn't valorized; whereas in sports, the amateur is as respected as the professional. There's no negative connotation if one belongs to the Amateur Athletic Association-- many consider it a plus. Given a choice to watch any basketball game from pee-wee to professional, I, like many others, will choose a high school game. We don't think one can beat a packed high school gym on a Friday night, the crowd spilling onto the court-- for many the seventeen-year-old player (probably a neighbor) and her setting are the game at its most satisfying.

Suppose we begin with the idea that everyone can make art. How much better off all of us, including professional artists, would be.