Interesting and sort of ironical column on arts in education in today's NYT: some researchers who had concluded art education didn't affect standard academic accomplishment were defending their findings. The one bit that jumped out at me was

“We feel we need to change the conversation about the arts in this country,” said Ms. Winner, a professor of psychology at Boston College and a senior research associate at Project Zero. “These instrumental arguments are going to doom the arts to failure, because any superintendent is going to say, ‘If the only reason I’m having art is to improve math, let’s just have more math.’ “

Which strikes me as about right, and very American: if we can't quantify it and see it in terms of "success," then who needs it? So what does end up being the argument for it? I know how I would have answered in high school and college, but those kinds of humanistic arguments sound naive to me, and I don't know how persuasive they'd be in this community, which isn't, you know, Berkeley or Woodstock (or Taos or Yaddo).

The justification I've given to my kids for reading fiction is that I've learned an awful lot about people by reading, say, Jane Austen, but you could probably get better info out of a psych book. And as I've said, the "oft was thought/but ne'er so well expressed" argument may not fly either.

Back to Oscar, then: "All art is quite useless." And pleasure is, sometimes, good.