The New New Deal 2009: Public Service Jobs for Artists?
By Arlene Goldbard

Zoom! Another message swoops across my desktop. A whole flock of bright ideas for public-service employment of artists is careening through the Zeitgeist, attracted by that irresistible combination of ingredients: high unemployment, a boundless supply of artistic and social imagination and the intoxicating prospect of a progressive government in Washington. Whenever this idea takes flight — in the Depression-era New Deal of the 1930s, in mid-1970s responses to urban unrest, and today — it draws our collective imagination aloft.

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