Photo: TonyTheTiger

Those who only understand cost, profit and loss don’t often find it hard to understand the concept of value.

President Trump is intending to take away the National Endowment for the Arts. A fund that supports arts organisations around the USA, many of them tiny organisations that will have to close without support.

I’m sure The President’s billionaire pals will not be digging into their pockets to make up the difference with their spare change. They wouldn’t want to be seen as the hated elite, after all.

Those who spend their days counting money, don’t seem understand that the arts are far from elitist,ain fact they are the very foundations of industry and finance.

Everything that is made or built is thanks to human imagination. A lump of iron is of not much use without the imagination of the artist who fashions it into a sword, a steel girder for a Trump building or and iPhone. It is the financier who then helps to bring the idea to the world. A profiteer just exploits the idea to make money and move on.

Nothing exists, but that it first appeared as a thought in someone’s head. Technical training can teach you how to manifest that idea, but only the arts can expand the horizons of the mind, making it open to new ideas upon which the rest of the world can build.

President Trump loves everything covered in gold, but who does he think designs the patterns and shapes of his buildings? Who does he think imagines the building in the first place? Fairies?

All the gilded fanciness that he loves so much, all the fancy clothes that Melania wears – they all came out of the minds of people that went to art school, went to see plays and art exhibitions have spent years studying the arts to get to the point where they can create the stuff  the Trump Empire loves and has built it’s reputation on.

Without the Arts, Trump Tower would just be a pile of bricks and without the the arts providing the foundations, the Trump Empire would soon come tumbling down.