The recent slash in California’s arts funding isn’t worth all the hand-wringing, says Christopher Knight, simply because the state wasn’t really doing anything helpful for actual artists even before the cuts. In the 1990s, artists learned that the way to get funding from an increasingly hostile set of lawmakers is to tie absolutely everything they do to education and social services, which results in mandates that funding be spent on repetitive and pointless programs rather than on the creation of actual art. “Why the inverted priority in the real world? No mystery: Artists don’t have advocates in Sacramento. The arts bureaucracy does.”