Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen write anthems about the travails of the working man; we line up for the revival of “Death of a Salesman.” John Mellencamp and Willie Nelson hold festivals and fundraisers when farmers suffer. Taxpayers bail out the auto industry and Wall Street and the banks. There’s a sense that manufacturing, or the agrarian economy, is what this country is really about. But culture was, for a while, what America did best: We produce and export creativity around the world. So why aren’t we lamenting the plight of its practitioners? Bureau of Labor Statistics confirm that creative industries have been some of the hardest hit during the Bush years and the Great Recession. But  when someone employed in the world of culture loses a job, he or she feels easier to sneer at than a steel worker or auto worker. (Check out, for example, the unsympathetic comments to a Salon story about job losses among architects, or the backlash to HBO’s “Girls,” for daring to focus on young New Yorkers with artistic dreams and good educations.)

The musicians, actors and other artists we hear about tend to be fabulously successful. But the daily reality for the vast majority of the working artists in this country has little to do with Angelina Jolie or her perfectly toned right leg. “Artists in the Workforce,” a National Endowment for the Arts report released in 2008, before the Great Recession sliced and diced this class, showed the reality of the creative life. While most of the artists surveyed had college degrees, they earned — with a median income, in 2003-’05, of $34,800 — less than the average professional. Dancers made, on average, a mere $15,000. (More than a quarter of the artists in the 11 fields surveyed live in New York and California, two of the nation’s most expensive states, where that money runs out fast. The report has not been updated since 2008.)

“What does it mean in America to be a successful artist?” asks Dana Gioia, the poet who oversaw the study while NEA chairman. “Essentially, these are working-class people – a lot of them have second jobs. They’re highly trained – dancers, singers, actors – and they don’t make a lot of money. They make tremendous sacrifices for their work. They’re people who should have our respect, the same as a farmer. We don’t want a society without them.”

Many of them, in fact, are effectively entrepreneurs, but have little of the regard of the lavishly paid, mythically potent CEO. A working artist is seen neither as the salt of the earth by the left, nor as a “job creator” by the right — but as a kind of self-indulgent parasite by both sides. Why the disconnect?

“There’s always this sense that art is just play,” says Peter Plagens, a New York painter and art critic. “Art is what children do and what retired people do. Your mom puts your work up on the refrigerator. Or the way Dwight Eisenhower said, ‘Now that I’ve fought my battles, I can put my easel up outside.’”

The reality is different. An ecology of churches, chamber series, libraries, on-call studio work and small and mid-size orchestras that neither pay a salary nor offer medical coverage keep musicians like Adriana Zoppo going: A hardworking freelance violinist who performs across Southern California, she’s played, over the last year or so, at a church chamber series, on “American Idol,” a Glenn Frey standards record and a scene of background music for “Mad Men,” and with her own Baroque chamber group. She’s also a regular player in the Santa Barbara Symphony, for which she drives 100 miles each way for four rehearsals and two concerts a month. “I just do a lot of driving, like every freelancer I know,” she says; every week, students come to her apartment for lessons. The economy — and the loss of audience and donors — mean her work is down by about a third. “There’s more and more time between jobs.”

It’s even tougher, she says, for people who rely on the movie studios. “Even before the economy went down, studios started doing more outside California; a lot of it is in Eastern Europe.” For those who made their living playing on records and movie soundtracks, “All of a sudden, they’re making about 60 percent of what they did. What I see is a lot of people looking for things outside music — a lot of people have gotten real estate licenses. I know people who’ve added massage therapist.” Some have dropped medical coverage they can’t afford, taking their chances.

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Of course, those who continue to work in the creative class are the lucky ones. Employment numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show just how badly the press and media have missed the story. For some fields, the damage tracks, in an extreme way, along with the Great Recession. Jobs in graphic design, photographic services, architectural services – the bureau’s phrasing indicates that it is looking at all of the jobs within a field, including the people who, say, answer the phone at a design studio – all peaked before the market crash and and fell, 19.8 percent over four years for graphic design, 25.6 percent over seven years for photography and a brutal 29.8 percent, for architecture, over just three years. “Theater, dance and other performing arts companies” – this includes everything from Celine Dion’s Vegas shows to groups that put on Pinter plays – down 21.9 percent over five years.

Other fields show how the recession aggravated existing trends, but reveal that an implosion arrived before the market crash and has continued through our supposed recovery. “Musical groups and artists” plummeted by 45.3 percent between August 2002 and August of 2011. “Newspaper, book and directory publishers” are down 35.9 percent between January 2002 and a decade later; jobs among “periodical publishers” fell by 31.6 percent during the same period.

So why aren’t we talking about it?

Creative types, we suspect, are supposed to struggle. Artists themselves often romanticize their fraught early years: Patti Smith’s memoir “Just Kids” and the various versions of the busker’s tale “Once” show how powerful this can be. But these stories often stop before the reality that follows artistic inspiration begins: Smith was ultimately able to commit her life to music because of a network of clubs, music labels and publishers. And however romantic life on the edge seems when viewed from a distance, “Once’s” Guy can’t keep busking forever.

Yes, the Internet makes it possible to connect artists directly to fans and patrons. There are stories of fans funding the next album by a favorite musician — but those musicians, as well, acquired that audience in part through the now-melted creative-class infrastructure that boosted Smith. And yes, there have been success stories on Kickstarter, as well — but even Kickstarter accepts just 60 percent of all proposals, and only about 43 percent of those end up being crowd-funded.

Our image of the creative class comes from a strange mix of sources, among them faux-populist politics, changing values, technological rewiring, and the media’s relationship to culture – as well as good old-fashioned American anti-intellectualism.

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It was only relatively late in the evolution of the species – after we settled down into cities and began to accumulate private property – that food surpluses, and with them, specialization, developed and allowed the existence of a creative class for the first time. The resentment may have started there, in the Bronze Age.

We’ll probably never know its deepest origins, but we can clearly document the roots of anti-aestheticism in the very founding of this country: The Puritans who settled the Atlantic shores were austerity-loving religious fanatics who saw art not just as frivolous or womanly, but as idolatry: Before sailing here they’d become notorious across England for smashing stained glass windows and ripping the benches from church choirs. Much of this aggression was directed against the Catholic Church, but the Puritans were no more fond of the church’s support for painting and music than they were of other instances of papery.

And while much of the landed gentry who founded the nation were intellectuals and aesthetes, the frontier myth resonates much more loudly. “Noble savage”-loving Rousseau, critic Leslie Fiedler wrote, is our real founding father, and our early literature is about men fleeing civilization and book learnin’ for an unmediated experience with nature at its most raw. When – decades later — vaudeville, circuses and early motion pictures began to spread, they were denounced for their corrupting influence on the young and working classes. “They were considered a threat to the American way of life,” says popular culture historian Robert J. Thompson.

Europeans, says Plagens, have a very different relationship to the arts because of a high culture going back to the Renaissance and before. “Over here, America is more tied to pragmatism – clearing the land, putting the railroad through … And artists don’t really help with that, so we’re suspect.”

Novelist Jonathan Lethem, whose father was what the writer describes as “a non-famous artist,” sees the American artist as living in internal exile. American history is stamped with “a distrust of the urban, the historical, the bookish in favor of a fantasy of frontier libertarian purity. And the Protestant work ethic has a distrust of what’s perceived as decadence.”

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We don’t wear buckles on our hats anymore; even coonskin caps have fallen out of style. But these latent notions in human nature and the American mind have taken a great step forward – or backward – recently. Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew were demonizing long-haired bohemians, know-it-all professors, journalists and other seditious types since around the time of Woodstock. But these seeds of paranoia really blossomed with the invention of the term the “cultural elite.” During the “Murphy Brown” wars of 1992, Vice President Dan Quayle spoke at the Commonwealth Club of California, connecting the Los Angeles riots to a group sitting “in newsrooms, sitcom studios, and faculty lounges all over America,” jeering at regular people. “We have two cultures,” he said, “the cultural elite and the rest of us.”

This term redefined “elite” from its previous associations (many of them positive) with skill and accomplishment, or wealth and explicit power. (And Quayle was, after all, not only a vice president but a wealthy man from several generations of money.) It also oriented the resented group around education, culinary tastes (they always seemed to be described drinking white wine or lattes) and attraction to culture. Presumably this cultural elite was driving to the opera in its Volvos – somehow managing to both sip a cappuccino and laugh at regular people at the same time — while dreaming up ways to undermine the American way.  While the cultural left has led assaults on the literary canon, or the race and gender of artists whose work hangs in museums, and so on, it’s rarely duplicated the anti-intellectual populism of the far right quite so well.

“Cultural elite,” says Lethem, is “a code word for people who are getting away with something for far too long. It’s a term of distrust – you can almost hear a plan for vengeance in it. Republican politics hardened these impulses and made them more virulent and paranoid.”

If someone who takes in culture – or who writes about it or teaches it, as in Quayle’s original formulation – is somehow “not like us,” the only person more discredited is someone who spends his life producing this stuff.

“There is a pampered class of artists in the United States,” concedes Gioia, who got to know a wide range of creative types during his years as NEA chair. “But it’s tiny. And they make insignificant money compared to sports people. We have this Puritan, practical tradition in the United States. Puritans would give to the poor, but not to the idle. Artists are seen as these idle dreamers.”

More typical than a celebrity artist feasting on enormous grants, he says, is someone like Morton Lauridsen, who is now one of the most performed living composers – after decades of scraping by, teaching and writing choral works. Or a writer like Kay Ryan, who, until becoming U.S. poet laureate in 2008 was known to only a small few. “She never applied for a grant, never taught writing,” Gioia says. “She taught remedial reading at a community college.”

It was the Coast Guard Academy band, in New London, Conn., that allowed Kelli O’Connor, a conservatory-trained clarinet and saxophone player, to make a living. These days she’s a principal in a nearby orchestra, plays with a chamber group at a Boston church, coaches at area high schools and teaches at the University of Rhode Island: None of these pay a full salary or significant benefits. “Freelancing is a hustle all the time,” she says. “You master the art of scheduling. Squeezing in as much as possible. There are some days when I’m not done until 11 or 12 at night, and then I have to get up at 7 in the morning.”

Like most musicians, she teaches private lessons, but her students have fallen by more than half. “Because of the economy, it’s really gone downhill. People are afraid to spend their money. You’re constantly sending your C.V. to local schools to stir up interest.”

“More than any other group of artists, musicians are getting a raw deal,” said a rare story on the crisis, in Crain’s New York Business.

The story of the struggling musician is nothing new, but with smaller orchestras like the Long Island Philharmonic and the Queens Symphony scaling back, and musicals and dance productions using fewer players or none at all, professional musicians — many who studied for years at prestigious schools like Juilliard — are facing an increasingly tough time. They are being forced to piece together bits of freelance work, take on heavy teaching schedules or leave the business altogether. Over the past decade, the number of members of the Associated Musicians of Greater New York Local 802 has shrunk to 8,500 from about 15,000.

Tino Gagliardi, president of Local 802, told Crain’s, “There are fewer opportunities for musicians, and as the work diminishes, people move on.”

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Most people get their ideas about artists and entertainers from the media – TV, the newspapers, radio and so on. When we see actors, musicians, and architects on the covers of magazines or on television, we think we’re getting a look at the creative class. But most often, we don’t see them at all.

Newspapers, especially, have long felt a romanticism, and sense of duty, toward a “man in the street,” a kind of salt-of-the-earth figure who could – depending on the location or era – come out of Springsteen or Steinbeck. “There’s the old saw about afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted,” says James Rainey, who reports on the press for the Los Angeles Times and is one of few journos who has written well on the damage to his own industry.

Coverage of the most vulnerable is among the noble things the press still does. But it means that some strata get overlooked. When papers have written about the recession, for instance, they’ve leaned very heavily on coverage of the poor and working class; professionals, say, losing their homes because of the unemployment or falling housing values hardly show up. One mainstay in recession-era stories about the creative class has been pieces about artists who have “reinvented” themselves – an architect brewing a perfect cup of coffee — in difficult times. Or artsy types who have pursued their “Plan B” – making vegan cupcakes or running a groovy ice cream truck. Fun to read, counterintuitive, more colorful than dreary unemployment statistics – and deeply unrepresentative of what’s really going on.

More honest – and harder to find — is the kind of thing veteran food writer Amanda Hesser just conceded on the blog Food52: That she can no longer advise even talented and diligent young journalists to follow her path. “Except for a very small group of people (some of whom are clinging to jobs at magazines that pay more than the magazines’ business models can actually afford), it’s nearly impossible to make a living as a food writer,” she writes, “and I think it’s only going to get worse.”

One side of the equation, though, is well represented. The celebrity-industrial complex has all but exploded since the 1980s: Rainey recently spoke to a magazine editor who complained about being held hostage by a marketplace that demanded more and more coverage of people famous for being famous.

“Part of this is because there are so many more news outlets than 30 years ago,” he says. “When I started out, you didn’t have Us, OK, so many supermarket tabloids that are big sellers and all about celebrity. On the TV side, there are hundreds of channels about celebrities, and you’ve got TMZ on the Web, Perez Hilton … That’s pulled some of the mainstream outlets in that direction.”

But newspapers, who by some estimates laid off as many as 50 percent of their arts writers in the years after the 2008 crash, may not be in the best position to document the crumbling of non-corporate culture outside Hollywood and television (both of which consume the lion’s share of media coverage). In their urge not to seem elitist, they may shy away from the struggles of folks in the fine and performing arts especially.

It’s nothing as craven or cynical as “media bias,” but the full picture of culture in this country doesn’t get told. Says Rainey: “There’s more attention to celebrities than to everyday people who put together productions, or who struggle to make a living in the arts.”

To most Americans, this middle class of the creative class might as well be invisible.

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Technology has reshaped this issue in another way. “The stereotype of the creative genius has not let go when we look at people out of the past,” says Thompson, the Syracuse University historian. He lists a number of costume-drama images – crazy-brilliant figures like Mozart and Van Gogh – whose prestige is undiminished and whose work is still widely revered.

“But we are much less willing to apply this to people who are still alive. Because distribution has been democratized by the Internet, we tend to think that talent has been democratized as well.” If everyone can post their videos on YouTube, why are some filmmakers richer and more famous than others?

“I think it’s changed the way we look at the contemporary creative class. A lot of it is resentment: Why are you up there when I can do this too?”

This backlash against the creative class – when is the last time we’ve seen an artist or an intellectual in a mainstream film, set in the present rather than a romanticized past, who was not evil or pretentious? – is part of a larger revolt against experts and expertise. We’ve come a long way since the days of Sputnik, when education and intelligence were valorized in a burst of Cold War chauvinism.

Steve Jobs and technological heroes are still worshiped, says Thompson, but it doesn’t translate to creative people who do things that are intangible or hard to understand. “I’ve seen people walk into a museum and say, ‘I can do that,’” he says. “They can’t, of course. But when their computer breaks down, they know they can’t fix it. Creativity is a form of expertise,” something a nation that keeps insisting on its status as a democracy has never been entirely comfortable with.

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There are other changes in sensibility besides rabid faux-populism that spell hostility to the arts and those who work in them. One of them is a kind of market fundamentalism – the idea that everything, whether education, culture or the state of our souls can be bought, sold and measured. “What Isn’t for Sale?” asks an article in the April Atlantic. (You can now buy “access to the car pool lane while driving solo,” rent a woman’s womb, “shoot an endangered black rhino,” and get your doctor’s cellphone number if you’re willing to pay for it, Michael J. Sandel points out. The growth of for-profit hospitals, warfare, community security and schools – which have recently gotten a sweet tax break – show how far we’ve gone in the last few decades.)

We see this same point of view in economic impact studies of the arts and the push for what’s called “cultural tourism” – museums and philharmonics arguing their worth based on the capital they generate. You see it, from the opposite side, when a cultural entity goes bankrupt. When a Kentucky paper reported the Chapter 11 filings of the Louisville Orchestra, the accompanying comments gave a sense of the way we think about culture and the market.

“Get rid of them, the Ballet and any other useless tax funded ‘entertainment’ that isnt self supporting,” one said. “Pack up your fiddles and go home boys and girls. Maybe find real jobs. Go to Nashville and vie for some sessions work.” A third: “Sale all of assets to pay these people off, fire them all and get rid of the Orchestra. It isnt popular with the residents or they would have packed crowds and not have to worry about $$$.” And unambiguous in its market fundamentalism: “The orchestra creates a product. That product has lost public appeal. Just like any business, this one needs to shut down. If your product isn’t selling there is no reason to continue in business.” Needless to say, classical music and other art forms originated and evolved in the age of patronage, well before the market economy.

It brings to mind Oscar Wilde’s line: “A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

“Everything now has to be fully accountable,” says Plagens. “An English department has to show it brings in enough money, that it holds its own with the business side. Public schools are held accountable in various bean-counting ways. The senator can point to the ‘pointy-headed professor’ teaching poetry and ask, ‘Is this doing any good? Can we measure this?’ It’s a culture now measured by quantities rather than qualities. We don’t have any faith any more in the experts when they say, ‘Trust us.’”

Says Lethem: “These days everything has to have a clear market value, a proven use for mercantile culture. Well, art doesn’t pass that test very naturally. You can make the art gesture into something the marketplace values. But it’s always distorting and grotesque.” (The awkward fit reminds him of the Philip K. Dick story “The Preserving Machine,” about a scientist who tries to convert treasured musical scores into animals that can survive an apocalypse – with unpleasant results.)

In some ways, the obsession with economics – both inside and outside the arts – is driven by economics itself. “Forty years ago,” says Plagens, who chronicled the West Coast art scene of the ‘60s and ‘70s in a gem of a book, “Sunshine Muse,” “you rented an art gallery for not much money, and bought a few gallons of white paint. Now you need investors and backers and all sorts of digital technology. So there’s a bigger emphasis on having a business plan than the old bohemian model.”

The final irony is that these are times when we most need the arts but seem the most resistant to culture and the people who produce it.

Despite the crisis in the creative fields in general, mass-distributed entertainment is in a boom cycle. (Movies, because they cost consumers less than most live entertainment, is typically counter-cyclical.)  “Popular art and commercial art is a form of escape,” says Plagens. “It’s what people want, especially in hard times; it’s what you got in the ‘30s, with movies about the heiress who disguises herself as a poor working girl, and so on,” which he sees as the precursor to the tidal wave of sequels, remakes and lame romantic comedies.

“Serious art – novels, what you have in the galleries – brings you back to reality and makes you look at your life. Serious art makes people uncomfortable – and during these times, we don’t need more discomfort.”

He pretended to be lost. He looked around, shook his head and grabbed a newspaper by a fireplace. After selecting a faded page, he set it on fire, gathered the gray-white ashes and gently spread them over his slightly tanned arm. Two dark figures slowly appeared on his grayish skin: “A♥.”

I was fascinated. It wasn’t the first trick my dad had performed for me — since I was 8, coins had frequently come out of my “dirty ears” and ropes had disentangled themselves from impossible knots — but this was certainly the first one that captivated me. I begged him to tell me how he had done it. Like a parrot, he repeated over and over again a conversation-ending mantra that I would soon adopt. “A magician never reveals his secrets,” he stated sternly. Of course, that argument lacked prescriptive force for a 10-year-old, and several days of relentless questioning later, he finally caved in. He made me quite aware, however, that he wasn’t going to teach how me to do it.

Soon after, my father drove me to the School of Magical Arts of Bogota, an old, spacious edifice that housed a magic school, a theater and a remarkable shop crammed with variegated paper flowers, disappearing wands, jumbo decks, vintage posters and rabbit-size contraptions. There, he said, I would finally learn the secret.

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Since the late 19th century, when two German brothers named Francis and Antonio Martinka opened a conjuring store in New York, brick-and-mortar magic shops have played a central role in America’s magical culture. For more than a hundred years, these often small, dark chambers have been a gathering place where traveling illusionists and celebrated performers like Houdini, Thurston and Kellar discussed their latest creations, shielded from the pestering presence of hobbyists and the general public. More important, up until a decade ago, they were the only places where magicians could teach eager teenagers like myself the right methods to produce ashen apparitions and the more complicated tricks that inevitably follow.

But then the Internet broke that monopoly. Today, any 10-year-old kid can type “magic tricks” into Google and gain access either via YouTube or other websites to the biggest trade secrets in a matter of minutes. He can watch a video or buy an expensive apparatus without leaving his house, seeing a live demonstration or talking to another human being.

As a result, magic stores are slowly vanishing across America. With their gradual disappearance, as Jamy Ian Swiss — a leading card-expert and magic historian recognized for his brilliant technique and for his outspoken column in Genii, a conjuring magazine — has argued, one of the foundations of this ancient art form is disappearing.

“Magic has always depended on the control of information,” Swiss told me in an interview. “When I was young, you had to hang around a magic shop, and learn to ask, and ask politely. You would approach a guy and he would tell you, ‘Well, show me what you are working on, kid,’ and you’d show him. And then he might say, ‘Let me help you out with that,’ or ‘Let me show you something different than what you asked.’

“The biggest problem with DVD and YouTube exposure is that it has damaged the skill of learning through asking, and it has created the mistaken assumption, perhaps, that all knowledge and all wisdom is available to buy,” he said. “And there’s so much difference between those two acts, because asking involves a human experience, while buying is just sitting in your coach and passively absorbing countless secrets that you think constitute magic.”

In New York, the Yellow Pages listed 16 magic shops in 1960 but just three by 2003. Now there are only two, Fantasma and Tannen’s Magic, says George Schindler, the dean of the Society of American Magicians.

Fantasma and Tannen’s are lingering throwbacks where young magicians can still learn secrets directly from their elders, sidestepping DVDs and videos from online sites. They are sanctuaries where awkward 10-, 14- and 20-year-olds can meet and talk to each other and to older magicians without fearing ridicule or censorship. They are the last place where kids who mask their timidity through magic can find someone to help them overcome the challenges of art and life.

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On a recent visit to Fantasma, “Magic Mo,” a laconic 14-year-old who wouldn’t part with his real name, fanned the cards while he waited for his mentor. As he opened and closed a red-backed deck, Mo watched David Roth, a world-renowned sleight-of-hand artist, perform for an English couple.

After divining several cards and correctly naming a random word a woman mentally chose from a book, Roth walked to the cashier and added up the cost of tricks the couple had bought for their magic-obsessed godson. The woman waved as she disappeared through the main door. Roth closed the register with a sigh and returned to check on Mo.

With a soft and at times faltering voice, the teenager showed him a card-control technique he was working on. Roth corrected him and urged him to do it again.

“Don’t practice in front of the mirror,” he told him. “You get used to blinking when you are doing a pass, which is not good. Video is better. But then again, you should do it in front of your friends here. The camera doesn’t think.”

Roth stood behind a display case filled with DVDs, multicolored decks of cards and several types of coins in a 3,500-square-foot exhibition room on the corner of 33rd Street and Seventh Avenue. (Fantasma serves as a store and display room for one of the world’s leading magic manufacturers, according to Roger Dreyer, one of the owners.) Directly in front of him, just behind a caged pet rabbit named Rambo, lies a collection of original Houdini memorabilia, which includes handcuffs, locks, books and black-and-white photographs. A couple of bookshelves line a part of two walls to the left of the exhibition, near a table with four seats that are occasionally occupied by amateur and professional magicians spreading blue-backed Bicycle decks over a blood-red cloth lined by black felt.

“Magic shops are disappearing because of the Internet,” Roth said during one of my visits while he extended his calloused hands toward the roof. “This place is an oddity.”

He works at Fanstasma twice a week, demonstrating tricks to potential customers and holding court over the enthusiasts who come by to talk to him or to show him something they’ve developed. Roth, 69, has short white hair that contrasts with his rosy face.

As most magicians will tell you, Roth is a legend within the guild. An expert coin manipulator, he was mentored by Dai Vernon, a man revered by close-up magicians throughout the 20th century. Vernon was a Canadian sleight-of-hand artist known as “The Professor” who revolutionized card magic by developing techniques he learned from gamblers all around the country. He eventually adopted Roth as a protégé from the 1970s to the 1990s — the final years of his life — in the Magic Castle in Los Angeles.

Within the walls of the Hollywood private club of the Academy of Magical Arts, Vernon advised Roth on the importance of practice and highlighted the beauty of a flawless technique in which all movements seemed natural.

“There are terrible magicians online that do tricks as if they had just learned them in the schoolyard,” Roth told me when I asked him about people who posted magic videos on YouTube. “They don’t practice. They see something and think they can do it immediately.”

Lack of practice is a constant complaint. You hear it even from amateur magicians like Uriel Nashofer, 20, a New Jersey native now studying in Missouri who likes to hang out at Fantasma whenever he comes home.

“Kids don’t read books anymore. They just watch DVDs or download effects from websites like Penguin and Theory11. The problem is they don’t think about the presentation,” he said after showing me a series of card tricks. “The effects I just did, for example, it took me nearly eight months of practice to master.”

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Unlike Fantasma, Tannen’s Magic doesn’t sell toys, only items used by professionals. The store is located in the sixth floor of an unremarkable building near Herald Square. Three black-and-white rabbit silhouettes decorate a blank wall in the corridor that leads to the shop. The dimly lit quarters house six glass counters and several floor-to-roof shelves covered with an assortment of colorful cylindrical gimmicks, colossal dice, papier-mâché flora and countless DVDs and special kinds of playing cards inside transparent plastic bags.

Tannen’s moved its catalog online a couple of years ago, and now sales are split evenly between the shadowy locale on West 34th Street and its own website, according to Adam Blumenthal, 27, the young Broadway light-designer and magician who owns the place. (Balay calculated that in Fantasma 70 percent of the sales still took place in the shop.) The store, nevertheless, still attracts a loyal throng of kids, especially over the weekend.

On a Saturday afternoon, four teenagers and a 25-year-old stand-up comedian were practicing flourishes, spreading fans, cutting the deck in three smooth movements and making cards fly from one hand to the other, and showing each other new tricks on a table in the center of the room. After watching them for a while, I joined them and asked how they thought the Internet was affecting magic.

“I started by learning from YouTube and it messed up all my future performance,” Vlad Verba, 14, said while he kept on cutting a deck in his hand. “I’m a righty, so I have to hold the deck in my left hand. I didn’t know that and I learned all the sleights using the wrong hand. I had to start all over after I came here.”

Harrison Greenbaum, a stand-up comedian, magician and counselor at Magic Camp — an event that Tannen’s organizes each year in which magicians from all around the country fly to Philadelphia to mentor and teach kids about performance and the psychology of the art — emphasized the social aspect of the store.

“In a brick-and-mortar magic shop there is a sense of community,” he said. “You get to know other people and you have somebody who’s an expert, who can help you with specifics that you don’t know about. You meet incredible magicians and you are able to walk up to them and show them what you can do, so that they’ll critique you and give you some tips.”

For Danny Braff, 15, visiting Tannen’s at least once a week offered a related advantage. “I met my best friend here,” he told me. “He’s a magician named Ruben Moreland and he’s helped me a lot with everything. I wouldn’t be nearly as good as I am if it wasn’t for him.”

The kids talked about Magic Camp and Harrison joked about how videos would inevitably fall short when answering important questions.

“What do you do if the bar mitzvah boy starts crying?” he asked, shrugging. “What do you do if your pants rip during a show? That happened to me once, you know.”

Everyone laughed and after a long silence, Joshua Kurzbam, 20, a sinewy teenager with receding black hair who sat next to Braff, looked at me, as if asking for permission to speak. “Magic allows us to be social,” he said. “It gives us an excuse to talk to people.”

Two of his companions lowered their eyes and nodded. They kept on talking until it was closing time, ceaselessly shuffling the packs of playing cards in their hands.

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The online videos often resemble movie trailers. They range from around 45 seconds to almost two minutes, featuring cyan- or red-saturated images and original short-lived soundtracks. Typically, they start with the logo of the website or a fading title over dark backgrounds, and then feature fast, short frames in which viewers can catch a glimpse of the effects being sold.

There are now dozens of Internet-based companies that sell products online. Two of the biggest, as kids in shops will tell you, are Penguin Magic and Theory11. Penguin strives to project a youthful image by using cartoons and a bright color interface, while Theory11 reinforces the aura of mystery cultivated in its videos by using black and gray tones.

Penguin started in 2002 and has grown ever since to become one of the most visited magic sites. One of the company’s main strengths is the sheer amount and variety of effects that it sells. The same is true of Theory11, a website founded in 2007 by 11 magic industry insiders, which last year launched “The Wire,” a global marketplace that allows magicians to directly publish their creations online.

The philosophy behind both ventures was to offer their clients an ever-increasing inventory capable of fulfilling any kind of style or concentration.

“The idea was to start a store where magicians could actually see a demo of every trick in the shop,” Acar Altinsel, a co-founder of Penguin, wrote me in an email. “Walk into most magic shops and the magician behind the counter can only perform a handful of what you see. This was constantly disappointing for me as a kid.”

Videos are supposed to solve that problem, according to Altinsel. “A ‘good’ magic DVD will get as much into presentation as an in-person lecture or book. Further, online video chat ‘sessioning’ has put magicians in an even better position to get mentoring and correction,” he wrote.

Most professional conjurers would disagree. The difference between a live performance or even a live chat and an online interaction is qualitative. As any music lover will testify, there are essential differences between watching a live video of a concert and actually attending the concert. The feeling and the power of the experience are heightened by the use of all the other senses, by the crowd’s feelings and the immediate surroundings. The statement is equally valid for couples who try to rekindle their passion via Skype or for any other art-form that thrives on human responsiveness.

Eric DeCamps, a magician from Forest Hills who was the second man in 107 years to receive the Gold Medal of Excellence for Close Up Magic of the Society of American Magicians, put it in somewhat similar terms in a recent conversation.

“Magic is a performing art,” he said, “and while it is interesting and fun to solve magic problems on your own, the problem doesn’t take full life until you perform in front of a live audience. I can’t explain the feeling I get when you are in front of that audience and you communicate and you almost become one consciousness; I mean, you almost know what they are thinking and there’s a level of communication that is indescribable.”

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As Jamy Swiss points out, magic is timeless, perhaps the spawn of a single moment of ingenious play. “It is likely that even in ancient times someone in a cave took a stone and pretended to put it in one hand while keeping it in the other, and magic was born,” he said.

Nevertheless, just one trick, as my father knew, was worthless. He was aware that even though the ash effect I coveted was relatively simple, to perform it properly I would first have to learn to perfection certain card techniques. He also knew I rarely spoke to other people. He knew I would rather hide behind a book than talk to a classmate or participate in a social event that involved more than two people. I presume that in part that was why he decided that a brick and mortar magic shop was the only place where I would be able to acquire the skills I craved.

The two-story house was a gathering place for Colombian magicians and for quiet, awkward kids like myself. While dozens of doves cooed from cages in the second floor, a group of five teenagers would sit around a green felt table and watch Richard Sarmiento, the stout, bearded magician who ran the school, execute basic sleight-of-hand techniques twice a week. With exacting detail, Sarmiento would explain under a weak yellow light the essential hand movements, and correct our own poor attempts to mirror him, much like Roth had done with Mo in Fantasma.

We would rarely ask questions or talk to each other. We stifled our wavering voices as we concentrated on how to palm a coin or divine a card. As we got better, Sarmiento taught us more complicated effects and pressed us to speak. We had to shed our shared shyness, he said. Our low voices would not do, for it was important to control the stage, to act naturally while performing passes or using misdirection in front of a live audience.

After a year of study, my colleagues and I staged an evening of magic in the theater. I closed my act by inviting a woman from the audience to choose a card. I joked with her and the audience laughed while I grabbed a lighter from a top hat. I asked her to concentrate on her selection and pretended to write something with an imaginary pen on a silver tray, which I held over the inside of my left arm.

I burned a newspaper over the tray and triumphantly showed the audience the blackened silver. A couple of people clapped even though the darkened metal had no particular shape. After feigning panic for a couple of seconds, I spread the black ashes over my left arm while Sarmiento and my father watched me. A “2♥” appeared in bold letters on my skin.

For an era supposedly defined by bourgeois bohemianism, architecture – a synthesis of aesthetics with hardheaded pragmatism — was the perfect field.

But for all its soaring lines and innovative solutions, architecture is exposed to the realities of the marketplace like few other fields: The surging sense of possibility that lasted through the ‘90s and the early 2000s flagged when the housing market crashed and turned the U.S. economy upside-down. Gehry, whose Walt Disney Concert Hall has become an iconic part of downtown Los Angeles and whose widespread fame led him to a gig designing jewelry for Tiffany, complained recently about the lack of work in the States and grumbled that he wishes he could move his staff to China, where there are more opportunities. Thom Mayne, the Pritzker Prize-winning architect (the field’s top prize) who has gone from one of the field’s rebels to one of its most successful, joked grimly about the need for a party for depressed architects.

It isn’t just the celebrity figures who are frustrated, however. A once-thriving profession, one that requires considerable education and work ethic, and which has traditionally served a wide range of functions — designing mansions for the 1 percent as well as public libraries — is in trouble.

The ups and downs became very tangible for Guy Horton, a Boston native who dropped out of an academic program studying Chinese history and literature to become an architect, entranced by both the field’s energy and seeming stability. “I thought I was being pragmatic,” he says now. “Architecture was booming, the starchitects were getting a lot of attention. I was taken by the excitement of the field,” especially the study of urbanism. “Travels in China and around Asia, and stints living over there, got me more interested in cities and how they transform.”

After graduating from the cutting-edge Southern California Institute of Architecture in downtown Los Angeles, he was scooped up by the L.A. offices of Perkins + Will, the large Chicago-based firm with a track record for sustainable projects. In 2008, as the market was crashing, he was laid off.

He bounced checks. He strained to pay student loans. Most of his income went to cover a health plan, but he avoided doctors or dentists because of high deductibles. He was pulled over by the police for his car’s expired tags. He was demoralized and frightened for his family, which included a 1-year-old daughter. After working hard to break into what seemed to be a burgeoning profession, unemployment was like being buried alive.

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Horton wasn’t alone: According to the U.S. Department of Labor, employment at architectural firms nationwide dropped from 224,500 to 184,600 between July and November of 2009, and the numbers have kept falling. In some cases, firms went dormant while remaining open. Gensler, the nation’s biggest firm, laid off 750 of a staff of about 3,000; British Pritzker-winner Norman Foster laid off a quarter of his. Gehry – whose Brooklyn Yards project and condo/shopping hybrid in downtown Los Angeles wilted – cut Gehry Partners to ribbons, slicing more than half his staff of 250. All over the world, even in once-vigorous regions, ambitious projects stalled. That process has continued: In November, Gehry saw the projected Guggenheim Abu Dhabi museum go into deep freeze.

Many architects running smaller firms were lucky enough to keep their jobs but saw their fees – linked to falling construction costs – decline. Numbers are hard to come by and the upbeat American Institute of Architects does not track unemployment, but many thousands certainly left the field altogether. Sometimes they luck out: A former architect has become one of the best-loved baristas in Los Angeles; another runs the Coolhaus ice cream truck. Others have lost their homes and their medical insurance. “It’s the new English major,” says Horton.

Those who remain in the profession find design work scarce and are teaching, lecturing, entering competitions and moving into Hollywood production design. These gigs have always been part of the field, which revels in its synthesis of theory and practice, but the balance has shifted in a way that leads to architects doing less and less architecture.

“The recession has affected everyone, for sure,” says Kevin Daly, an established Santa Monica architect whose firm, Daly Genik, employs 10 people when at full strength. “Generally there’s a lot less work than people are accustomed to having. Clients are doing feasibility studies and then keeping their options open.”

Architect Marcelo Spina is a member of the creative class who serves the creative class: His boutique firm, Patterns, aims to design art galleries and small museums, and saw some early success. But many of those projects are drying up.

These days, he can only keep himself afloat through university teaching, and it’s the same for his architect wife, Georgina Huljich. “It’s a hugely important factor for us financially,” he says. “We’re proud academics, but we don’t want to be purely academics – we don’t want to be part of the paper architecture world. My colleagues are struggling the same way. Right now what you have is full-time employment with internship wages. There is much less meat for the same amount of animals. You see a whole lot of talented people not getting jobs.”

Spina is one of the lucky ones: He has strong connections in his native Argentina, where residential and civic projects have not died off. Because of a recent history of runaway and credit busts, designers are usually paid with real money. “You know someone is going to show up with a bag of cash.”

But those stuck working in the States are in a tight spot. In January, the New York Times ran a piece called “Want a Job? Go to College, and Don’t Major in Architecture.”  The article charted a report by Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce that showed architecture graduates, of all college majors, the most likely to be out of work. The survey reported that a whopping 13.9 percent of architecture students between 22 and 26 were unemployed. Experience helped only a little bit: Among experienced architects between 30 and 54, a full 9.2 percent remained out of work. Even humanities and arts majors – often the least career-obsessed of students – fared better.

The Times story, Horton says, angered many of the architects he knew. “People were getting defensive about it. ‘It’s not about that – it’s about the passion!’ People were irate!” He knows architects who’ve left the state, closed their firms, moved back in with their parents. “People don’t want to talk about unemployment anymore … we are supposed to be in recovery optimistic power mode.”

It’s part of a professional ethos, he says, that stresses idealism, dues paying, hierarchy, optimism and a heroic self-image while ignoring financial realities. It’s something he’s become intimately familiar with as he tries to chronicle the damage the recession has exacted on the field. “I’m trying to talk to architects about the economy,” Horton says. “Forget it! It’s hard to get real information. They’re so conscious of P.R. – they’re worried about what’s going to get tweeted.”

A lot of the profession, he says, has spent years in denial.

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Part of the problem with tracking the state of any creative class employment is that the numbers don’t tell the real story. Nor do the Horatio Alger stories that newspapers and magazines love running about the tiny minority of laid-off creatives who manage to “reinvent” themselves and turn their misfortune into an opportunity.

Not everyone is suffering. Eric Owen Moss and Barbara Bestor are very different kinds of designers, with sharply different lists of clients, but they show what is possible when talent and good fortune line up.

Moss has some major advantages over even the typical successful architect: He is the director of an architecture school, which provides him with a hefty salary. He has connections in China and has several projects cooking in a country that considers a redesign of the coastline within the art of the possible. And he has an architectural patron who has financed a daring series of design projects – asymmetric office buildings and an “art tower” in Culver City — that earned a 2011 rave in the New Yorker.

Though he calls himself “temperamentally optimistic,” Moss knows what’s happening around him. “If you look at the numbers, architecture graduates are looking for opportunities in other fields. Overall, commercial building has slowed to almost nothing.”

Bestor, whose hair is cut in a kind of ‘70s shag, has for years been the indie queen of Silverlake, the bohemian neighborhood on L.A.’s east side. Sitting in her retro-cool Airstream trailer, parked outside an open-plan plywood office that buzzes with activity, she compares herself to a culinary locavore: She’s tapped into the neighborhood – its boutique small businesses and pop-culture spirit — and is the first call for cool coffee shops (Intelligentsia), wine bars (Lou) and record label offices (Dangerbird) in Hollywood and points east. “People know me; they know what I do.”

But even Bestor has struggled: After laying off most of her staff after the crash, she took a university teaching gig in 2009, working, effectively, two full-time jobs. “Very much like an immigrant worker,” she says. “I sold the house I had, bought a cheaper house and worked harder.” She’s coming back, but things are still tight. “It’s a shell game: This will pay for that; this will pay for that this month.”

Olivier Touraine, a Frenchman working in Los Angeles, helped design a Japanese airport for Renzo Piano soon after graduating from architecture school in the late ‘80s. He later taught at Columbia University and worked for future Pritzker winners Koolhaas and Jean Nouvel. In 2007 the New York Times profiled Touraine and his wife, Deborah Richmond, as a green-design power couple who had recently completed a home refurb for director Wim Wenders. Living in a sleek and sustainable new house made of redwood and corrugated steel that the couple designed, not far from Venice Beach, the gentlemanly, intellectual Touraine seemed like someone destined to thrive.

These days, “We are making less than a cleaning lady,” Touraine says, sitting in Wurstkuche, the high-design gastropub that serves the architecture students of SCI-Arc. The dried-up residential work hit his firm especially hard. “Architects’ fees are based on construction costs; those are going down. When you do the math at the end, you end up with less. You have to get more work, but you have fewer employees. It was six employees, plus us. Now we have an intern two mornings a week.”

When he looks around at his colleagues, things don’t look much brighter. “Everybody has been massively laying off. Massively.” But the pain is not evenly distributed. “The bigger you are, the better you can pass through the storm. And if you are rich enough, even if [your firm] is very small, you can be OK, even if you are losing ridiculous money. They are trust-fund babies: Somehow the recession has been good for them; it has exterminated the competition.”

Another reason numbers are deceptive is that small firms often don’t technically die. “They can’t exactly close,” he says. “They freeze. Or they close their professional space and move into their backyard or garage.” Others buy cheap land in developing countries and design self-funded projects of their own to give clients a sense of forward motion. “It’s completely staged.”

For small firms who keep struggling, the pain bleeds into a marriage. “I’m almost more surprised when I hear people are still together,” says Touraine, who recently separated from his wife. “It’s like having two guinea pigs in the same cage – night and day, you bring the stress back.”

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Even Bestor, who is lucky enough to have boundless energy and talents that sync nicely with the state of the marketplace, worries about what awaits the younger generation.

Architecture has always been a tough field for newcomers. “Your salary starts at the schoolteacher level,” she says, “but then you watch your friends who went to other professional schools go up and up, while yours stay the same. If they went to dental school they make more than you.” It forces students to be cautious at the time in their careers when they should be taking chances.

The current uncertainty makes the old model – poverty in youth, payday sometime in middle age – harder to count on. She fears that after being a profession, architecture will return to the patronage system, in a day of dwindling patrons. Or a system where “only rich kids can do quirky stuff and everyone else has to work for corporate firms.”

Spooked by the marketplace, more and more students are going right into teaching from grad school, getting little or no professional experience. It’s hard to blame students who graduate with significant financial pressure. “If you go to a private school, you can easily come out with $100,000 in debt,” Horton says. “For a graduate program, it’s hardly unheard of to have $50,000 to $60,000. Then you have all the fees associated with getting your license.”

And due to an old-school ethos of dues paying – as well as the freeze in building – today’s students often wade through round after round of low-paying internships before getting a full-time job, only to find that salaries have declined.

“It’s not good for me,” Touraine, who now teaches at USC, says of the field’s sour state. “But I’ve had my good time. I probably won’t be able to climb the way I wanted to. But I won’t be homeless; I can teach. I’m really concerned about a generation that won’t get a chance.” As for his peers, “We’re pissed off, we’re frustrated, we’re overstressed. But as an educator, I feel like an ayatollah sending kids running into the minefield.”

Horton thinks architects are deeply out of touch with economic reality and aren’t leveling with students and young designers. “How do you keep the KoolAid and the boosterism flowing when there are no or few prospects after graduation?” he asks, describing what he calls a lost generation. “But architecture just grinds on heroically, regardless.”

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People will always need houses, cities and nations will always need schools and libraries and civic buildings, and trendy restaurants will need redesigns. Architecture will never die completely: It’s existed as a calling, in various forms, at least since the medieval master builder.

Moss, who regrets having to lay off employees, says he still feels encouraged about the future. He expects to hire this year – at lower pay and with less stability than he’s used to offering. Periods of tension sometimes produce fresher thinking. “Maybe there’s an opening for new ideas.”

The Washington, D.C.-based American Institute of Architects, which represents the entire field but is considered by some a cheerleader for corporate firms, is cautiously optimistic, projecting “a 2.1 percent rise in spending this year for non-residential construction projects,” and better numbers for 2013. The group fights to make small increments sound victorious, like the two months of slight increases in architectural billing, following dozens of months of contraction, which the AIA celebrated in January.

But overall, the state of architecture reflects the larger story of the creative class in the 21stcentury: Security and artistic freedom exist only for those who are independently wealthy. There are heavy casualties at small independent companies from which corporations are somewhat shielded. The middle levels get hollowed out. Barriers to entry tighten. And there’s a lingering sense that even when the recession lifts, these industrywide problems will not abate. Record corporate profits, after all, have not led to a significant increase in design work or construction. They’re issues, of course, that increasingly face the broader middle class in the developed world as well.

Some smell trouble in architecture’s sense of itself, as the most visible architects work for high-fashion companies – Koolhaas’ Prada stores, for example — even as the profession suffers: It’s part of a process by which the field orients itself around the top 1 percent and contributes to what some call the skyboxing of America. “Most architects in the ‘50s were building private houses – like the Case Study House project,” Touraine says of the effort by Arts & Architecture magazine to design stylish, modest homes for the middle-class. “But the idolatry of the starchitects has made it seem like architecture is only for exceptional buildings. Architecture is perceived as a luxury good. It can be, but it’s not only that.”

A decline in public spending – belt-tightening by U.S. cities and states, full-on austerity in Europe – kills off the civic projects that allow architects to develop reputations and make payroll. “I don’t feel like this is temporary,” says Daly. “The immediate future will be more like now than it will be like it was five years ago. Until we make the decision as a society to invest in things – and I don’t really see that happening.”

After two full years of pain, Horton got a new job, this time at a firm that he calls a better fit. For him personally, the recession and the blow it dealt his field has had a reasonably happy ending. But he’s less sanguine about where things are headed: The downturn has shown the contradictions of a field built on wait-your-turn hierarchy, a sense of self-importance, and a culture of sacrifice. And it showed that the world had changed from the postwar age of professional loyalty.

“You had the economic bargain that Robert Reich talks about: You work, and you’re taken care of,” says Horton, who, at 43, is old enough to have seen the transition from the old model. “This bargain no longer exists; it’s not unique to architecture. Architecture is a creative industry, but it’s also reflective of shifting paradigms of the middle class. Architects are supposed to be serving society, but I think we’re struggling to maintain our position in society.”

“I proposed that we offset the costs by holding a recording salon,” Tiemann says. “So we invited a select group of people to come in and experience the music live in the studio as it was being created.”

Six people came in to watch, and each paid $250 for the privilege. Presto, budget gap closed. If Tiemann has his way, that will be a regular happening at Manifold, a wildly ambitious high-end studio that opened over the summer in the rural splendor of Chatham County, North Carolina (near Raleigh).

Thanks to his deep pockets from his position at the software company Red Hat, Tiemann had the means to turn his “passionate obsession” of a dream into reality. He spared no expense on Manifold, which is a remarkable facility with lavish attention to detail. Most of the building’s dimensions are based on the Fibonacci sequence and/or the golden ratio, with all the grids of the floors, walls and ceilings lined up to interlock and intersect with perfect symmetry. The wooden floor of the main studio is composed of a diamond pattern, and each diamond has 12 slats in honor of the 12-note scale of Western music.

The studio’s technical gear is all state-of-the art, of course. Manifold is the sort of destination studio where you could imagine U2, Adele or some other chart-topping act setting up shop for a month or three to wax their latest opus. But if anything seems less practical than starting a record company right now, it’s building a high-end recording studio that rents for $2,000 a day. Having built it, Tiemann is convinced they will come — although the “they” he has in mind is less top-of-the-pops and more grassroots.

Even though Manifold is very much a high-tech facility, Tiemann’s vision of it is steeped in the vibes of past glory days from the era before Pro Tools rendered studios obsolete. Speaking of models for Manifold, Tiemann cites the Beatles’ old stomping grounds of Abbey Road, where they pioneered the technique of using the studio as another instrument; Peter Gabriel’s Real World, a studio he says was “built to support creativity”; and most of all the old CBS 30th Street Studio, favored back-in-the-day recording venue of everyone from Miles Davis to Leonard Bernstein.

“When Miles Davis would record at 30th Street, he’d bring three or four dozen people into the studio and they’d do a live recording session,” Tiemann says. “This was a lot like a musical version of the salon model, people gathering in a room small enough to support conversation and large enough to hold a diverse group of people. Glenn Gould, who recorded ‘The Goldberg Variations’ there, said that recording would completely replace live performance within 50 years. That was in 1966 and it has not quite come true, not yet. What we’ve got in mind is to bring together those two experiences, recording and performance.”

To that end, Manifold is set up to do broadcasting or webcasting, just in case anyone is of a mind to make a recording/performance available to a wider real-time audience. Even without that, it’s a very comfortable space for a live audience of several-score fans. And with the right act and setup — an unplugged rock band, say; or James Taylor, who grew up right down the road in Chapel Hill and still has ties to the area — you could imagine Manifold being the perfect setting for the right kind of live-recording project.

“Everybody still wants to make great-sounding records in great studios,” says Souvik Dutta, a producer scheduled for two Manifold projects in 2012 including one with Widespread Panic guitarist Jimmy Herring. “It’s like taking your kid to a baseball game to see his favorite player.”

Still, are there enough projects like that out there to support a studio that cost millions to build? Tiemann is convinced there is, citing parallels with the slow-food movement.

“Just as the slow-food movement encourages eaters to think more holistically about how food is grown, prepared and brought to the table, this co-producer model gives people much more access to the creative process of music,” Tiemann says. “They’re not just financially involved, but also participants in a stronger way than the traditional music industry has really encouraged. There is a new economy waiting to be discovered, new markets waiting to be engaged. We’re very early in addressing this brave new market, and doing so at a time when the record industry’s rhetoric is so wildly against anything new that it makes us look like the crazy ones.”

Trying to sell an idea like Manifold is actually familiar territory for Tiemann, a guru of the open-source-software movement whose career began just as the Internet was coming together in the 1980s. Early in the game, Tiemann was doing a lot of work with open-source software, which is free and set up so that users can easily modify it.

But open-source software seemed like a commercial dead end until Tiemann figured out how to monetize software that you give away: Sell support services, the software equivalent of giving away cell phones and charging monthly user fees. Red Hat, a company specializing in Linux software, acquired Tiemann’s company in the late 1990s, and he moved from Silicon Valley to Red Hat’s home base of North Carolina.

Tiemann started out as Red Hat’s chief technical officer, eventually settling into his current role as the company’s vice president of open-source affairs. That involves a fair amount of punditry and acting the gadfly. Couple that open-source mindset with his lifelong love of music (he first recorded as a 10-year-old member of the Saint Thomas Choir while growing up in New York City), and Tiemann might be just the guy to drag the record and studio industries kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

“People said the idea of giving away software and selling services to new markets would never work,” Tiemann says. “That worked out fine and this can, too. What would it be worth to provide a path to sustainable success in the music industry? I think that’s worth a lot. Strip-mining the low end, selling less and less quality to more and more people — there are limits to that model, and the music industry has done about as much of that as can be done. It’s time to try something new.”

Like virtually every other conservative candidate, Romney has had it — had it! — with government expenditures like public broadcasting, and he wants to save taxpayers money by cutting federal funding to programs like PBS and the National Endowment for the Arts.

There are many good arguments – aesthetic to social to economic – for using public money to fund the arts. There are also arguments – philosophical and practical – for not using public money this way.

But Romney’s threat/promise isn’t about arguments. For the past 30 years, opposition to government funding for the arts has been a rote exercise for conservatives wanting to demonstrate ideological bona fides. It’s not just about opposing arts funding, it’s about actively seeking to defund the arts (two different things). Arts funding is shorthand for a laundry list of evils, from rampant government handouts to profligate spending, suspicious values, and out-of-touch elitism. Framed in these terms, who wouldn’t be opposed? Opposing arts funding checks the boxes on numerous fundamentalist conservative issues.

Because it does, no amount of argument – good things the arts do, what a great return on investment they are, or the mountains of studies designed to convince – makes a whiff of difference. It isn’t about the arts.

It’s a cliché, but true: Those who frame an issue control it. Republicans want to win the support of moral absolutists and those who believe, as Ronald Reagan famously said: “Government is not the solution, it’s the problem.” In this fight, the arts are collateral damage, symbol rather than target. For all the right reasons. The arts are shades, not blacks and whites. The arts are messy collective investment and experiment. They’re about undependable ideas often intended to provoke rather than reaffirm. The arts represent, for a certain class of politician, a threat to “traditional” values.

As long as fundamentalist ideological conservatives are able to define the issue, the arts lose. Period.

I think as long as it’s about money, the arts lose. As long as the conversation starts with funding, the arts lose. Yet that’s where the arts often start; if the debate is about money, then we try to prove what a good investment the arts are.  But the problem with economic impact studies is that if someone isn’t in the market to invest – no  matter how good the return is – they won’t. Concurrently, the problem with arguing aesthetic value is that if the aesthetic values aren’t my aesthetic values, they don’t sound compelling to me.

Conservatives have been successful not because they have a better economic case, but because they make an argument about values. In a time when people are angry over a sour economy and a lack of accountability for those they perceive got us there, they preach caution, living within our means, and trying to impose more responsible behavior. Argued in these terms, again, who wouldn’t sign on?

Against this, how does arguing for public funding for the arts get anywhere? The argument seems so … small … so self-serving. By the time it’s about money, the argument has already been lost. The arts actually are about values. The question is how to argue them before the argument ever gets to funding.