From a NY Times article, “An Exhibition About Drawing Conjures a Time when Amateurs Roamed the Earth”:

We’re addicted to convenience today. Cellphone cameras are handy, but they’re also the equivalent of fast-food meals. Their ubiquity has multiplied our distance from drawing as a measure of self-worth and a practical tool. Before box cameras became universal a century or so ago, people drew for pleasure but also because it was the best way to preserve a cherished sight, a memory, just as people played an instrument or sang if they wanted to hear music at home because there were no record players or radios. Amateurism was a virtue, and the time and effort entailed in learning to draw, as with playing the piano, enhanced its desirability. …

In a new memoir, “Let Me Finish,” Roger Angell recalls trips to the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium in the 1930’s with his father, who also liked to join pickup games when middle-age American men still did that. Today baseball is like the arts, with grown-ups mostly preferring not to break a sweat. “We know everything about the game now, thanks to instant replay and computerized stats, and what we seem to have concluded is that almost none of us are good enough to play it,” Mr. Angell writes.

So it is with classical music, painting and drawing, professional renditions of which are now so widely available that most people probably can’t or don’t imagine there’s any point in bothering to do these things themselves. Communities of amateurs still thrive, but they are self-selecting groups. A vast majority of society seems to presume that culture is something specialists produce.

I’ve been an enthusiast of home-grown culture for a long time. A music jam at a friend’s house or around the campfire at a folk festival is far more enticing to me than a big-ticket rock concert (though I do love listening to rock full-blast on my stereo, er, I mean laptop), and I’d much rather make art myself than go to a museum and look at art. Which is not to say that one can’t do plenty of both. Lately I haven’t looked at any “professional” art, but I have been flexing my amateur muscles in our school garden. When I get over this flu bug thing that flattened me for the past couple of days, I’ll dust off the scanner and share my home-grown drawings with you.