Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 89.djvu/331

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�� ��This house can be built for $3500. It was designed by the Minnesota Art Commission

What Home Builders Really Want

Taking the Advice of Plain People

By Maurice Invin Flagg

��IT is hard to imagine art as a business l)iiii(lcr for the farmer of Minnesota, or in fact of any other state. Most art programs shoot into space. They over-reach the mark, with the result that art, instead of Ijccoming a common pos- session of the common people, is a pas- time or pleasure and the plaything of the wealthy.

The Minnesota State Art Commission is a department of the state government. It was created by an act of the legisla-

��ture some fourteen years ago. It has been slowly but productively tilling a virgin field which is now bearing crops far beyond the hopeful anticipations of those who were responsible for the com- mission's inception. The farmers in Alinnesota are walking arm in arm with the art commission. The people of the small cities and villages consult the com- mission upon all sorts of questions. If the chimney smokes or the plumbing balks or the furnace fumes, the people

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