Did you hear the one about lawyers and artists?

Hear the one about lawyers and artists?

... Lawyers packed Tsunami on Bank Street recently celebrating Volume 1, Issue 1 of MLA Arts Brief, a quarterly publication, to educate and inform Maryland artists about legal issues affecting them.

Too many artists don't do so well when it comes to the real world. Somebody else profits from their work. In this Digital Age, painters, composers, writers, performers -- even sculptors -- are at greater risk than ever. It's more than tough luck for artists.

When those who create cannot prosper, it threatens our very culture. That costs everybody. Anyone who thinks the arts are some soft and fuzzy contributor to the greater common good should think again.

Right here in Maryland last year, just 228 nonprofit arts organizations generated $1.2 billion in economic activity, according to the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development . Nearly 14 million people attended events supported by Maryland State Arts Council organizations.

These numbers represent only a fraction of the total art economy in our state. Beyond that, talk to any corporate site locator or executive recruiter.

They rank arts high in the quality of life essential to keeping, expanding and attracting business. Art itself is a business with massive payback. It's hard to calculate precise value added by John Waters, David Simon and Barry Levinson to the Maryland economy, but huge would be a good estimate.

We're wise to remember undisputed founder of our Information Age Samuel F.B. Morse was no scientist or engineer. His day job was painter. Some physicists think tortured genius Jackson Pollock was decades ahead of science in a revolutionary new way of seeing the reality of, well, reality.

Consider Vincent van Gogh , who never made a guilder off his paintings. Just about everybody else has. What's the total economic value added from his bits of canvas and tubes of paint? Billions.

Beyond the prices now paid for his works, think about profits from every poster, print, frame, note card, coffee mug, bottle of gin, mouse pad, T-shirt, tote bag, umbrella, album cover, song or play for more than a century? Such is the transformational power of genius.

The big question is: How many van Goghs have we lost? Every genius wasted is more than an aesthetic and moral loss. It's a cold, hard economic loss no less real because we cannot calculate it.

Yet wealth, quality of life and the greater common good are but small benefits from the arts compared to the big one: freedom. Check history.

The first people despots go after are artists. That is why our Founders made expression freedom No. 1.

Art is our ultimate weapon of mass construction against evil enemies. Remember, the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan -- the only government in the modern world with the guts to actually enforce the Ten Commandments -- blew up irreplaceable world art treasures to impose their twisted view of the glorious Quran.

Before he went after the mentally handicapped, Jews, dissidents, Seventh-day Adventists and anybody else who got in his way, Hitler went after "decadent" artists.

In freedom's eternal struggle, arts and artists are on the front lines at home and away. That's why MLA is so important.

These lawyers can help those essential few among us who create to keep creating. Beyond helping individual starving artists in a rapidly changing world, MLA can champion copyright reform, the Visual Artists' Rights Act, the Artist-Museum Partnership Act, the American Society of Composers and Performers and the First Amendment for all.

One thing we know for sure is that our species can be slow to recognize genius, slower still to reward it and often quick to punish it.

Even though our state is blessed to have Maryland Art Place, the American Visionary Arts Museum and other support programs, MLA fills a vital need. We need to help these lawyers help others. Art lifts us all, still, as it has for 50 millennia. Let's keep lifting the arts. Frank Keegan is editor of the Baltimore Examiner. Examiner