You absolutely can. Is this actually an issue that EAs have to grapple with? It seems so obvious to me. You just have to stop thinking about art in the fuzzy, "good because other people say it's good" sense of the word. You have to actually come to grips with the function that art serves, which I gather is difficult for a lot of people because the answer doesn't gel with the cultural pacifism that they believe they believe in. Marx of all people got this right.
Art is cultural warfare.
>I suspect no society, ever, has been healthy that didn't invest significant time and resources in the arts.
Obviously. A culture that does not invest in its art is going to be overtaken by a culture that does. Just as a nation that lacks a military is not going to be its own nation for long. The purpose of art is to define, defend, and spread the cultural values of the people that create it. Doing so ensures that those values survive to the next generation, ensuring the long-term success of the culture and movement. Thus, justifying investment and engagement with art, or raising children, is easy. Quantifying the benefits of that investment is much harder because, in contrast to mosquito nets and vaccinations, culture spread is going to be opposed by other cultures. It's PvP, rather than PvE.
For those that don't believe that art affects cultural values, please consider this thought experiment; imagine you have a young child that wants to watch a new movie. You take a look at it, and the movie's story is of a bully and cheater winning at some competition, the entire community siding with that antagonist, and the main character eventually accepting that this is fine and normal and must simply be tolerated. The moral is clearly that liars and cheaters win, violence is a valid way of getting what you want, and everyone who disagrees will be unhappy and defeated in the end anyway. Would you want your child to watch that movie? If not, why?
Of course, this view means that most forms of "high" art - the kind that exists so that people in the know can look down their nose at people who just lack taste and class[0], or so that they can commit tax evasion[1] - are not actually good art. They do not effectively communicate cultural values, or defend them. The attitude of the art world in defending this excreta widens the rift between them and the general public that they should be trying to communicate to. It lowers people's interest in engaging with art on an intellectual and philosophical level, allowing more and more pandering nonsense to be shovelled into them. The modern world has no more interest in "artists" making "art"; it wants "content creators" creating "content".The ongoing destruction of people's ability to understand or appreciate art - where it actually exists - at a high level serves only to lower natural defenses against competing cultures.
"All poets are soldiers. We fight our wars across centuries."
[0]: https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2021/08/the-weird-story-of-th... [1]: https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/90-of-modern-art-is-just...