The lazy, idyllic beauty of the Berkshires would seem to be a strange setting for a duke-’em-out, no-holds-barred debate on the relationship between the federal government and the arts. But this past summer, with headlines about the future of the National Endowment for the Arts showing up in newspapers on a seemingly daily basis, even the easygoing vacationers in Stockbridge, Mass., couldn’t help but have art and politics on their minds. And so, on June 7, in front of a sold-out house at the Berkshire Theatre Festival, The Nation’s Victor Navasky and Katha Pollitt debated National Review’s John O’Sullivan and Jeffrey Hart on the virtues and drawbacks of public art support.
This was not the first time that pillar of liberalism, The Nation (the oldest weekly magazine in the U.S., started by abolitionists in 1865) and National Review (the country’s premiere bulwark of conservative opinion that was founded 42 years ago by the dean of right-wing thought, William F. Buckley) have gone head-to-head; other debates on affirmative action and the death penalty were held earlier in New York. But with the future of the NEA on the line, this was “the perfect moment” (to inadvertently quote Robert Mapplethorpe) for this quartet of culture warriors to lock horns.
Indeed, beyond just the issue of the arts, the participants’ positions—printed here in the order they were delivered—define with striking clarity the core ideological differences in American society today. Whatever side you’re on, American Theatre presents these arguments in the spirit of Don Corleone’s advice to his son Michael in The Godfather, Part II: Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.
John O’Sullivan, editor, National Review
Let me admit that Professor Hart and I enter upon the task of persuading you of the demerits of arts subsidies in a spirit of trepidation. To argue against arts subsidies in today’s cultural climate may be regarded as a misfortune; to argue against arts subsidies at a theatre festival sounds like carelessness.
So I propose to begin with a series of mollifying concessions. First of all, I do not deny that arts subsidies may do some particular good things. It would indeed be hard to spend upwards of $200 million a year without pleasing anyone or doing any good. That would require more ruthlessness and determination than is probably possessed by the NEA.
Nor do I believe that subsidies to the arts are all of equal demerit. There seems to me to be a stronger case for subsidies for established opera houses performing work of recognized merit than for subsidies to experimental or—God help us—“cutting-edge” art or drama.
Nor, thirdly, do I deny that subsidies will have incidental economic and other benefits. Covent Garden enhances Britain as a tourist attraction. The Kennedy Center makes life more bearable in Washington. Such benefits clearly exist, but so would benefits of that kind exist if you spent $200 million on anything. There are always side effects.
And my final concession is that neither Professor Hart nor I expect to win a vote at the end of this debate. You, ladies and gentlemen, are not a random selection of Dr. Gallup’s voters. We have fallen in with a very delicate crowd here. So, like lions in a den of Daniels, we are going to give a few growls before we are preached to death.
All the concessions I have made so far do not really help supporters of government arts subsidies. They still have an extremely high hurdle to leap over. They must establish that government subsidies have a general effect sufficiently beneficial to justify taking money from taxpayers by law and spending it on things which the taxpayers themselves would not have chosen. They must show, first, that subsidies will enable many more people to experience aesthetic bliss—no less—by, second, fostering the writing, playing and producing of better novels, poems, plays and so on.
Now, even if we could guarantee the second requirement—namely, better works of art—any libertarian would be happy to tell you that it would still be very hard to achieve the first one—that is, more aesthetic bliss. The libertarian theory of art is derived from Jeremy Bentham’s famous remark: “Pushpin is as good as poetry.” The art that is subsidized might not be—indeed, generally will not be—the art that millions of taxpayers would have bought for themselves if they had been allowed to keep their money. Tastes notoriously differ, and subsidized art will generally reflect the tastes not of the taxpayer nor of the audience, but of the selection committee that distributes the money. Many people, perhaps most, will therefore get what they don’t like.
Indeed, there is an entire theory of art subsidies—the theory of cutting-edge art—that says quite plainly that the audience should get what it doesn’t like on the grounds that such art will provoke them out of their complacency. To be sure, this argument is applied very erratically. It’s not suggested, for example, that ethnic minorities be shaken out of their complacency, and since the case of The Satanic Verses and Salman Rushdie, I haven’t noticed anyone suggesting that Muslims should be provoked in any serious way. It is white males, the religious Right and the rest of the usual suspects who are to be the beneficiaries of this arousing experience. So, bor””the unreadable in pursuit of the unfashionable.”
Now, what is the justification that people should be made to pay for aesthetic experiences they don’t want? Culture is, after all, not a public good like defense, namely, something which must be provided to everyone if it is to be available to anyone. We can’t all buy our own individual defense policy, but we can buy our own individual aesthetic experiences.
Nor can poverty justify cultural subsidies. To be sure, it may well be the case that poor people, if they had the money, would spend more of it on aesthetic experiences of one kind or another. If so, the correct solution is to ensure that poor people have their income augmented so that they can buy more of the art that pleases them. It is not to choose on their behalf the poems, plays, novels and so on that we think they should have.
No, from the libertarian standpoint—that is, the standpoint which treats people as equal moral beings, capable of making their own aesthetic choices for themselves—there really can be no justification for arts subsidies. They are deeply offensive to the idea of the moral equality of human kind.
But I am not a libertarian.
I am a conservative. I am therefore willing to push that notion of equality into the future and accept here and now the concept of a cultural elite which has a duty to shape popular tastes into something better. (I am willing to accept that in theory anyway—the actual cultural elite in this debate do not always represent something better than popular culture. Surely, indeed, Alec Baldwin is popular culture.)
Secondly, although some might dispute this, I am a reasonable man. I am willing to accept art subsidies in part because they don’t cost much. And on the principle of De minimis non curat lex, I will not insist on my principles being adopted down to every dot and comma. I would therefore be prepared to accept a modest level of subsidy for the arts on one condition: if we can establish that subsidies will clearly benefit the arts. But do they? The argument of many writers and scholars and artists is that subsidies actually produce worse art. Let me suggest a few reasons why.
First of all, they free the artist from a sense of responsibility to his audience and encourage him to shape his work to please the tastes of those who commission it. Those commissioning it generally fall into two categories. The first group is government bureaucrats. What kind of culture will they encourage? There is the famous story from the ’30s, probably apocryphal, about a meeting of Soviet writers in which a lone delegate stood up and reported proudly: “In our district Soviet writing is making enormous strides. Today we have 387 full-time Soviet writers producing culture, whereas in backwards Czarist times, we had only one: Leo Tolstoy.” Yes, we’ll certainly get more culture, I’m afraid. Quantity will be the bureaucrats’ first test of merit.
But their influence will not end there. They will almost certainly have (generally philistine) projects of their own to encourage. The results will be things like Nazi art, socialist realism or the latest horror from Brussels—where there is now a committee, jealous of U.S. culture and Dallas, which directs subsidies to create Europe’s own culture-schlock. One of the programs which is to get such a subsidy is the series Highlander, about an 18th-century Scotsman who lives forever and never grows old—a sort of good vampire. He will presumably praise the Common Agricultural Policy in future episodes. This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a sitcom.
A distinctively American version of this emerges in boasts by the NEA that they are assisting art that will express the full range of the American people’s history and interests—the political agenda, in short, of multiculturalism. We are therefore likely to get Native American dances, “Hispanic” poems (not in Spanish, of course), black “history” as melodrama, and the latest minority’s latest self-invention. This kind of thing is simply philistine politics in fancy dress and always reminds me of Anthony Daniel’s comment on Soviet cultural policy: “Under communism, all minorities dance.”
Let me now turn to the second group commissioning art, namely the artist’s peer group. For the kind of people who sit on committees to award grants are other artists. Now, I’m not too worried here about the danger of back-scratching, though that exists. I am more concerned with the fact that, just as critics are not famous for producing great art, artists may not produce great criticism. As one of Tom Stoppard’s characters points out in his Artist Descending a Staircase, “Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.”
Alas, it will not be the manufacturers of wickerwork picnic baskets who will be awarding grants—but the possessors of imagination without skill (“creativity” for short). And the kind of subsidy they give will in the end divorce the artist from his public, and encourage him to produce art that is obscure, self-referential and ultimately condescending, even hostile, to his audience. As the English poet, Philip Larkin, said of such art in his introduction to All What Jazz:
I dislike such things not because they are new, but because they are irresponsible exploitations of technique in contradiction of human life as we know it. This is my essential criticism of modernism…it helps us neither to enjoy nor endure. It will divert us as long as we are prepared to be mystified or outraged, but maintains its hold only by being more mystifying and more outrageous: it has no lasting power.
You think Larkin and I exaggerate. Look, however, at the fate of modern music after several generations of this kind of patronage. Kingsley Amis pointed out that if you have a new work of music (and by the way, the first performance of a new work of music is common; it’s the second performance which is rare)—if you have a new piece of music, it always appears at exactly the same point in the concert program. You cannot make it the first item, because if you do, the audience will come late. Nor the last item before the interval, because then everyone will go out to the bar early. Nor the first item after the interval, because then they won’t come back from the bar. No, you always have to make it the second item in the first half of the program—in order to overcome a resistance which the public has learned to mount over the last 60 years.
Indeed, the public’s resistance explains the campaign for subsidies. Subsidies are the recognition by a certain kind of artist that he will not get the public’s money any other way.
Katha Pollitt, associate editor and columnist, The Nation
In his great poem “Expecting the Barbarians,” the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy describes a wealthy imperial capital city in which daily life has been suspended because barbarians are imminently expected to invade. The atmosphere is urgent, exciting: Officials dress in their finest robes, great stores of treasures are gathered together to impress the savage invaders—only, as the poem moves along, reports drift in from the frontiers that the barbarians no longer exist. The poem ends: “And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?/ Those people were a kind of solution.”
Communism and the Soviet Union served the convenient role of the barbarians in the American psyche for most of this century. They made America look good and challenged us to look even better, while satisfying the needs of what Robert Heilbroner called the paranoid style in American politics. Deprived of the Reds, we find ourselves feeling a bit like Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” And who is this “us”? Homosexuals, blasphemers, pornographers, atheists, multiculturalists, feminists, New Yorkers—in a word, artists, who have managed in their sneaky elitist way to have the regular Americans pay them to destroy our national fabric and corrupt the youth.
Since I am arguing that government should fund the arts, I suppose I should disclose that I am the recipient of an NEA grant for poetry, and have sat five times on peer panels that evaluated and recommended grants. I would never argue that every dollar of government arts funding goes to the most deserving pockets—and I’m sure there are those who would argue that my own grant is proof that some didn’t. But that’s not the issue here: When we are wearing our worldly, sensible hats, we know perfectly well that you can look at any large institution, whether it’s a government agency, a private corporation, a nonprofit organization, or maybe even a political magazine, and find money spent unwisely. We don’t disband the Army because the Pentagon pays $600 for toilet seats and can’t seem to find a general chaste enough to deserve promotion. We don’t even cut the Pentagon’s budget—indeed, last year, even as Newt Gingrich and his yahoo followers were insisting that the tiny NEA and NEH budget allocations would break the bank, Congress voted the Pentagon $14 billion that had not even been requested. Clearly, the money is there.
Why should government support the arts?
Because that is what civilized countries do, and always have. Man does not live by TV alone, even when Man has premium cable. Art, museums, opera, ballet, theatre, scholarship, archives preservation, arts education—these things are all very expensive. If they are to have a consistent presence in our national life, they have to have consistent money. In other countries—wealthy, civilized countries, I mean—arts funding isn’t controversial. Compare the $3.30 each American taxpayer contributes for total arts funding in this country with the $35.10 dollars spent by each French citizen, the $39.40 by each German, the $28.50 by each Canadian, and—get this—the $16.10 by each Britisher, even after 27 years of Tory government.
Americans thus spend less of their taxes on the arts than the price of a grilled cheese sandwich, yet opponents of arts funding began their campaign by claiming it was a huge budget buster; when that argument was discounted, funding became a small budget-buster, but the symbolic key to getting any kind of handle on the deficit. Now, having belatedly realized that most Americans support arts funding and don’t want to see their local museums and theatres shut down, their kids deprived of traveling Shakespeare productions and so on, they make the opposite argument: The government piece of the arts funding pie is so small it won’t be missed.
Why should government fund the arts? Because the arts are an expression of our common life, and the government—not rich benefactors, not Phillip Morris—is how we express our common will. The arts knit our far-flung country together and make it possible to live in remote places without being totally cut off from culture. It’s probably true that some high-profile, well-established institutions could get by without public funding—there was art in America before the government took a hand, and there will be art even if Newt Gingrich carries the day and defunds it. But there will be less art. The story of art in America today is much more than a few famous landmarks and companies which can attract big donations from private folks; it is also about regional theatre, local museums, civic and state orchestras, neighborhood poetry-reading series, community-based arts groups and summer festivals. Before the NEA and state arts councils, these local arts scenes did not exist. And without it, they would quickly wither away. The local money base isn’t there, and don’t kid yourself, the corporations won’t be there either: They want to fund high-profile, nationally visible projects, and since philanthropy, like everything else, is subject to fads, five years from now they may not even want to fund those—the money may all sweep over to nature conservation or medicine. A considerable amount of federal arts funding is for projects that don’t get publicity: preserving and archiving documents, and publishing classics, like the Library of America books. Phillip Morris is not going to take on these unsexy tasks.
As for those high-profile cultural gems, well, the Metropolitan Opera, already so expensive it shuts out the vast majority of opera lovers, could always raise ticket prices and shut out even more. That’s what a fellow of the Heritage Foundation suggested in a recent Washington Post article. But is that what we want? That the arts, already under fire for being elitist, should become even more so? I’d rather see the government subsidize ticket prices, as was done in Thatcher’s Britain.
Wouldn’t we be better off if tickets to the Met were easily affordable, if the Met could mount extensive touring programs so that people all over the country could experience great live opera instead of simply railing at New York? In fact, the 1997 NEA grant to the Met includes funding for teacher training in several Western states.
Are the arts elitist? No! Elitist is just a code word here, intended to summon up resentment of everyone from homosexuals and New Yorkers to anyone who understands something someone else finds baffling. The truth is, Americans, by huge margins, like the arts. According to a Harris poll, 84 percent of Americans participate in the arts in some way, whether actively or as audience members; some 30 percent of black women, for example—hardly an elite demographic—write poems or stories. More people attend artistic performances every year than attend sporting events—and let’s not forget how heavily subsidized sports are, through tax breaks, bond issues for new stadiums, and athletic scholarships to public universities. And the more Americans are exposed to the arts, the more they like them. PBS broadcasts of opera, with easy-to-read subtitles, have created a whole new audience of opera fans. The poets-in-the-schools program has helped expand the audience for poetry.
Even if the arts were just a form of entertainment, and even if they did only appeal to part of the population, why shouldn’t the government fund them, the way it funds other pleasures, like the national parks? I will probably never camp in Yellowstone or walk the Appalachian Trail, but I’m glad my taxes make it possible to do so. Most of what the government funds benefits only some of the citizens. This is the same government, after all, that wants its citizens to have summer houses in the country so much that it offers us a mortgage deduction on our second home; this is the government that allows all sorts of economic breaks to private colleges (like, oh, Dartmouth, where Jeffrey Hart is professor emeritus), which are explicitly elitist institutions. If the whole country—most of which will never even meet a Dartmouth grad, let alone become one—is assumed to benefit from the existence of Dartmouth, why can’t one make the same argument for supporting, say, a baroque orchestra or a book of poems? You’ll notice that the opponents of arts funding don’t make a populist argument against government subsidies to business, including ones like tobacco that are actually harmful.
Is it fair to make people pay for art they disapprove of, that offends their sensibility and hurts their feelings? Well, is it fair that I have to pay Strom Thurmond’s salary, or underwrite the incarceration of pot smokers? We don’t get a line-item veto on our taxes. And without denying that there are people who are offended by certain types of federally funded art, I wonder how many of them know what their grilled-cheese sandwich money goes to, beyond what they’ve been told by right-wing demagogues and fundamentalist preachers. Do they know that government arts funding means their kids get to hear some jazz, or see some flamenco dancing, or work with a poet in English class? Or do they only know what Pat Robertson tells them? In any case, true arts funding opponents are in the minority. Most Americans, according to the same Harris poll, favor government support for the arts, and in fact would be willing to see their taxes raised to expand that support, which is kind of amazing in today’s anti-tax climate.
The truth is, far from being off in some airy-fairy, irrelevant, hermetic world, the arts today are finally becoming knit into the fabric of American life, and government funding has a lot to do with that. It’s fashionable these days to scorn multiculturalism and the increasing diversity of the art world, as if the inclusion of women and ethnic minorities meant a lessening of quality. But actually, women and minorities are producing some of the most interesting work today in virtually every artistic field, and bringing along with them new audiences for art. Government funding helped create this new arts landscape by providing alternatives to the stodgy existing sources of funding, by nudging resistant organizations and by committing itself to new voices. Applications for NEA grants in literature, for example, are judged without names or resumes, which makes them virtually unique.
Now, let’s say a word about obscenity, blasphemy and so on. Obscenity is a legal term, which so far doesn’t accurately apply to any work funded by the government. In the only case that has even had the legs to go to trial, that of the homosexually explicit Mapplethorpe photo exhibit, a Cincinnati jury, hardly a gathering of bohemians, found that the photos were not obscene—and throngs of Cincinnatians flocked to the show. Blasphemy is another term that’s bandied about, but it’s hard to see what it could mean in a pluralistic society which has no established religion. Surely National Review, which finds it amusing to illustrate its cover with racially stereotyped cartoons—and expects the members of the caricatured groups to laugh along—can take a similarly tolerant attitude toward Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ.
The obscenity argument is deployed to contrast dirty-minded bohemia with red-blooded “normal” America. But, in fact, what opponents term obscenity and blasphemy characterizes popular culture even more. Face it: Americans like sexual and irreverent art. They like Playboy centerfolds, gangsta rap and smutty shows with low family values like Married with Children. They like The Simpsons and Howard Stern and the many gay characters now peppering network television. At its worst, government-funded avant-garde art is mostly an intellectualized highbrow version of the vulgar lowbrow stuff the vast majority adores.
If you want to drown in a sea of entertaining tripe, defund the arts. If you want to provide an alternative, something more thoughtful and multidimensional, something redolent of history and maybe even of beauty, the government must support the arts. No one else is going to.
Jeffrey Hart, senior editor, National Review
Katha Pollitt mentioned that since the disappearance of the fascists and the collapse of the Soviet empire, we don’t have any barbarians outside and we’re looking for them inside. I noticed that she found quite a few in the form of Newt Gingrich, that weak man, as well as other such people as fundamentalists and demagogues and so forth. So there is no shortage of little dragons running around.
The news I have is that the barbarians are already here. Not as in the Cavafy poem—a very good poem, by the way—where they fail to arrive. They have arrived, and they can be seen hanging on the walls of the Whitney Museum any afternoon of the week.
Since I’ve “been there,” so to speak, having served on the governing council of the National Endowment for the Humanities, I’ll say a few things from the inside. I served first under Ronald Berman as chairman, then under Bill Bennett and Lynn Cheney. My criterion for federal funding is a demonstrated necessity. In other words, the necessity has to be publicly demonstrated. I make that harsh criterion because so many federal agencies have never demonstrated any such necessity.
For example, neither Endowment sprang from any perceived public need. They sprang from Lyndon Johnson’s felt need to outbid the Kennedy Camelot. So he threw a few crumbs of the Great Society—$10 million apiece—to the Endowments. The Department of Miseducation had nothing to do with education. Jimmy Carter, running for President, promised the two big teachers’ unions the Department of Education as a bribe, and got their support. It was probably crucial support. So, the genesis of these things sprang not from eleemosynary impulses on the part of Carter and Johnson.
Of course, the Endowments do nice things. The NEH’s support of the Webster Papers, for example, was well worth doing. The Library of America—the American Classics series—is a wonderful thing and I’m glad to have it. The question becomes: Could those things not have been done under other auspices? The Library of America would be an excellent investment for a publisher or a consortium of publishers, and they’d probably make a long-term, large profit on it—those books are here to stay.’
There is a serious question of bureaucracy in relation to the arts. In a certain way, they are hostile to one another. I think a case could be made that the awarding of grants to contemporary working artists by a bureaucracy tends to freeze, if not turn backwards, the development of art. In other words, the NEA funds art that seems clichéd and backward-looking—we’ve seen it all before. They’re even funding stuff that looks like the Dada art of the 1920s, which was shocking when it appeared—it had some roots in a theory of the unconscious—but when you begin to see Dada 70 years later, you say, “Why?” The same with abstract expressionism and so on. The bureaucracy is always funding the things that they’ve seen; it looks backwards rather than looking at what people are doing at the present time.
There is also a dynamic, in modern art especially, in which once a thing is done, you don’t want to see it done again. We’re glad to have Finnegans Wake, but who wants five Finnegans Wakes, let alone one funded by a federal agency?
I’d like to make one important point—it’s a representative point. At the NEH, where I spent 12 years, I don’t remember making one absurd grant. Not one. I was the council member responsible first for the Fellowships Division, then for the State Programs Division, where I was in charge of 50 state programs. I don’t regret one grant that we gave. None of them was disgraceful.
The reason why there were no absurd grants is because the definition of the humanities is clear, whereas the definition of art is up in the air and far from clear. In fact, I don’t think such a definition is operative at the present moment. Under the charter laid down by Congress—very well written—our mission at the NEH was clear. The humanities are commentary, not original creation. In other words, Mr. Melville, we can’t fund Moby Dick—take that somewhere else. We could fund a biography, or a critical study of Melville; that is, commentary on the work. So, as I said, there were no absurd grants.
Now there is no agreed-upon definition of art. There have been some in the past; for example, Aristotle’s. You can extract from Aristotle a definition of art as follows: a human activity with primarily an aesthetic goal. In Aristotle’s view, a nice-looking bee’s nest is not art. A well-made doorknob is not art, though there may be a line in which it becomes art, if it’s done by Bellini. Art must primarily—and that’s a matter of judgment—have an aesthetic goal. So outright propaganda can’t be art. Pornography, which is only stimulative and not aesthetic, can’t be art. Of course, there’s room for argument in all these things. Aristotle’s mean was not something down the 50 yard line; it depended on judgment about where the measure ought to be.
Aristotle, I think, depended in his normative definition upon consensus or common sense. This common sense does not exist operatively in the arts, as far as I can see today, and therefore it is very difficult institutionally and bureaucratically to say what is and what is not good art—or even what is art. Some reputable critics considered Willem de Kooning’s Alzheimer-inspired scribblings to be as good as he’d ever done. Absurd. The whole thing is, as I say, amorphous, and there is very great difficulty in passing an institutional judgment. That’s why the committees at the NEA cannot function as effectively as the ones at the NEH.
The conclusion I would reach after long experience with both agencies is that we could very well do without them. After all, for most of the life of the country—until LBJ started the two Endowments—we got along quite well. The writing of poems and the painting of pictures does not depend upon subsidies of any sort. They’ll happen anyway.
Indeed (and this will sound heretical), sometimes I feel that there is too much “pretty good” art around. There is so much “pretty good” poetry being written now, that almost no poetry gets paid attention to. There may be terrific poets out there, but it’s very difficult to focus on them, given the quantity of poetry that’s being written. It’s possible to have too much art in a moral sense, too. It’s not good news to me that X number of women are writing poetry out there. Maybe they should be doing something else. It’s not hard to write “decent” poetry now, since the new criticism has gone so carefully into poetic structure, texture, irony, metaphor and so on.
I would say, in conclusion, that while these two Endowments may not be the worst offenders in government, the necessity for them has not been demonstrated, and it cannot be demonstrated.
Victor Navasky, publisher and editorial director, The Nation
There are two themes in American history and they have always been in tension with each other. First, there is the theme of Jefferson and Madison, of Tom Paine and Benjamin Franklin: the First Amendment, freedom, communication and creativity. Then there is the theme of intolerance and fear of the unknown—it goes all the way back to the Alien and Sedition Acts on up through the Palmer Raids after World War I, and the great domestic Red hunt after World War II.
Historians tell us that this nativist impulse identifies the foreign and the unknown with the radical and the unclean, the immoral. And it is no accident that artists, whose business is often to operate in the avant-garde, to challenge the pieties of the day, to undermine the official line, to explore the nether regions of the mind, body and soul, are so often candidates for demonization. They and their work-product, art itself, are perfectly cast for the role of enemy-other. That’s why the old Dies Committee went after Hallie Flanagan’s New Deal WPA Theatre Project. That is one of the reasons that 50 years ago the House Committee on Un-American Activities chose Hollywood as its first anti-Communist target. And that, I would suggest, is the one of the deep forces behind the campaign to eliminate the NEA.
On the surface, those who would defund artists and the arts make a series of arguments that remind me of George Bernard Shaw’s story about the woman who responded to a complaining neighbor, “I never borrowed your teacups; I returned them in perfect condition; and besides, they were broken when I received them.” The abolition-of-funding arguments are equally contradictory: The arts are a luxury we can’t afford in this age of the balanced budget; the arts are so essential that the private sector can be counted on to take care of them; the problem with government funding of the arts is that it isn’t funding real artists, it’s funding immoral, radical, sexual degenerates disguised as artists.
And besides, real artists don’t need the money. Newt Gingrich made this point to a visiting delegation of artist-lobbyists by citing the playwright Arthur Miller as an example of one who had produced great works with no help from the government. The only problem was, as Arthur Miller pointed out in a letter to Newt, right after he graduated from college he got onto the WPA’s Writers Project at $22.27 a week. His talented colleagues included, among others, Orson Welles.
So let us examine what I take to be the principal contention of the opposition. Five arguments for government to stop funding the arts.
- In the age of the balanced budget we don’t have the luxury of supporting artists and the arts; other things are more important.
As Rep. John T. Doolittle (R-CA) asked the House Education and Workplace Committee only last month, “Why would we even think about restructuring entitlement programs until we eliminate the non-essential federal spending programs such as the NEA?”
There is some merit to this proposition. As the novelist E.L. Doctorow has pointed out in the pages of The Nation, “The truth is, if you’re going to take away the lunches of schoolchildren, the pension of miners who’ve contracted black lung, the storefront legal services of the poor who are stunned into insensibility by the magnitude of their troubles, you might as well get rid of poets, artists and musicians.”
But Doctorow’s implication is not that we throw in the towel on government support for the arts. His point is that since the amounts involved are such a piddling portion of the federal budget—the entire NEA budget of $99 million is less than the cost of the Pentagon’s military bands, or, to put it another way, a B-2 bomber costs $2.2 billion, or approximately 22 times the current NEA budget—a compelling argument can be made that the NEA is a great investment because art stimulates local economies and the arts industry itself creates more jobs than the entire advertising industry. But one doesn’t have to buy into such materialist thinking to see that the dollar argument against government arts funding is a fraud.
- The private sector can be counted on to take care of the arts.
Again, there is some merit to the proposition that business can replace government support for the arts, if what you mean by the arts is a museum, an opera company or a symphony orchestra. But this ignores the point that the NEA’s best role is precisely to support work that is too difficult for the private sector, and that some of the most important beneficiaries of federal funding programs are the community that puts on its own play by its own unknown playwright, or brings an artist or poet into the schools. As Doctorow wrote, to help children light a spark in themselves and express their sadness or joy in a poem or painting—“Whole lives ride on moments like that.”
There is a more urgent problem that arises should our government go cold turkey on arts funding. Ideally, the arts occupy a space independent of state and business control where citizens are free to create, appreciate, criticize and interact. This space loses its cultural capacity if it is taken over by either the state or business. And in recent years commercial values—often the worst sort of commercial values—have come to dominate the culture. As one scholar, George Gerbner, puts it, the new trans-nationals “have nothing to tell, but plenty to sell.” In the U.S. alone, the marriage of Hollywood and Madison Avenue seems to have ended the idea that there are limits to the intrusion of commerce on art. Robert McChesney, author of Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy, cites as an example the 1996 release of Time Warner’s film Space Jam, based on Nike shoe commercials, starring Bugs Bunny and Michael Jordan. As Forbes magazine writes, “The real point of a movie like Space Jam is to sell, sell, sell.” Time Warner is looking to hawk up to $1 billion in toys, clothing, books, art and sports gear based on the movie characters. These are the values of the marketplace which is supposed to replace government as a source of arts funding.
- The arts and artists that the National Endowment has supported represent a hotbed of cultural subversion, moral depravity and political correctness—witness Mapplethorpe with his homoerotic themes, Serrano with his Piss Christ and performance artist Karen Finley with her chocolate-smeared put-ons and take-offs.
A variation on this argument is to cite a grant to Indian basket weavers and not mention that the grant to the California Indian Basketveaver Association—which required a dollar-for-dollar match in private money—went to support two statewide galleries seeking to revive what was a dying craft, one of the oldest traditional art forms in America.
The reason those who would abolish federal, state and local funding of the arts keep trotting out the same old examples is simply because they don’t have any others to trot out. The NEA has made 112,000 grants since 1965 and the radical Right has found a handful of controversial ones, branded them “blasphemous,” “pornographic” or “P.C.” and then called for the elimination of the program. The fact is that no NEA grant has been found obscene by any court. Personally, I find Arthur Danto’s appreciation of Mapplethorpe more persuasive than Jesse Helms’s or Rush Limbaugh’s denigration. But I don’t want to make an aesthetic case here. For the purposes of argument only, let’s concede them their aesthetic.
And let’s not blind ourselves to the irony that the same conservatives who deride as “politically correct” college professors who object to racist inflammatory speech on campus, would, at the same time, eliminate federal support for the arts because its guarantees don’t meet their own less generous standards of political correctness.
For my money, the best answer to the argument that a handful of dubious grants mean the NEA should be disappeared was provided by another Nation contributor, the actor Paul Newman, who captured the flaw in this logic by carrying it to its logical (which is to say, illogical) conclusion:
“The U.S. Army tragically downs two of its own helicopters in Iraq. Mistake.
“It lost four soldiers to hypothermia during training exercises in Florida. Failure to communicate.
“Two hundred and eighteen marines have been lost to terrorists in Lebanon. Inadequate protection.
“Do these same radical Right congressmen clamor for the elimination of the Pentagon?”
I would suggest that the assault on the NEA should be seen in the context of a wholesale attack on all of those institutions—the federal government not least among them—that possess some autonomy from the so-called free market. Thus public television, public libraries and public education are being primed for privatization and commercialization. What we get are advertising-supported schools and schooling-for-profit, notions regarded as unthinkable only a decade ago.
It’s a mistake to let the right, the Republican Congress, or for that matter the Clinton Administration itself put the rest of us in the position of fighting piecemeal for this or that social program while the assault against all of them proceeds across the board.
- State funding of the arts ought to be abolished simply because it is the state that is doing the funding.
For libertarians who don’t like to see the state doing much of anything, the proposition is sufficient unto itself. For conservatives, but also some liberals, state funding for the arts connotes one of these dreaded ministries of culture that one associates with the totalitarian regimes of Eastern Europe or the sort of propaganda machine that Hitler made infamous.
If the state had anything approaching a monopoly or even a significant “market” position on arts support, that might be cause for concern. Rather, what we have is a state whose support for the arts is an occasional beacon of light along with a few islands of private philanthropy in a vast sea of increasingly volatile free-market commercialism. The state should be seen as a contributor to, rather than a detractor from, arts philanthropy pluralism. Moreover, in the U.S., the state is inhibited and enabled by the First Amendment to the Constitution which prohibits it—or, I would argue, should be read to prohibit it—from getting into the censorship of content business.
- Finally, there is the argument of Representative Dick Armey, who says that federal funding of the arts is a way of “robbing the poor to pay for the rich.”
But Armey’s anti-elitist argument has a hidden patronizing assumption—that the poor are incapable of appreciating museums, operas and symphonies.
There is a populist variation on this theme which asks: Why should my tax dollars go for art which I detest, or worse, don’t understand?
Here is what The Nation’s art critic, the philosopher Arthur Danto, has to say about that. Danto makes a distinction which I think is critical to this subject. He says, “It is as imperative to distinguish taxpayers from individuals who pay taxes as it is to distinguish the uniform from the one who wears it.” Individuals have diverse aesthetic preferences. Taxpayer, on the other hand, is a civic category and as taxpayers we have an interest in supporting freedom or artistic expression, especially its most extreme expression.
As citizens we regularly see our tax dollars funding programs and policies we abhor. Why single out artists for special treatment?
It is our job not to let the aesthetic values of members of Congress corrupt their integrity as custodians of democratic society’s deepest values.
As Arthur Miller put it in his letter to Newt, “We believe most in the reality of what is marketable; this is the hallmark of commercial society and we glory in it. But there is often more enduring value in what is not marketable, or not immediately so. The real question, it seems to me, is whether the American artist is to be alienated from his government or encouraged by it to express the nature and genius of his people. The National Endowment for the Arts, compared to similar efforts in other countries, is minuscule in scope, but the spirit behind it must not be extinguished.”
“The Nation vs. National Review, Resolved: The Government Should Not Fund the Arts” was sponsored by The Nation Institute and National Review with assistance from Alan Sagner and Ed Jaffe.
