After a hearing that lasted barely an hour, the Senate confirmed Alexander with a unanimous swoon. Her confirmation process proved that chivalry is not dead and that she, although an altogether modern woman, knows the usefulness of male gallantry. The Senate asked her no searching questions about spending $175 million a year to shape public sensibilities. It vibrated like a tuning fork to her vision that “every man, woman and child find the song in his or her heart.” She has mastered the arts-speak that passes for, and suffices for, argument on behalf of the NEA. It is a sugary patois that calls to mind Joseph Epstein on Carl Sandburg: “Cliches run through his verse like calories through cheesecake.”
The NEA was created in 1965, at the high tide of Great Society hubris about the competence of government. Today Alexander presides over one of the most secure federal spending programs. It is instructive to note why it is that.
Alexander correctly says that it is a mistake to focus attention entirely on the NEA’s involvement with what she delicately describes as “controversial” art. The NEA was born just as the last remnants of consensus about the nature of art and its public purposes were dying. By 1972 the NEA was funding, for example, “Dinner Party,” a triangular table with 39 place settings of vaginas on dinner plates. NEA money was involved with the “performance artist” who inserted a speculum into her vagina and invited members of the audience on stage to view her cervix with a flashlight. The NEA funded a Chicago film project that was advertised with a poster announcing “Sister Serpents F— a Fetus.” The theme was: “For all you folks who consider a fetus more valuable than a woman, have a fetus cook for you, have a fetus affair, go to a fetus house to ease your sexual frustration.” Recently NEA funds went to three Wyoming women for an exhibit of 70 cows inscribed (painted; why not branded?) with feminist thoughts. Well, not everyone has the same song in his or her heart.
Such sophomoric attempts to shock the bourgeoisie confirm Paul Valery’s axiom that “everything changes but the avant-garde.” But Alexander is right that “controversial” art should not monopolize the attention given to the NEA. Most of what the NEA does is popular, particularly with the political class.
Alexander notes that government subsidizes science and she says the arts deserve equal treatment. But suppose government wants to cause the production of a large-scale scientific instrument that private market forces could never produce–say, a space telescope. Government knows how to assemble relevant experts, to measure their progress and to know when the goal has been reached. Baptists and atheists, liberals and conservatives can collaborate. Now, try to develop an analogy with arts projects.
Arguing that the arts “always have been subsidized,” she elides a lot of distinctions, such as those between state subventions and private patronage. She even notes, in justification of the NEA, that without the help of his brother Theo, Vincent Van Gogh “would have drifted into obscurity.” She also is gifted at the Washington art of arguing that her programs pay for themselves.
In a speech in Indiana, Pa., she sounded like a member of Congress, reciting the blessings the NEA has bestowed on western Pennsylvania. It brought the Ballet Hispanico and the Pittsburgh Ballet to Johnstown, enabled the American Theater Arts for Youth to perform in Indiana and Ford City, helped the Indiana Arts Council (the NEA is just the top of an enormous pyramid of government involvement in the arts) to hire a director. The NEA supported a playhouse in Ebensburg, and the Johnstown symphony, and the Southern Allegheny Museum of Art in Loretto, and gave $800,000 last year to support the state arts agency, and so on. She asserted that Pittsburgh’s tax revenues from the arts have more than doubled since 1990, and she vaguely associated the arts with the creation of 6,300 permanent new jobs “projected” by the end of the decade. She said the arts in Pittsburgh are outdrawing that city’s professional baseball, football and hockey teams combined. She did not explain why, if Pittsburgh’s arts are so popular, they need federal subsidies.
She tells of her travels, marveling that she is greeted everywhere by outpourings of gratitude: “I can’t tell you how many people came up to me and said how glad they are…” Yes, of course. But only Washington believes that expressions of gratitude justify federal activities requiring one group to pay for another group’s pleasures.
In Washington the best defense is a brazen offense. She asserts that the NEA is “probably the most successful agency in the federal government.” Its success is, she says, “unparalleled.” Well. If a government agency exists to encourage, say, the production of corn or electric power or highways or housing, it is relatively easy to formulate standards for measuring the agency’s success or failure. But the NEA cannot help but be a huge success. Using money to do the summoning, the NEA summons “art” from the vasty deep. Lots of stuff called “art” comes. Not surprisingly: the summoner is not particular about what can be called art.
Alexander stresses the NEA’s role in “leveraging” money from the private sector. She says NEA grants generate an elevenfold return in private money. But some NEA grants give a patina of legitimacy to foolishness, or worse, and enable highly political and lightly talented organizations to milk support from well-meaning but inattentive people in the private sector.
There was a time when the question of what constitutes serious art was answered by patrons and the educated public, perhaps influenced by philosophers. Today the question “Is it art?” is considered an impertinence and even a precursor of “censorship,” understood as a refusal to subsidize. Today art is whatever the “arts community” says it is, and membership in that community involves no exacting entrance requirements. (A familiar Washington rhetorical trope: “You are a lobby, we are a community.”) The “arts community” is characterized by strident insistence that any attempt to distinguish serious from philistine art is bad because it is both elitist and populist. It is impermissibly elitist because it assumes that a few are more talented than most. It is impermissibly populist because it implies that the arts ought to try to be marginally popular–that they generally should pay for themselves by attracting audiences, rather than by attracting government grants.
Alexander hopes people will “look to the NEA for a vision for the arts in the 21st century.” But given what is known about both the behavior of government and the history of art, it is passing strange to suppose that a government bureaucracy is suited to the business of such vision-making. Alexander speaks of the arts as being often “prophetic.” A similar bromide of arts-speak is that art should discomfort, provoke. disturb, etc. This conceit gives an arts bureaucracy a bias toward novelty, the political and “the new.” This means a tilt against standards of taste because, as a character says in Alan Bennett’s play, “Forty Years On,” “Standards are always out of date. That is what makes them standards.”
The NEA says that “peer review” ensures proper standards in the disbursement of funds. But as we have seen, the screening process often is, to say no more, porous. Besides, would “the arts community” agree to a system whereby defense contracts were approved by “peer review” panels composed of defense contractors? Of course defense contractors constitute a lobby, not a “community.”
New York City shells out $87.3 million a year to 431 arts groups. An aide to the new mayor speculates that
there are a lot of “clubhouse-type political handouts.” Good guess. The New York Times reports that plans to increase–yes, increase–support for the city’s premier arts institutions, “possibly” by cutting support for lesser ones, “was met with anger and trepidation” by politicians and “members of the arts community.”
Any plan for supporting only the best is reflexively denounced as elitist." That epithet comes awkwardly from the directors of museums and dance troupes and other things that claim to deserve subsidies because they have scant popular support. But this is the residual argument for public television in an era of rapidly proliferating cable choices: some programming should be subsidized precisely because it cannot earn an audience sufficient to make it commercially viable. Finally, it is said that refusal to subsidize the most marginal art is a sin against “diversity.”
Subsidized arts are pork for the articulate, for people nimble and noisy in presenting their employment or entertainment as an entitlement. So the subsidies are secure, as is the right of everyone to have federal support in finding the song in his or her heart.
