on public funding for the arts

       The money's an excuse, isn't it?
For the enemies of funding for the arts, it seems like an easy enough target--what better way to rile up middle-class America than to claim that its pocketbooks are being pilfered? But that's really not what this is about. The National Endowment for the Arts gets such a small trickle of tax dollars, and yet such a disproportionately intense rancor that it can't simply be about money. No, this is about values.
      The most familiar attack has been waged by the political far right, spearheaded by Republican politicians such as senators Alphonse D'Amato and Jesse Helms, and recently NYC mayor Rudolph Guiliani; front men for a small but horribly vocal movement of conservative Christians who style themselves as cultural redeemers. Many have called this part of a larger "culture war," a fight between those supporting "family values," and those who are audacious enough to claim that the world is actually more diverse and textured than the content of a Sunday school class.       That is part of the cause for opposition, that public arts funding helps to spread expressions that many might find personally offensive. To give money in America is, after all, to give legitimacy, and cultural conservatives have no desire to legitimize contrary values that might criticize their own. But there is still yet another cause.
      Something that is rather revealing is to look at the criticism that public arts funding sometimes receives from within the art community itself. There are some artists and art critics who believe that government subsidies act to undo competition and challenges that they feel artists should be subjected to. Funding, the argument goes, gives them a free ride that their talents wouldn't have been able to procure in the open market of the art world. No one wants someone to get something that they don't deserve, right?
      That question usually derails the whole discussion, but analyzing it can be useful. To "deserve" something in this context means to outsell competitors, to have consumers offer money for an offered product. Though only the greatest philistines among us honestly believe that the blockbuster movie with the highest box office draws is necessarily the best one in the theaters, most Americans still have an unquestioned faith in the decision making of the commercial market.
      The public may voice contempt for commercialism and shameless pop culture, yet that system and its rules are reinforced by their consumer choices. When those rules are broken, they feel threatened. This is because the existence of public funding programs such as the NEA (in reality, of taxation itself) seems to make a simple statement--Americans, as individuals, don't have a clue as to what they should sensibly spend their money on.
      "Modern art" as an amorphous vernacular category refers to any works of this sort, and is as a whole dismissed as something "anyone" could do, or in some cases, even their children might be capable of. This judgment arises from the populace being left behind by a progressive and avant-garde tradition, with only the criteria of obvious craftsmanship to go by, stuck within the system of commodities and commercialism.
      Throughout the 20th century, art became harder and harder for unpracticed viewers to tackle. Most serious artists' works are incomprehensible without knowledge of the history of work that preceded it, and the corresponding climate of criticism. Public comprehension becomes even more difficult with works that are structured under the idea of art as a continuing dialogue, rather than a process of creating valuable objects. It's necessary to recognize that in art, just as in any practice or field of study, there are experts, and there are laymen. It should be evident that what is most popular is not necessarily the best, though many would like to keep cultural and artistic judgments in a subjective free-for-all. The NEA exists to offset the poor consumer choices of over 200 million Americans. Without it, the only option that many Americans would have would be the commercial entertainment industry, that tries to pander to them through simple appeal to the lowest common denominator.
      At this point, we have it in our power to use government to help our culture flourish, or to simply use it to guard our junk. It all hinges on what we value. Rank materialism is one of the options, with the religious tenet of total faith in the infallibility of the market to choose value, and with the corresponding political belief that the only cooperative venture that a nation can undertake is the guarding of its property.

dlf
2000

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