Karl P. Platt on sun 8 jun 97
This appeared in my mailbox a while back. Thought it might interest
someone here
Who Should Pay for Art?
Michael Levin
The dialectic goes like this. First, an artist--I use the term
broadly--exhibits something pornographic, blasphemous, or
otherwise egregiously offensive. His opus may well be an action, as when
an HIV-positive "performance artist" had his back cut
open before a surprised audience in Minneapolis.
Next, the perpetrator turns out to have received public funds,
suspiciously often from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Incensed conservatives then demand an end to subsidies for these
outrages. Liberals charge censorship in reply, as op-ed
pieces condescendingly explain that art is meant to "shock" and
"challenge."
Extremes like bloody backs distract from the main issue, which is not
whether taxpayers should subsidize grotesque
performance or perverse photography, but whether they should subsidize
art at all. Market theory, of course, follows one
simple rule: those who want something should be the ones to pay for it.
In particular, those who want art, or a specific kind of
art, should put up the money, whether by purchasing tickets or becoming
a generous benefactor.
If connoisseurs cannot sustain the work they favor, they and the rest of
the world will have to do without it. When a lover of the
outdoors cannot afford a house with a picturesque view, no one suggests
that others be forced to build him one; why are
admirers of degenerate snapshots--or ballet, or abstract
expressionism--entitled to more?
Art socialists offer reasons to spare. For one thing, they say, art
benefits everyone, all of society. Surely, though, what literally
benefits everyone will attract enough voluntary support to sustain it.
Genuinely popular artists, like Norman Rockwell and Frank
Sinatra, never needed anybody's taxes to keep going.
A few years ago the head of the financially pressed Negro Ensemble
Company inadvertently gave the game away when he told
the New York State Council on the Arts: "If the people of New York State
want to see our plays, they will have to subsidize
us."
Not quite; if the people of New York State had wanted to see their
plays, they would have bought more tickets. The one NEC
production I saw I found superb, but too few people agreed for the
company to stay in business. The benefits of the NEC were
evidently lost on most recipients.
But that's just the problem, say subsidy defenders. The average
unimaginative person left to his own devices will waste his
cultural dollar. A market catering to his tastes will churn out
enjoyable mediocrity--show tunes instead of Schoenberg.
Adventurous, stimulating art requires that people support what they may
not initially appreciate. This argument dovetails nicely
with the business about Great Art as shocking and challenging.
One can almost hear the capital letters when subsidy advocates talk this
way, as if Art were a single beacon illuminating all
before it. Such pretensions slyly suggest, among other things, that art
is an indivisible good, not only deserving everyone's
support, but apt to vanish unless the support is publicly coordinated.
Don't worry: the next Braveheart is in no danger of going unmade while
everyone waits for someone else to finance it so he
can see it for free. Anyone who wants to see a flick must buy his own
ticket--as must anyone (at least at the moment) who
wants to see serious drama. So long as there is an audience for Chekhov,
however narrow, there will be Chekhov for that
audience. Or, as Sam Goldwyn almost said, if most people want to stay
away from Uncle Vanya, you can't stop them.
Anyway, the opposition between art and enjoyment is nonsense;
historically, art has always sought to please and inspire its
patrons. Titian was popular because people liked to look at what he put
on canvas. The world cannot get enough Mozart and
Tchaikovsky. Even works with disturbing content, like Goya's Disasters
of War etchings, have been expected to interest the
eye.
No masterpiece has ever been disagreeable for its own sake, and no true
master regards popular rejection as proof of his own
greatness. Highbrows may cite incidents like the disturbance at the
premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring to prove that
popular taste opposes innovation--but doing so ignores how quickly Rite
became a repertory staple. Having something to say,
it found its market niche.
Centuries ago the leading art consumers were the royalty and nobility,
who--let's face it--seldom acquired their wealth through
voluntary exchange. Still, aristocrats bought what they personally
preferred, with funds universally regarded as theirs by right, so
in that sense artists courting their favor were competing in a market.
Aristocratic taste was often pretty good, as when George I
commissioned Handel's Water Music for public relations purposes. It
could even be progressive--witness Count Waldstein's
support for Beethoven.
Church composers also worked within a competitive market, trying to
please both benefactors and the faithful. When liturgical
trends demanded greater clarity in the Mass, Palestrina rushed to
provide it. When Lutherans demanded new music for their
new liturgy, Bach rose to the occasion. The music survives its original
setting: the revival of Gregorian chant has been driven by
mass consumer demand.
Today, government funding is impersonal by design: committees following
"guidelines" dispense appropriated money they never
see for work their members will not have to live with. Yes, art must
experiment as old techniques and modes of expression are
exhausted. But the way progress seems to occur is that every so often a
genius like Stravinsky or Picasso or T.S. Eliot brings
off something genuinely new, causes a stir--and is widely imitated.
Modern mass media, instantly disseminating and thereby
dissipating novelty, have accelerated this process.
One byproduct--accounting for much of modernism's trash--has been the
idea of a cutting edge, of being different as an end in
itself. And the one institution consistently controlling the quality of
this torrent of newness has been the market. Today, for
instance, arresting images are more apt to be found on theatrical
posters than on the walls of modern art museums. And for
melodic invention, one looks to stage and movie scores, which receive
not a penny of public money, whereas concert-goers
must be tied down to endure "serious" modern compositions of the sort
funding agencies love.
The market for new art has its lapses. At the low end is rap--springing,
be it noted, from a population sustained by welfare. At
the high end, we find Andy Warhol and those Julian Schnabel collages of
broken crockery that fetched millions in the 1980s.
But the market also gives good taste an opportunity to laugh last, at
trendoids stuck with their depreciated soup cans. Public art
carries risk for no one but the taxpayers.
State-supported art has traditionally been labeled timid, conformist,
and conventional--in a word "academic" (after England's
Royal Academy). The label still sticks; only the orthodoxy has changed,
now rejecting craftsmanship and embracing nihilism
and multiculturalism.
The avant garde is more predictable than punk rock. There is money to be
made betting that the next installation at one's local
modern art museum will include TV monitors, dismembered female
mannequins, and black-and-white photos--along with a
label thanking some public agency.
This orthodoxy will only become more entrenched under the NEA's new
standards, which emphasize, again predictably,
"outreach" to "nontraditional audiences." Translation: more angry murals
by black artists, more Shakespeare skewed for bored
Hispanic children, more famous women you've never heard of.
Art socialists may admit that some worthless art gets funded, but the
classics get funded also. Government money helps keep
museums open and local opera companies in business. In fact, these
expenditures are said to be investments. Whenever a
reduction in municipal contributions is suggested here in New York, one
hears that $4 returns to the city for every $1 it spends
on art.
Let's first ask why it is so vital to have art forms that outlive their
popularity. Masques are no longer produced. You don't see
much Morris dancing anymore. Must opera, for instance, always be with
us? Handel began to compose his great English
oratorios only after people stopped attending his Italian operas.
Whenever the market gives signs that opera's time too may have passed,
art socialists dwell on the emptiness of life without it,
forgetting, as usual, the issue of opportunity cost. Were big city opera
to die, resources now diverted to sustain it on
life-support would flow elsewhere, perhaps toward chamber ensembles in
the suburbs. Musicians will always want to perform;
subsidizing opera only delays the emergence of forms of performance that
might attract new audiences. (Those successful
"superstar" concerts with Luciano Pavarotti were opera minus the
costumes and overheated plots.)
The payoff of tax-funded art cannot be verified, and is suspect on
principle. Government interference with the market--job
training, keeping loggers from trees--is almost always called "investing
in America's future." If that is what it is, America needs a
new broker, since she is currently $5 trillion in debt.
It never occurs to art socialists that people have less to spend on
worthy institutions like museums for the same reason that they
have less to spend on everything: they are taxed too heavily. Public
spending induces distortions, which then become the excuse
for further spending.
Many important holdings of the great art museums were once the private
collections of fabulously rich men, donated after their
death. Taxes have made it much more difficult for individuals to acquire
art on that scale, and thereby discouraged philanthropy,
forcing curators to seek help from the state. If people were allowed to
keep more of their money, there might even be enough
for opera, or cycles of symphonies by Mahler.
When all else fails, and public funding of art faces real opposition,
liberals cry censorship. This accusation turns truth on its
head. You censor someone by actively hindering his self expression.
Refusing to help someone express himself is not
censorship; still less is it censorship to refuse to force others to
help him. What liberals call "censorship"--such as ending the
NEA--is respect for freedom: the freedom not to support what one does
not wish to.
Defenders of subsidies tell a story about Twyla Tharp, the noted modern
choreographer. Lacking the patience to fill out forms
when she applied to the NEA, she instead submitted a note: "I write
dances, not grant applications. Send money. Love, Twyla."
And she got it.
This incident is supposed to show what wonderful free spirits artists
are, and why society should support them. But consider
that the money she was asking for was someone else's before it was
forcibly transferred. An indulgent Uncle Sam has fostered
arrogance in his more creative nieces.
Patrick & Lynn Hilferty on mon 9 jun 97
This argument is as standardized as the examples it decries.
Patrick
At 6:41 -0800 6/8/97, Karl P. Platt wrote:
>----------------------------Original message----------------------------
>This appeared in my mailbox a while back. Thought it might interest
>someone here
>
>
>>Who Should Pay for Art?
>>
>>Michael Levin
>>
>>The dialectic goes like this. First, an artist--I use the term
>>broadly--exhibits something pornographic, blasphemous, or
>>otherwise egregiously offensive. His opus may well be an action, as when
>>an HIV-positive "performance artist" had his back cut
>>open before a surprised audience in Minneapolis.
>>
>>Next, the perpetrator turns out to have received public funds,
>>suspiciously often from the National Endowment for the Arts.
>>Incensed conservatives then demand an end to subsidies for these
>>outrages. Liberals charge censorship in reply, as op-ed
>>pieces condescendingly explain that art is meant to "shock" and...(snip!)
******************************************************************************
Patrick Hilferty
Belmont, CA 94002
E-Mail:
Web Page: http://home.earthlink.net/~philferty/
*****************************************************************************
Louis Katz on tue 17 jun 97
Seed money can come from many sources for arts organizations. Allowing
our government to provide, the small amount of money that it does, allows
a wider variety of organizations to be started. Our world wide stature in
the arts comes in part from support of artists during the depression.
Government is involved in art everytime it builds a new building. It
makes artistic decisions when it builds a capitol with a dome, columns or
any other decorative/communicative feature. Government makes artistic
decisions whenever it makes a decision. Art, from the word ars (to stick
things together) is part of the legion (lignin) that holds our society
together. Diverse as we are we need diversity in art.
Despite the fact that I think the government should not fund individual
artists, I do not feel this funding should be stopped during calls for
censorship.
Funding arts organizations is the equivalent of building good looking
infrastructure.
I for one do not want a cinderblock society, or a cinderblock government.
This late in the afternoon rambling seems to be the best I can do,, Hey
time for dinner, I will make some sorbet afterwards. If you are in town
let me know.
Louis
Louis Katz
Texas A&M University Corpus Campus
lkatz@falcon.tamucc.edu
http://www.tamucc.edu/~lkatz
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