Whither or Wither the NEA?
After being embroiled in the culture wars, the National Endowment for the Arts has lowered its sights and now strives to avoid political controversy. So writes Michael J. Lewis in “After the Art Wars,” Commentary Magazine (Jan. 2008).
The NEA famously sponsored controversial works of visual art in the late 1980s that nearly caused the agency’s demise. When
It seems, then, that both Republicans and Democrats had learned the same lesson from the art wars: entanglement with the visual arts could do them no political good, and quite possibly much harm. Whichever party claims the presidency a year from now, this political calculus is unlikely to change.
Lewis reviews the history of the agency, and the artistic climate in which it was created, in order to shed light on its possible future. He contrasts the American and French versions of patronage. The French established academies for the cultivation and rigorous control of state-sponsored art, resulting in high standards and conservative art. “In the meantime, many of what we regard as the fundamental achievements of French art took place outside this elaborate edifice and in deliberate opposition to it.” In
Lewis also describes how the efforts to create the NEA coincided with an unusual period of formalism in art. “The only period when the utilitarian view of art was consciously suppressed was from the late 1930’s to the mid-1960’s.” Except for this formalist period, the impulse has been “to think of art as justified by the lesson it imparts rather than the pleasure it gives.”
And so the NEA was incubated in this formalist period and hatched at its end in 1965. Its formalist beginning quickly succumbed to the new utilitarianism.
Within a few years of the founding of the NEA, the doctrine of formalism, which had insulated art from any sort of didactic program and instituted a kind of cordon sanitaire between art and politics, collapsed utterly. The Vietnam war, the international upheavals of 1968, the rise of the New Left and the counterculture – all these suggested to many artists that a detached apolitical stance was no longer tenable, and was in fact immoral.
The NEA, lacking a guiding aesthetic principle or coherent national policy, began supporting cutting-edge art, basing its decisions not on artistic merit but on extra-artistic, social content. A pursuit of such policies in distributing tax dollars seems sure to lead to the political disputes that ensued. Many NEA panelists perceived their mission not as supporting the arts, but as supporting putatively disadvantaged artists.
Tellingly, neither the arts community itself nor its liberal constituency has ever defended the NEA on grounds of aesthetic merit. The arguments made on its behalf invariably boil down to a simple proposition: what is good for the arts community – that is, those who make art, exhibit it, and write about it – is perforce good for art.
The NEA has now set the mundane goal of delivering a direct grant to every congressional district. That safe stance may help to insulate the agency from renewed controversy, but it still suggests an absence of any serious policy or guiding aesthetic.
Lewis asks relevant questions about the future of the agency and what role the government should play in promoting the arts. His comments deserve consideration. Any discussion of the NEA’s future needs to examine the role of private patronage and whether government support provides a needed boost. It also needs to consider the aesthetic questions, like whether government dollars encourage serious art in a way that private money cannot or instead skew the arts toward mediocrity.
Government dollars come with government oversight, and the arts community cannot reasonably hope for an arts utopia in which a panel of experts has carte blanche to spend tax dollars on art that has no broad constituency. Whether the NEA can articulate a vision that appeals to a large segment of the public while at the same time setting high artistic standards remains to be seen.
