No Censorship of the Arts! (Unless We Trust You)
From the origin of the National Endowment for the Arts during the Johnson administration to the election of President Obama, the arts community was united in its opposition to censorship. The argument that prevailed is that the NEA should not use funding to restrict artistic expression or deny support for art that might offend bourgeois sensibility.
When a significant segment of the public was outraged to learn that the NEA provided funding for Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” the arts community rose as one to decry censorship over efforts to cut funding for his “art.” The arts community was equally upset at the suggestion that government policymakers might influence the content of its artwork. As the art world sees it, the government should pay but remain silent about artistic content.
During the George H. W. Bush administration the NEA made an effort to require grant recipients to sign an anti-obscenity pledge, which sparked a spate of angry comments from the arts community and a generally hostile stance to President Bush.
Now, however, the worm has turned. The NEA under President Obama has expressed a desire to use the agency as a propaganda instrument to promote the administration’s positions. And astonishingly, the arts world seems all too amendable to political advocacy as part and parcel of its work.
Patrick Courrielche, a filmmaker, exposed an Obama administration attempt to use the NEA to build support for the president’s agenda. At a White House meeting artists were encouraged to promote arts activities that “can be used for a positive change.” That of course translates into advocacy for presidential policies in health care, environment and energy, education, and community service. As Buffy Wicks, deputy director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, noted, “We’re going to come at you with some specific ‘asks’ here.”
One might have assumed that the “asks” to the artistic community would lead to public outrage. After all, the fiercely independent artists are being told that promoting the president’s agenda might result in NEA grants. In fact, it appears that taxpayer money is being employed to enlist artists in a promotional campaign for the president. It is hard to imagine what kind of journalistic explosion would have occurred if the Bush administration had tried anything like this.
Surely, Dr. London, we know the answer to that question. It’s contained in another question: “When who needs it?”
Artists, being emotion-driven, respond to emotional appeals and are relatively insensitive to reason and evidence. Sometimes they style this “compassion,” as if attempting to flout the laws of Nature could bring about a net reduction in human suffering, or any other positive result. But in all cases, it will be their emotions that guide them — and the Obama phenomenon is the starkest example of a pure-emotion, reason-free political movement known to American history. Not even William Jennings Bryan and his “Cross of Gold” antics can approach it.
Irving Kristol once wrote that the left-liberal attitude toward politics compounds emotion and appearances: as he put it, the liberal wants to do good and feel good while looking good. This is a behavior almost entirely confined to emoting and voting — and here we have all the explanation for the behavior of our contemporary “artists” anyone could possibly need.
There is nothing said here that a civil war couldn’t change. I would like to repeal every single ‘progressive’ law ever passed. Imagine the effect that NPR’s tax-paid cartoon against the Tea Partiers could have on that movement. I want to be part of a huge ‘can you hear us now?’ movement.
Yes, and the art will probably look like all of that Socialist “Realism” under Stalin, K. & Brezhnev. All hail and glory to the Great Leader Bambi…
Careful with that remark about Goering. You know you’re not allowed to compare any “progressive” to any You-Know-What.
Besides, they got the idea from a source “progressives” consider morally and ideologically “pure”. Namely, Lenin and Stalin.
The “social realist” school of didactic art began as the results of a deliberate policy of the Soviet government in 1921. As to why they would be concerned with art when they were busy fighting a civil war with the White Russians, it’s because they recognized the value of art as a tool of propaganda, especially in a country with low literacy rates. (Although I strongly suspect that the per capita rate of functional illiteracy, as opposed to the total kind, is probably higher in the U.S. today than it was in the USSR in 1921.)
In calling for artists to support the Revolution, Lenin was “preaching to the choir”, as most of them were already on his team, so to speak. (Those who weren’t, like Wassily Kandinsky, had mostly already left the country anyway.) Stalin continued the policy after Lenin’s death, because it worked.
The result was that for at least two generations, art in the Soviet Union was “realistic” to the degree of being primitive, and not in the Grandma Moses sense. It was also didactic to a degree not seen anywhere else- until the People’s Republic of China decided to copy the style after 1949. Never mind that they had to jettison about three millennia of China’s native artistic history- that was so bourgeois. (Or maybe, like the Soviet leadership, they didn’t want to remind the people how much they were acting like the old “imperial” governments they affected to despise.)
There was a brief spate of this in the U.S., as well, under FDR- but it didn’t last, because cooler heads prevailed in the artistic community at the time. To me, of course, the idea of thinking of the likes of William Carlos Williams in music or Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, and Piet Mondrian’ in visual arts as “cooler heads” is a bit discordant (and I happen to like abstract art). But the real hard-core determined anti-bourgeois “crusaders”, like Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier (Paul-Eluoard Jeanneret), and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy were concentrated in the schools of architecture, anyway. (See “From Bauhaus To Our House” by Tom Wolfe.)
Seeing the recruitment of artists to push radical political objectives, probably at the expense of creativity, good taste, and ultimately probably even actual thought, by this administration disappoints me. But it does not surprise me. (Actual thought, from this administration, would be the surprising thing.)
The fact that the artistic contingent of the “enlightened elite’” seems so eager to sign on -in the hope of a fast payday- surprises me even less. Art, like most professions, is the domain of a few geniuses, with the rest being a combination of (a) a large group of good, reliable workers who know that that’s what they are and are happy being good at it, and (b) a small faction of discontented second-raters who think they’re better at it than they really are, and aren’t getting the attention they think they deserve.
I’ll be very surprised if the ones who buy into this scam in the arts don’t come from that last group, almost exclusively. That’s how it happened in Russia, Germany, and (briefly) here in the U.S.
The results are still around to see, if anyone is interested.
clear ether
eon
The American left has wandered into fascism.
Can I state the Obvious? Most of these “artists” are nothing of the sort. The truly great ones have inspired, not shocked. Shock value is what you go for if you don’t have the talent to inspire.
Dear Eon,
Wonderful and informed.
Dear Bill,
Yes. Modern art is all about an idea which shocks, and it has nothing to do with 1. hard-won development of one’s craft, and 2. addressing archetypal meaning and the profound ultimate meaning of a single life lived and/or life itself and 3. the exposition of beauty itself.
Western artistic development and integrity is some of what is destroyed by trivialization of art when art itself is only about self-expression, as though I should give a sh*t what an “artist” feels in a random moment in time. The result is a piece that one sees (or hears) and “gets it,” but never has a need or desire to ever see it again.
Instead, gaze at a Rembrandt self-portrait, for example, and a person can spend a lifetime delving into the mysteries of its creation. Pay attention to a Bach cello or violin solo (or myriad other pieces), and one can spend a lifetime seeking to fathom the depths of the profundity that created it, where every human emotion, yearning and awe are evoked.
It’s sad that art has been trivialized just as the processes of governance, the meaning of liberty, the perception of a life well-lived, etc. have been trivialized.
Not all artists are liberals or even emotion driven. Those who are tend to be the talentless hacks who make “shock art” like the “piss Christ” and other attacks on Christianity (because it is a safe target that will draw attention from the nattering class). They are also the ones who need federal money because otherwise no one would buy their garbage. Think about those who make junk out of chewed chocolate, literal garbage from the street, and so on.
Others are those who make junk but have promoters who are able to convince the rich, liberal elite that what they produce is actually art. Since social acceptance and position is paramount to this kinds, if someone says a piece of “art” is the best thing going the rest will typically agree. Throw in some schlock about its deep meaning and those people will eat it up, in order to seem smarter than they are.
These kinds may be in the majority, but not all are like that.
As long as they agree with you, liberals are all about free speech.
As long as an evil Republican wants to eavesdrop on terrorists, that is overstepping the limits of government and personal privacy. But of course, not a peep when Obama does the same thing.
As long as a Democrat wants to see your medical records and control what services you get, that is only government decency, and anyone who objects on the basis of limiting government and ensuring personal privacy is a greedy tea-bagging redneck pig.
Here is one artist that will not ” pledge to be of service to Barack Obama.”
Red Hot Chili Peppers and Oprah……..get back to where you once belonged
How does art aid in the defence of this nation? If the answer is nothing why are tax dollars going to it?
As someone who spent many years in the arts, my experience has been that liberalism is rampant in that area. It’s lonely being a thinking, rational individual, because commenting invites attack. It reminds me of the intelligentsia and the Russian Revolution; they supported the Communists. Lenin and company accepted the support until they didn’t need it, then got rid of the intelligentsia.
Modern art is all about an idea which shocks, and it has nothing to do with 1. hard-won development of one’s craft, and 2. addressing archetypal meaning and the profound ultimate meaning of a single life lived and/or life itself and 3. the exposition of beauty itself.
I visited France’s national MOMA at the Pompidou once. Aside from the works with which I was already familiar, I can recall only two pieces from the permanent collection. One was titled Zen TV and consisted of an old B/W television with rabbit ears playing “snow.” I thought it clever and amusing, but hardly of an artistic caliber one would expect to see in a national museum. A hip gallery in SOHO, oui. La Musee National d’Art Moderne, non. On the other hand, it is only one of two I remember. The other was a large, rectangular piece of wood painted black with a nail driven in the middle. If it’s ever stolen, I’ll be happy to replace it no charge. I can get everything I need at Home Depot.
I really hated it when some people on the Left made that dumb “Bush = Hitler” equation. It was a cheapening of Nazi crimes, a dumbing down of historical memory, and just generally bad politics.
This rant is even worse. To compare this overblown non-scandal to the return of Goering! That has all the non-logic of a Two Minutes Hate. It does have one good effect, however. I will know in future that the author is not worth reading, or taking seriously.
But I guess this junk has some resonance among people who think that William Carlos Williams was known as a composer of modern music, rather than a poet. Two minutes and counting…
#14 Fred Mecklenberg;
Thanks for correcting me on W.C.W. I admit to a brainf**t there. (Knew he was a Modernist poet at the subconscious level, but the fingers typed “music” instead.) Mea Culpa.
As for the rest, you notice I was drawing a parallel not with Germany per se, but Russia and the U.S. My opinion is that this is a predominantly socialist (authoritarian) policy, and one unlikely to have any good effect on the arts. It will, however, tend to discredit the artistic community in the eyes of the rest of society, as people willing to sell their creativity and independence in the service of an increasingly dubious and fundamentally anti-individualist dogma. (Never mind that it will be a relatively small segment of same that plays along.)
Considering that artists almost invariably insist on their inalienable right not to “follow the herd” (as well they should) this is especially discordant.
No matter the rationale’, it’s a bad idea and one that will not be seen as being to the credit of either the arts community or the administration. Because it isn’t.
clear ether
eon
In my opinion there should not be an NEA. There is no need for government-financed art, except in architecture. The government needs buildings, and some very fine buildings. Government can only contaminate art with politics.
#11 Phrance: how are you doing sonny? I was traveling all last week. I missed all of you high school drop out simpletons!!!
Look here sonny: it takes a lot more than guns, jets and tanks to defend our great country.and art is one of them. art shows the human side of our people and our great nation!!!