ARTIST AGAINST SOCIETY
65
read the pathetic story of a vast "Grub Street," which until recently
was considered not only normal but comic-witness Pope's
Dunciad.
All these considerations irresistibly suggest that we are flatly
wrong when we speak of our modern "materialistic" civilization as
doing less for art and caring less for artists than previous epochs.
Here too one need do no more than catalogue the institutions con–
cerned today with giving art its due-the foundations, institutes,
museums, and universities; the prizes, the travel funds and the
training scholarships; the theaters, galleries, orchestral societies, book
publishers, radio stations, magazines, and newspapers; the guilds,
unions, and civic associations; the government councils, ministries or
committees; the national and local collections, the libraries, and in
some countries the bureaucracies which deal exclusively or partially
with the fine arts-all these represent a sum of energy, brains, and
capital which would make any earlier culture gape with envy.
And apropos of earlier cultures it must be said categorically that
the familiar piece of cant which contrasts the United States-that
well-known materialistic nation-with Europe, that haven of dis–
interestedness and pure art, is sheer nonsense and mischievous false–
hood. Not only does the United States spend a very respectable
amount of money on cultural enterprises, including the fine arts;
not only does it produce, disseminate, and organize more actively
than any other nation the substance of culture, not only does it
worry
about Art with a capital "A," but it shows at the same time
a spirit of fair play, or open-mindedness, a love of diversity and of
youthful talents absolutely unknown to the Old World. The reason
it
can do so is of course that its resources are relatively greater, like
its territory.
In contrast with this, the reason that the material life of
culture in Europe is so bitterly bad is that resources are small and
that their concentration in the hands of government at the capital
gives
rise
to a series of gang wars for the capture of the spoils. Let
no one pretend that European artists care nothing about money,
titles, and honors.
It
is not so. Even the artist who starts as a free
lance and whose temperament
is
disinterested finds himself com–
pelled by centralization to compete for the kind of reward which will
enable him to carry on his work. Needless to say, these European
facts, combined with the dangers of bureaucracy in matters of the
