POINTS AFTER
"NO FOUNDAT ION ALL THE WAY DOWN THE LINE"
Victor Navasky's hard-hitting review of Nielsen's
The Big
Foundations
in the last issue of PR--as well as the book itself--ex–
poses many of the pretensions and failures of the handout corporations.
But institutional criticism of the foundations, however probing, leaves
out the simple fact that most foundations have developed a highly or–
ganized structure for creating the illusion that they are coping with their
problems while actually dissolving them in a stream of bureaucratic activ–
ities. This is done largely through policies and procedures that inevitably
lead to certain kinds of grants and exclude others.
Take literature (the area I know best), where a peculiar mixture of
caution and gimmickry has been arrived at by combining consensus
thinking with the cult of novelty. Consensus thinking involves an assem–
bly line of panels, studies, and consultations, which prove what has been
assumed--or what is already known or what isn't worth knowing. The
results are safe, obvious, respectable--and often useless--grants. At
the same time, foundations have been infected by the unrelenting search
for the new that dominates the popular media, so that like the entertain–
ment industry the foundations act as though they are breaking new
cultural ground when they are really following the latest fashion.
Actually there is no contradiction between playing it safe, like sup–
porting the popular performing arts, and going for far-out but modish art
projects, for both are simply two sides of the Zeitgeist.
