ROBERT BRUSTEIN
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general operating support. Today, it is a rare foundation indeed that
doesn't reserve the lion's share of its revenue for incremental multicul–
tural projects. Artistic support, in short, is posited not on quality (most
foundation officers admit that excellence is an obsolete standard) but on
evidence of affirmative action.
The HlIdson Review
and
The Paris Review
both lost their federal subsidies recently because they failed to contract
enough minority contributors.
Whereas in the past artistic institutions were considered autonomous,
today artistic directors are being forced to share their decisions with
foundation program directors, panel groups, and service organizations.
Edward Rothstein, music critic for
The New York Times,
recently wrote
about a report from the American Symphony Orchestra League which
decreed that orchestras "should reflect more closely the cultural mix,
needs, and interests of their communities." Orchestras were ordered to
overhaul themselves from the repertory to the boardroom and to hire
consultants
to
begin "diversity sensitivity training." Otherwise, funding
sources would be urged to reserve their grants for "the inclusion of cer–
tain kinds of repertoire," meaning popular, folk, and racial-ethnic ex–
pressions. As Rothste in concludes: "This is not artistic leadership; the
league is actually threatening its constituency: We know what is best for
orchestras, and if you orchestras don't listen, our views will be imposed;
your finan cing depends on your compliance.... This report is a dis–
grace. "
Indeed, it is a disgrace, but it is not an isolated disgrace .
In
their
humanitarian effort to increase the number of minorities in companies,
audiences, boardrooms, and repertoires, the minions of political correct–
ness have succeeded in imposing personnel restrictions on not-for-profit
arts groups, very similar to the content restrictions being sanctioned by
Jesse Helms and his moral myrmidons. Both have totalitarian implica–
tions. Those who refuse to conform to the required aesthetic cleansing
are not sent
to
labor camps, as in Stalinist Russia, but rather to an eco–
nomic gulag where they are starved of resources . But the result is similar,
and so is the disgusting Orwellian technique known as "sensitivity train–
ing," where people are asked to confess to unconscious racism and
brainwashed of any thought diverging from current ideological confor–
mity. It is a pitiful development indeed when some of the very same
agencies responsible for the great resurgence of high art in this country
between the sixties and the nineties are now preparing the way for its
extinction.
Are these politically correct methods improving the lot of minori–
ties? Yes, I suppose they are to some extent. While the dropout rate
among black college students remains inordinately high, the number of
