Comment
As the debates over the fate of the NEA and NEH are heating up,
have a modest proposal to save both endowments by revising them.
Let me begin with four propositions:
1. Every civilized nation has to have - and is judged by - an ad–
vanced art and serious, high-level intellectual activities.
2. The arts and many intellectual activities are not self-supporting in
modern society and cannot survive in simple, free-market competition.
They must be supported by public funds and private foundations.
3. Serious talented art should be supported for its own sake, not for
its economic value, nor for its tourist attraction, nor for the size of its
audience. Nobody remembers how many copies of Proust or Mann or
Joyce or Eliot were sold originally, nor how many people attended the
first performances of Beethoven's symphonies or quartets.
4. Public support - and private aid as well - has been jeopardized by
wild, tasteless, politically correct projects that have provided ammunition
to the opponents of the endowments and have offended large sections of
the population.
The criticism of the NEH has been largely political, while that of
the NEA has been largely aesthetic. But both the political and the
aesthetic aberrations are part of an overall trendy and ultra-leftist
ideology.
Clearly, a considerable part of the academy, the media, popular
performers, and inauthentic avant- gardists have fallen into the trends that
have become known as political correctness. This tendency that has been
falsely labeled as advanced art and thought has produced such
monstrosities as Mapplethorpe, the urination on a crucifix by Serrano,
and the naked woman covered with chocolate, as well as many less–
publicized travesties posing as original art, bucking outworn conventions.
It
also has produced many outrageous and nonsensical projects funded by
the NEH. The reason why they have been funded is simply that the
panels making the grants have been composed largely of people who
disdain the ideas of quality and standards and espouse trendy causes. The
result has been the confusion of serious art with works that shock and
flaunt taste, and of serious scholarship with cultural fashions. Thus we
have a pseudo-artistic and pseudo-intellectual, self-perpetuating group of
bureaucrats that make up both the judges and the judged, many of
whom may be manipulated.
On the other hand, in the political realm, some conservative
Republicans in their assault on the endowments have spread further
Editor's Note: A shortened version of this comment appeared in the Op-Ed
section of
The New York Post.
