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PARTISAN REVIEW
mand that creative expression be a medium for promoting minority sclf–
esteem may seem like a thrifty way to respond to the urgent needs of the
underclasses. But whatever the immediate effects of such well-meaning
civic experiments, they are not long-lasting. Works of art have occa–
sionally been known to transform consciousness and alter individual des–
tinies. They have rarely been known to change society. Culture is not
designed to do the work of politics, nor will inspirational role models
even begin to compensate for the unconscionable neglect of arts educa–
tion in our schools. No wonder inner city children prefer rap or salsa
when so few qualified teachers have been employed by the system to ex–
pose them to serious theater, art, or music. Effective projects like the
Teachers and Writers Collaborative, in which poor kids are introduced
to language and poetry by practicing poets, are rare and privately subsi–
dized. No wonder the infrequent visit of a performance artist or a dance
company on a grant often leaves such students barned and sullen, when
no money exists for developing their imaginations. Anything short of
daily arts education in the public school curriculum will register as little
more than tokenism. Indeed, such cosmetic procedures may even be ex–
acerbating the problem, since they tend to varnish the surface instead of
probing root causes.
Whatever its impact on education, for philanthropy to administer
non-profit funding by utilitarian rather than traditional aesthetic criteria
is almost certainly likely to doom the arts as we know them. It is very
ominous indeed that the word "quality," the standard by which art has
habitually been measured, is now avoided in the majority of funding cir–
cles, being considered a code word for racism and elitism. This is true
not only in federal, state, and city cultural agencies, where one expects
the arts to be subject to populist and egalitarian political pressures, but
even in most private funding organizations. With a few lonely exceptions
(most notably the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Shubert
Foundation), large and small private foundations now give their money
not to general support as in the past but overwhelmingly to special pro–
grams conceived by the officers of the foundation. Active rather than re–
ceptive in relation to the choices of artists and the programming of artis–
tic institutions, the foundation world is now engaged in what we can
regard only as coercive philanthropy. Artists and institutions are obliged
to follow the dictates of officious program directors or choose to be
exiled to an economic
gulag.
The Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Fund, for example, which handed
out forty-five million dollars to the arts in 1993, describes its three-year
program for resident theaters in the following manner: "To expand their
