WHAT HAPPENED TO THE ARTS?
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percentage of success more than validates its existence. None of us crit–
ics, no matter how intelligent or tasteful we think we are, can really be
perfect in our judgments about what constitutes good art and bad art at
the time. Posterity ultimately validates the art, not us.
Jules Olitski:
I should admit a personal animus. I was once asked to be
a judge in the New England area. None of the artists that I chose were
accepted. So, damn them, I said.
Hilton Kramer:
I think the distinction Bob Brustein is making between
NEA grants to individual artists and to institutions is an important one.
Because of the way things worked out at the NEA, the institutions came
to be punished for the ill-judged selections of grants to individual artists,
and there was no thought given to how that could be avoided-partly
because it was rare for the appointed chairman of the NEA to have any
brains. They mostly were terrible dummies. I remember Livingston Bid–
dle, in a public television forum, saying to me, "I don't know what
you're talking about when you're talking about quality. I think all artists
are wonderful." Yet because of his celebrated name, he had this great
responsibility. I'm old enough to remember when the first list of indi–
vidual grants was announced in I965 . I was working late at the
New
York Times,
and the copy boy brought me the initial list of visual artists
that had just come in over the wire. I knew the work of every single
recipient, and I knew how much in need most of them were financially.
I thought that the NEA was off to a great start.
The first turn in the road came during the Nixon administration,
when Leonard Garment persuaded President Nixon to exponentially
increase the NEA's budget. And as soon as there was, relatively speak–
ing, a lot of money, everything began to go wrong. Suddenly congress–
men and senators wanted a piece of that money for their districts. And
the senator from Wyoming cou ldn't see why his district didn't get as
much money as the congressmen from Manhattan. That was the begin–
ning of the end of the NEA in the visual arts program.
It
was a disaster.
It
was not all that clear at the time that the institutions were that much
in need, because, certainly in the visual arts, unlike Europe, where the
government owns all the museums, most of our great museums are pri–
vately owned. The Met and other museums now receive subsidies from
New York City and even from the state, but the bulk of the money
comes from private donors, which is why comparisons between the way
museums function in Europe and in the U.S. are misguided. But so far
