624
PARTISAN REVIEW
as the visual artists' grants at the NEA are concerned, it just became a
racket, for which, unfortunately, the institutions had to pay.
Audience Member:
Censorship by grant applications meant focusing on
particular forms of artwork rather than on an open field of applications.
It
did a great deal of harm by dumbing down what should have been
regarded as the best American art.
It
was terrible to say that the best of
our national arts, particularly the visual arts, produced such mediocrity,
and yes, a few objectionable things .
Robert Brustein: I
don't know if you know my writings, but I am among
the most severe cr itics of the National Endowment and
its
disintegration
into dumbing down and into geographical distribution, into ethnic and
racial and sexua l distribution, and all the various distributions which
have effectively diluted the effectiveness and the qual ity of the kinds of
grants they give. I was a panelist at the very beginning, and I was a pan–
elist later on. Then I stopped accepting offers to be a panelist, because I
couldn't stand the structure in which I was being asked to participate.
But I remember when it was a damn good agency and was doing exactly
what it was supposed to be doing.
It
was observing its charter, which says
that the artist and the agency should be protected from political interfer–
ence, political persuasion, or political influence. And that stopped hap–
pening after it reached the hundred million dollar mark under
Nixon.
However, democracy is to blame, as well. The United States has a lot of
faults in the way its government is conducted . We don't call for the
extinction of the government or of democracy; we try to reform it. And
it seems to me that, insofar as the NEA is capable of reform, through the
kind of criticism that you and I and others make, it wi ll again be capa–
ble of making effective grants and serving the arts of this country.
Hilton
Kramer: I published a book in
1973,
The Age of the Avant-Garde,
in
which I announced that there no longer is such a thing as an avant–
garde. You can't have an avant-garde when all the cu ltural institutions in
a society are will ing to embrace every little knuckleheaded thing that
comes along. You have the universities, the museums, the media, all for–
aging for something new, something transgressive. At the
New York
Times,
when meeting with my editors the first question was "What's new
this week?" You can have good art, but then there
is
a sort of fake avant–
garde, a kind of parody, as Cynthia Ozick said in her paper. That is now
filling a great many of our institutions, certainly the Whitney and a good
part of MOMA and the Guggenheim. The Guggenheim now compounds
