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player ready...As a culture-vulture, my instinct is to regard Donald Trump as a boorish philistine.
But I had an atypical reaction to his plan to scrap the National Endowment for the Arts. The president’s 2018 budget eliminates funding for the federal arts agency, and I can see why he might do that. Does it make any sense to send tax dollars to bureaucrats who can’t be trusted to recognize a painter or sculptor when they see one?
If you don’t think that question is posed by Trump’s budget, please explain this: The NEA’s website lists “direct grants to individuals” under the heading, “We Do Not Fund.”
The NEA supports museums that house an artist’s works, and conferences that explore an artist’s creativity, but it doesn’t cut an artist a check. Why?
The National Institutes of Health doesn’t warn doctors not to come hat in hand to that federal agency. There isn’t a help wanted sign outside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announcing: “Epidemiologists need not apply.”
The NEA does make an exception for creative writers. Perhaps that’s because funding poets and translators hasn’t come back to haunt the agency. Other grants have, sometimes spectacularly.
Among them was a grant of $10,000 to Artists Space, a New York gallery, for a 1989 show. The catalog included “fantasies by artist David Wojnarowicz of setting Senator (Jesse) Helms on fire with gasoline and throwing another conservative legislator from a high building,” according to the NEA’s official history. Politicians and clergy cried foul, and the agency pulled its funding. Then the art world accused the NEA of practicing thought control, and the grant was restored — provided its dollars didn’t pay for the catalog. A Solomonic decision, it satisfied neither waring party.
Perhaps the inscription on NEA’s tombstone should reflect the cause of death: “An artist’s imagination is not a politician’s reality.”
Never was that more true than in the era of the NEA’s birth. When it was established in 1965, modern art was running out of steam. It began in 19th-century France, where artists were expected to toe their elders’ aesthetic mark. Then came rebels like Van Gogh and Picasso, who rejected conformity and embraced innovation.
Novelty has a limited shelf life. The bourgeoise catches up with the avant garde. Witness the mobile — Alexander Calder’s moving sculptures were cutting edge in the 1930s. Now they hang over myriad baby cribs. So running out of art forms to innovate, artists created a genre: ticking off the middle class.
Its measure of innovation is a product or behavior not previously considered artistic. In one sub-genre, the artist is the art object, which denies him or her one way artists make a living: Selling to someone seeking a work of art to go with the furniture. You can’t hang Karen Finley over a couch.
She got nearly naked in front of an audience. That’s like striptease, which is considered vulgar. Then she smeared herself with peanut butter. That transformed her act into art — in the eyes of the cognoscenti. When Middle America dissented, the NEA denied grants en route to Finley and three other “performance artists.”
Equally controversial was an NEA-subsidized exhibition that included a photograph that the NEA’s history described delicately: “a crucifix as seen through a golden liquid.” Photographer Andres Serrano didn’t mince words, titling it “Piss Christ.” The hinterland called it blasphemy.
Finally Congress had enough, and forbid the NEA to make grants to artists. That handicap made the agency like a bird with a broken wing, circled by vultures. President Ronald Regan had wanted to kill it. So too did Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who championed the ban on individual grants. He had to settle for cutting its budget drastically, a tactic Trump borrowed.
Hindsight posses a question: Shouldn’t the NEA have been more judicious in its grant making? Perhaps asking Serrano: “It’s obvious that you’re giving the finger to believers, but what makes your photograph art?”
To the art world, the question is heresy. Putting limits on creative expression is the high road to barbarism.
Yet history says that’s not so. In ancient Athens, dramatists were forbidden to write about contemporary politics. That didn’t drain the creative juices of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Their plays sell tickets 2,500 years later. Will the art of Wojnarowicz, Finley and Serrano be as long lived? Who knows.
Likewise, the NEA’s fate isn’t quite sealed. A president’s budget goes to Congress, where horse trading is a fine art. Line items are erased and rewritten. So the NEA could face, say, a hospital in a Darwin struggle for survival.
That might not be an easy call for a representative from Manhattan. But consider one from Middle America. He can fund that hospital — or an arts agency that isn’t credited with enough common sense to distinguish impostors from artists.
Wouldn’t that be a no brainer.
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