by Lee Bockhorn
My professed conservatism and contributions to the Review have elicited some interesting reactions from my colleagues at the School of Music. One of the most common is for a friend at the School to ask in a condescending and/or critical tone, "So you're one of those bozos who wants to get rid of the National Endowment for the Arts?" (NEA) The implied question, of course, is "how can you, as a musician and one who participates in and enjoys the arts, not support the NEA?" Because of this, I feel a need to explain my apparent hypocrisy to my musical peers. So, I hope the following will demonstrate how I can be an "artist" (in whatever sense,) yet still support efforts by conservatives to eliminate the NEA.
The first, and in many cases only, argument made by some conservatives against the agency is that it has supported the production of "obscene" art. While this is not the lone or even the best argument against the Endowment, it has some validity. In recent years your tax dollars have funded (relax, our country has no more pressing concerns) a "performance artist" whose "art" consisted of political diatribes in which she smeared her naked chest with chocolate to symbolize excrement (and thus man's beastliness to women;) and Andrew Serrano's "Piss Christ," in which a crucifix was placed in a bottle of human urine. These are just two of numerous examples. Such infantile displays are ostensibly intended to shock the bourgeoisie; the irony is that these artists produce such works while suckling at the government teat known as the NEA, which is inconveniently funded by that same detested bourgeoisie's tax dollars.
Of course, when conservatives cite such examples to demonstrate that much of what the NEA supports is not good art, cries of "censorship" arise from the art community. They claim it is not the government's role to decide what qualifies as "art." This seems rather odd to say; one might think that the best argument for government support of the arts would be that the art serves some larger social good (i.e., it "enriches" or "enlightens" the public). Yet, when conservatives ask that the NEA should at least distinguish between art that does and does not serve such purposes, we hear more complaints about censorship. There was once a time when the question of what constitutes serious and worthwhile art was answered by patrons, the educated public, and philosophers. Yet as columnist George Will points out, "today the question of 'is it art?' is considered at best an impertinence and at worst a precursor of 'censorship,' understood as a refusal to subsidize." The important point that conservatives make is that the elimination of the NEA would not prevent the likes of Serrano from producing their "art" if they so chose; it would merely get the government out of the messy business of subsidizing such nonsense, and then having to defend itself.
Even with the strength of the claim that the NEA has funded many questionable activities, there are more substantial arguments against the agency which have little to do with the content or quality of art produced. They concern more fundamental questions about what the federal government ought to be doing, and how decisions are made to determine how the government allocates its scarce resources. Let us be realistic our country has always had a healthy fear of letting government become too expansive, and this fear ensures that the government will always have limited resources to spread around. This, in turn, necessitates that we must make difficult choices about priorities. Given this, are the NEA's supporters prepared to say that arts subsidies have the same claim on government dollars as cancer research, child immunization, or a host of other worthy programs? This is not to say that art is unimportant, but that there is a crucial difference we must acknowledge. If a government program exists to encourage, say, the production of highways or housing or tomatoes, it is fairly simple for it to assemble relevant experts, formulate standards to measure the agency's success, and determine when the goal has been reached. Try developing an analogy for the NEA, given the difficulty of coming to an agreement on standards to determine when worthy art has been produced. The point is that we must recognize a distinction: there are lots of great ideas and worthy, noble endeavors out there, but that does not mean they should all automatically become federal programs.
This means, as conservatives admit, that private funding alone must support the arts in America. To this, the NEA responds by stressing the agency's role in "leveraging" money for the arts from the private sector. This is a mixed blessing, though, since an NEA grant often lends an aura of legitimacy to nonsense, which enables these "artists" to garner support from uninformed yet wellintentioned persons in the private sector. Nevertheless, the notion that private funding of the arts will wither away if the NEA is eliminated is preposterous. Corporations and the wealthy, always searching for ways to reduce their tax bills, will surely continue to support artists and arts organizations which have proven their cultural value, such as orchestras and museums.
The whole question about who should fund the arts gets to the heart of a major problem with our government today. Too often, the decision about how to spend government money depends less on the relative merits of different programs, and more on which lobbies are the most knowledgeable and aggressive at getting the attention of politicians, and the NEA is a textbook example. The agency itself recently released a report that said the agency had contributed to an "elitist" attitude in the art community. The overwhelming majority of those who enjoy the types of art the agency supports are generally middle to upper middle class or richer, highly educated, politically aware, articulate individuals. Thus this group is better situated, in terms of resources and knowledge about how government works, to influence how government money is spent. That allows this group, which by any measure certainly has enough resources to support the arts it enjoys by itself, to instead convince the government to use the tax dollars of everyone, from a single mother on the South Side of Chicago to a rancher in the vast grasslands of Montana, to, in essence, subsidize their ballet tickets. Some art lovers may be able to ignore their consciences enough to accept this, but I cannot.
NEA supporters also claim that the point of the agency is to bring art to persons like that single mother or rancher, and to support art that the market alone will not sustain. That is a noble goal, but this has not been the case most of the time in reality. Furthermore, these supporters are being hypocritical when they say that the NEA's existence is necessary to support art which would not be sustained by the market or private support, because they are also constantly proclaiming how popular NEA supported projects are. In a speech in Pittsburgh several years ago, the Endowment's former chairperson, Jane Alexander, stated that the arts in Pittsburgh were so popular that they were outdrawing the city's professional baseball, football, and hockey teams combined. This, of course, begs the question: if the arts in Pittsburgh (or any other city) are so popular, why do they need federal subsidies?
I hope, by now, that I have demonstrated how it is possible for someone who values the importance of the arts in mankind's existence to nevertheless agree with efforts to eliminate the NEA. If the agency someday meets its demise, and this means that persons like myself who have the means will have to pay an extra ten dollars for a ticket to an orchestra concert or opera, so be it; at least we will have clear consciences. And furthermore, arts supporters who moan that nothing less than the apocalypse will occur if the NEA is eliminated should lighten up; listening to them one wonders how on earth the Hemingways, F. Scott Fitzgeralds, T.S. Eliots, and Beethovens of the world produced novels, plays and symphonies before the existence of the almighty NEA, which was created amongst the hubris of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society in 1965. Their time would be better spent trying to convince our nation's youth to turn off the MTV for a while and listen to some Bach or read a good book, so that the future of art appreciation in this country will not depend on an elitist few needing to convince the government to subsidize their pleasures. MR
Lee Bockhorn is a Senior majoring in Music and Political Science. Bockhorn, an accomplished triangle and slide whistle player, may be reached at bockhorn@umich.edu, should you care to lambaste him.