Jon Chait’s op-ed on the National Endowment for the Arts has been talk of the day. Arguing that the Democrats should find a compromise issue in abolishing arts funding, he writes,
[L]et’s face it, the NEA is in large part a way of forcing the NASCAR set to subsidize the art house set.
None of that would matter if there was a strong, principled argument for the NEA. In fact, there isn’t. The basic rationale for the NEA is that art is good — advocates tend to use loftier terms, but they’re all synonymous with “good” — and the NEA provides for more of it. But there are lots of good things that don’t deserve government support.
Kevin Drum more or less agrees on substance but finds the issue a non-starter: it doesn’t really win Democrats votes and simply concedes territory Republicans are unified on. Kriston at Grammar Police has an astute post (to which I commented a version of this, but I won’t replicate in full) pointing out that when you look at what the NEA does, it’s not the caricature that Chait presents. In fact, if the NEA goes, the likeliest losers are non-metropolitan museums.
But something seemed missing in Chait’s editorial and in the argument over arts funding. Moreover, I think that something suggests why the NEA is doomed politically. The ultimate function of the government’s funding of the arts is not to decide which art is worthy or not. Even if it tries to do that, it merely follows the legitimization of art in the art world. Rather the true value of arts funding is twofold. First, there are educational aspects of art institutions. Art is simply production but also access to existing art and production of material that helps us understand art. The NEA seems to have been putting more emphasis on access and education, and that may be the role in which it continues in the future.
Second, more than the production of good art or the artistic legitimization of art, state funding confers political legitimacy to artistically legitimate culture. That is, while markets both economic and cultural do a pretty good job in the US of producing and assessing art, they do a lousy job at connecting to anything but themselves. The state can make artistic culture part of the official national culture and can help bridge the aesthetically legitimate with national identity in general.
If you think about the history of political support for arts funding, this makes sense. The NEA came into existence in the mid 60s, a culmination of the liberal consensus of the postwar years. World War II marks a break of sorts in the artistic field in this country. After the war, modernism flourished and took on a distinctively American character. Furthermore, postwar modernism was allied with the business and global hegemony of the US. State funding of art suddenly seemed necessary, for the avant-garde impulse of legitimate art made it foreign from everyday understanding of artistic worth. Abstract Expressionism and the International Style were very much unofficial artistic voices of American nationhood, only increasingly ones requiring sanction, exegesis, digestion.
Eventually the avant-garde impulse would push legitimate culture further away from working class and petit bourgeois, even bourgeois, notions of what art should be. As the New Right was attacking the postwar liberal consensus on so many other fronts, some sort of legitimation crisis was inevitable, it just took the form of the NEA 4.
Just as Welfare Capitalism may be a dying relic, so is a nation in which a liquor distributor or a health consumer products manufacturer could commission masterworks of American architecture. The Welfare State and arts funding were in some ways manifestations of those moribund impulses.
But simply because something’s dead doesn’t mean its life was in vain.
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