Conservatism in Art

A point was made, then passed over, about the conservative tastes in art collecting by corporations. I’m responding to “Modern Art’s Big Business in San Diego” (May 23) by Hilliard Harper. First, I just want to wish terrific sales to these institutions by artists trying to survive in the market.

If the art they make to sell as “conservative,” it is not necessarily their doing per se. Artists in the contemporary setting do not create demand or its aesthetic limits. But I think we have to consider the enormous purchasing power of businesses because what is encouraged through financial support (buying) on the one hand is discouraged by its absence on the other. There are serious conservative forces working to undermine public support for the arts just in order to constrain the range of acceptable expression.

The tremendous growth of corporate patronage is similar to efforts to replace government programs which, since the Great Depression, have served to catch those of us who fall out, so to speak, from the job market. This move is political in that the power to decide who is worthy of support, and who is not, shifts from the government (which by law must be blind to sex, race, creed and political persuasion) to private sources that can help or not help who they damn well please. One of the things corporations are doing with their enormous profits at this time is to shape American culture. And get a tax write-off from the taxes they barely pay.

The fact is that the Bill of Rights stops at the door of private property.

Aerojet will take some “risks” with certain kinds of vanguard art, but they certainly won’t risk anything that encourages their employees or the public to challenge their defense contracts or question their labor relations. Yet there are contemporary artists with “credentials” whose work is profoundly concerned with these and other issues.

There is art about gender relations, race questions (anti-apartheid, for example), nuclear power and weapons, ecological concerns, non-intervention in Central America, etc. The conservative viewpoint of business functions to keep these major and interesting “trends” in art marginalized or out altogether from public exhibition and collection.

FRED LONIDIER

La Jolla