The Art Community Remains Complacent Even as Barbarians Approach

If you’ve visited New York recently and, feeling reckless, decided to ride in one of our world-famous “see your life flash before your eyes” taxis, you’ll notice two differences. The first is that when the driver starts the meter, an irritating celebrity voice, or sometimes the voice of an irritating celebrity, will issue from a speaker, feeding you tepid schtick the punch line of which is that you should fasten your seat belt. The second difference is that there is almost always a seat belt to fasten. Then, tradition takes over and the rage-crazed driver will proceed at hair-raising speeds through heavy traffic obeisant to no discernible rule of law or sanity. But at least you’ll be belted, saying your prayers.

I don’t have statistics to prove it, but I am certain this annoying gimmick is working: Cab drivers tell me I’m not the only one who now fastens his seat belt. “Everyone does!” a cabbie recently said. “This gives me far less responsibility,” he added, which wasn’t comforting. But the point is that after a week or so of simply hating to hear Joan Rivers every time I entered a cab, I began to hear what Joan, Placido, Eartha or Dr. Ruth were saying: Buckle up! I know seat belts save lives, I never drive in a car without wearing one, and since someone in N.Y. government started insisting that taxis provide working belts and goading us with famous goaders, I, along with many other New Yorkers, have changed my ways. I offer this as yet another illustration of a truism central to civilization: Government works! Government spending works!

Government spending means taxes, of course, and proposing new taxes is as popular as proposing the mandatory slaughter of puppies and kittens. Hence, on page 155 of the National Endowment of the Arts’ new book, “The American Canvas,” where it is revealed that a 10% excise tax on all movie tickets sold annually would generate revenues greater than the budgets of the NEA, the National Endowment for the Humanities and all state arts funding organizations combined, the revelation is followed by a hasty, cautionary dose of reality: “Such a tax on popular culture is an extreme longshot, needless to say.” Rather than exhorting its audience to actively pursue such a longshot, the authors follow this with a wistful complaint that Hollywood could volunteer more money than it now does. As the kids say these days, “Duh!”

“The American Canvas” received front-page coverage in the New York Times last week, two days before its official debut. The coverage was shocking: Study Says Elitist Attitude Reduces Support for the Arts. But though the NEA’s report does parcel some blame for the precarious financial state of nonprofit culture on the artists, the use of “elitist” in the headline suggested the NEA is capitulating ideologically to its right-wing congressional and religious-fundamentalist opponents far more than it actually has. There’s more than a little lip-service in the report to family values, but essentially the ideological capitulation in evidence has been performed on economic, rather than cultural, grounds.

It would be much more interesting if Jane Alexander, the NEA chairperson, had turned on American artists and accused us of elitism, if she had issued a call for the dumbing-down of the arts, if she had, after her career before the footlights and behind the proscenium arch, endorsed a call for the razing of proscenium houses, concert halls and museums and told all artists to hit the streets and community centers. Then at least there would be something, someone to fight, something to really argue with and about, as there was back in the George Bush era. But this is the Bill Clinton era, and the NEA’s report is careful, careful, careful.

The report is a more balanced, and a far less interesting document, than the first coverage implied. It is fairer, and more progressive, than anything a GOP administration would present. Controversial art is not ignored, politics and formal experimentation are lauded (though not emphasized!); and every circumspect assertion that the arts are, well, elitist, has its accompanying retraction: Museums and theaters can be exclusionary, but, of course, museums and theaters have their place. My least favorite of all arguments justifying federal, state and local arts funding is that the arts are profitable, the arts make neighborhoods more tourist-friendly, blah blah blah. The report makes this claim over and over, but always there’s a proximate reservation alongside it that the arts should not need to justify their existence by proving their usefulness, that the use-value of art is both im- and un-measurable.

The report’s proposals are decent enough. Artists should get involved in their communities. Folk arts and community-arts projects should receive support. The arts should become more inclusive; arts training and appreciation should become important parts of public education. Corporations and individuals should give more; technology and media should be used wisely to make the arts more visible, central to the life of society. Who could argue with any of this? Who hasn’t heard it all before? What arts panel hasn’t spoken of the arts in America with precisely this blend of world-weary defeat and pious optimism?

But there’s a creepy sign of these dreadful times, something new and ugly emergent in a statement like the one made in an early chapter:

“The closing years of the 20th century present an opportunity for the reexamination of the structural underpinnings of the nonprofit arts and speculation on the development of a new support system: one based less on traditional charitable practices and more on the exchange of goods and services.”

This is appalling in principle and so entirely unpracticable one can’t imagine that the person who wrote the sentence, nor the agency that authorized it, didn’t burn with shame. After pointing out that all arts organizations operate at huge deficits--that, for example, museums spend, on average, $30 per visitor and charge $1.46 admission--to call the preposterous attempt to fund art through “an exchange of goods and services” an “opportunity,” rather than a certain-to-fail calamity, is disgraceful, a mendacity and a betrayal. But, again, it’s only one whispered sentence (the italics are the NEA’s) in a 190-page book, the bulk of which perfects the art of confessing to an absolute dearth of real solutions without ever doing so explicitly.

It’s bad enough that the Clinton administration sits by while the lunatic-fringe right slashes the NEA to smithereens. It’s bad enough that in “The American Canvas,” the only substantive remark about the arts attributed to this Democratic president is a wistful plea to Congress to spare federal arts funding so that we can have classier millennium celebrations. It’s bad enough that, on Alexander’s watch, the NEA’s budget was chopped in half, and yet the chairperson didn’t call for outraged public protest, didn’t challenge her boss to do more and better, didn’t loudly scold the arts community for its political passivity, didn’t make Clinton fire her or resign in protest before he had the chance; bad enough that “The American Canvas” helps put a bittersweet face on a flaming catastrophe. Did it also have to be so numbingly dull?

The nonprofit arts in this country are being murdered. It’s happening slowly. The Republicans won’t be able to abolish the NEA in a single act while Clinton is watching. They’ll whittle it down to ineffectual nonexistence, so when the time comes to kill it entirely, no one will care--and the Democrats will do nothing to stop them. It has been pointed out that between 1982-1992, attendance at live performance by people of color in this country basically increased by 50%; but this heartening factoid has the peculiar conclusion, put forward by the NEA, that such a promising development has nothing to do with federal arts funding nor with social progress. But, of course, it has much to do with both.

If the serious arts in this country are to become more democratic, funding is needed. Single-ticket sales, exchanges of goods and services, jingling beggars’ cups at corporations won’t do the trick. The money needs to be provided by a government interested in providing its citizens with life’s basic amenities and necessities, one of which is obviously art.

Arts organizations should do vigorous outreach into communities. Artists should participate in the life of their communities--what citizen shouldn’t? Education need only return to the un- and immeasurable use-value of a non-vocational liberal arts training, and arts appreciation will follow. Every proposal made by the the framers (should I say stretchers?) of “The American Canvas” is worthy of consideration, but the Big Unsayable remains Unsaid: All this needs money! It all needs to be funded! Government Funding! Education! Art! Health care! Art!

Sufficient resources cannot be generated by artists themselves, nor by the institutions that employ them, nor by their boards of directors; nor can it be anticipated solely from unreliable corporate and overstrained foundation largesse.

Democratically elected governments express and execute that which their citizens deem valuable, and that which, as our representatives, they deem valuable for us. It’s a tricky dialectic, but it works: If you think democratic governments are never elected to lead, go join a militia. Taxing and spending, which as Lewis H. Lapham points out, is what governments do, is the missing ingredient.

“The American Canvas” throws around words like civilization and the future, acknowledging in the process that the stakes are mighty high, high as they can be. The fight for the NEA is, at its core, the fight for America’s political soul, our identity. It’s a fight over whether or not there’s anything coherent enough left of American society to be said to have an identity. What’s at stake is simply this: Are we going to develop as a functioning democracy that preserves, promotes and extends freedom of thought, expression and action for all citizens, while guaranteeing a decent standard of life for all citizens, which standard must include both breathable air and accessible, serious art? Or are we going to continue on the path of surrendering more and more of our vital social, communal strength, health and will to an ego-anarchism, masquerading as states’-rightism, serving the mad profiteering of a monied elite?

So if the stakes are so high, why does the NEA sound so blase? If it’s really the NEA or barbarism--and I believe this is our choice, if we understand the NEA as a beachhead for an assault on the role of government in our lives--if we’re at a turning point, if the moment of decision is upon us, isn’t complacency a declaration for barbarism?