You Get What You Pay For

As the 20th century stumbles to a close, an elephant sits quietly over in the corner of America’s cultural living room, largely unnoticed and mostly unremarked. The elephant has a simple name--the National Endowment for the Arts (or NEA for short)--but the simplicity is deceptive. The federal agency stands for the rather more complicated reality of arts patronage by the United States government--which is to say, arts patronage by We the People. The time has long since come to begin discussing what to do about this shabby, disheveled and undernourished beast--yet that conversation hasn’t begun.

As currently conceived and operated, the NEA is an unfunny joke. We all know why. There’s no need for aging soldiers of either uniform in our uncivil Culture War to reenact the Gettysburgs and Antietams of the past decade.

Nor is there reason to defend the unmistakably talented men and women who do their best to run the beleaguered agency, nor to itemize the achingly obvious benefits to American society that indeed accrue, even from the meager distribution of its emaciated level of funds. For this story is not about a particular government agency, but about a general principle of government: Public arts patronage is good and right and essential.

And emaciated, as it always has been here in the wealthiest nation the world has ever known. Even in the 1980s, at the peak of its congressional appropriation, the NEA’s annual budget was embarrassingly puny--never more than 60-some cents per capita. Today it’s dwindled to 36 cents. Compare that to the Pentagon budget passed last month by Congress, which includes funding at $24 a head just for armaments the military has said it neither needs nor wants. This despite the fact that today’s culture industry creates more jobs in more places than the defense industry ever did.

Individual Americans of all stripes pay lip service to the arts, but few pay cash. That includes We the People--the nation as a whole. So we shouldn’t be surprised that, to borrow from critic Jacques Barzun, we get the culture we deserve.

Increasingly the culture we deserve means a culture of inflated publicity and scant artistic interest. It’s celebrity culture, plain and simple, as extrapolated for the art museum from the ad-heavy pages of People magazine and Vanity Fair. The notorious example of the moment is the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s “Sensation: Young British Artists From the Saatchi Collection.” A largely forgettable show of mostly minor contemporary art, “Sensation” has drawn more public attention than virtually any museum exhibition in the United States this year. (Is there anyone left who thinks it’s just coincidence that Charles Saatchi, the savvy British collector whose holdings are surveyed by the show, is an advertising mogul?) Yet, celebrity culture is becoming more routine at America’s art museums than this exceptional conflagration implies. Increasingly it’s a staple.

Take the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. With lovely and important shows of Ingres’ portraiture and ancient Egyptian sculpture on view, the Met publicly sniffed its nose at the commercialized goings-on across the East River in Brooklyn; then, in early December, it promptly opened “Rock Style,” an exhibition surveying theatrical fashions of postwar pop music stars--from the Beatles to Madonna, Elvis to David Bowie (who, synergistically enough, had also cut a Web site deal with the Brooklyn Museum for “Sensation”).

Pop music fashion is a minor art that is indeed legitimate for museum study. However, just at the moment the art world was experiencing ethical nausea at gross revelations that Saatchi had largely organized and anonymously underwritten the presentation of his private collection at a public venue, the Met unveiled a not dissimilarly challenged show: “Rock Style” was underwritten, arranged and to a considerable degree directed not by a disinterested curator, but by fashionista Tommy Hilfiger, purveyor of mass-market designs to the hip-hop generation.

“Rock Style” thus took its place in a long line of dubious celebrity marketing endeavors masquerading as Met exhibitions of modern decorative arts. The Met is pleased to tut-tut Brooklyn, as Judith Shulevitz pointed out in Slate, while ignoring its own questionable history: a show of Dior couture paid for by Dior, of Tiffany jewels paid for by Tiffany and of Faberge bric-a-brac underwritten by Faberge and assembled by a Faberge consultant. Suddenly a Saatchi show by Saatchi didn’t look so alien.

Up the street, meanwhile, the Guggenheim Museum was engineering its own celebrity fashion mess. Eleven days ago the New York Times reported an interesting sequence of events: In January the Guggenheim opened discussions with Italian fashion designer Giorgio Armani about a career retrospective; in March, Armani proposed to the Guggenheim a multiyear gift, reportedly totaling $15 million, and in November the Guggenheim publicly announced the Armani retrospective was on for fall 2000--while not disclosing the gift.

Oops.

New York seems to be cultivating a rent-a-museum ethos. Meanwhile, on the Left Coast, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is taking a slightly different tack. Celebrity fare formed the spine of its 1999 exhibition program, but here the idea is that celebrity stuff will underwrite the real art that the mass public doesn’t care to see.

So, we got a pleasant (if artistically uneven) touring show of paintings, prints and drawings by Diego Rivera, which added virtually nothing to our long-established understanding of the great--and hugely popular--Mexican muralist. Next came a slew of third-rate examples by famous French Impressionist painters, borrowed from the National Gallery of Art. Currently we have an artistically vacant tribute to Pompeii, the famously hapless town on the Bay of Naples buried by the lava of Vesuvius in 79 AD--an “art” show whose intellectual high point is a sharp analysis of animal husbandry in the ancient Roman province.

These shows accelerated a slide begun last year, when LACMA rented a varied group of works by Picasso from the Museum of Modern Art and pretended it was a significant exhibition. At least we can be grateful to have been spared “Star Wars: The Magic of Myth,” a show of movie props, costumes and set designs just winding up its national debut at the San Diego Museum of Art, before an extensive tour of American art museums (the sensationally lucky Brooklyn Museum gets it in 2002.)

None of these shows can be accused of the same kind of commercialization tainting Brooklyn, the Met and the Guggenheim. Instead, they approach the financing problem from the opposite side, sacrificing art for commercially lucrative pop entertainment.

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We, unlike the Pompeians, did not come to this unpleasant pass by accident. Twenty years ago, when the political center of the United States shifted sharply to the right, the stage was set for developments like these. (Once again: Is there anyone left who thinks it’s just coincidence that advertising mogul Saatchi is the same Brit who made his name by engineering Margaret Thatcher’s rise to power?) The accelerated push for privatization and the attendant withering of the public world are together leaving art museums high and dry.

The art museum profession seems, at the moment, a tad uneasy with the shift. Accommodations are nonetheless being made. Three extreme cases italicize how: High-profile art museums in Los Angeles, Chicago and Boston are now headed by directors with (a) virtually no training in art, (b) no art museum experience, or (c) both. Corporate headhunting firms, which now routinely advise the amateurs on museum boards in their search for directors, add fuel to the fire.

Talented art museum directors are always in short supply, of course, and exhibition programs are always peppered with less than sterling fare. Such is life. Still, “Sensation” will probably be remembered as a perverse watershed. It bookends a decade begun by the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s cancellation of a show of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs, some of them erotic, for fear of getting pulled into a debate over public funding of art. Corcoranism begat Sensationalism, which knows that celebrity success can make the debate moot.

Since the slide shows no signs of reversing, it’s worth pulling back to get a somewhat bigger picture of what has happened. Here’s a capsule history of the public life of art in America since World War II:

Postwar prosperity and the GI Bill conspired to create an expanding class of educated Americans blessed with leisure time; thus emerged a new constituency for the arts, which led to a steady expansion of the cultural scene. By the late 1960s, the new NEA (and a growing network of state and local arts agencies) were priming the pump, providing seed money for cultural events. These attractions were rarely secure financially, almost always leading a precarious existence.

Private arts patronage, being the province of individual initiative, takes care of itself, but public patronage requires the collective mustering of political will. For good or ill, from the 1950s to the 1980s, political will was provided by the Cold War. In a troubled and dangerous world, the superiority of American democracy could be signaled by the vibrancy of the nation’s cultural life. To politicos, art meant freedom triumphant.

When the Cold War came to an abrupt end, that established public purpose vanished as quickly and completely as the Berlin Wall. Ten years on, nothing has replaced it. The result has been a steady atrophy of public support, matched by explosive growth in private and corporate wealth and power. With no clear public purpose in evidence, celebrity is filling the vacuum. Art museums are more vulnerable than ever to mass-market values and corrupt manipulations.

Note that this short history begins with the traditionally American idea of partnership between private and public--between private postwar prosperity and the publicly minded GI Bill--then ends with the breakdown of that partnership in the 1990s. To those who cavalierly declare that the federal government has no role to play as a public patron of the arts, history gives a blunt rebuke.

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Today’s severe imbalance between private interests and public ones is not easily righted, as several presidential candidates (in both parties) will eagerly tell you. Congress can, without much ado, appropriate $6.5 billion for armaments the military doesn’t want because private defense industry lobbyists make it worth their while to do so. The $375 million newly appropriated to begin building a helicopter carrier in the home district of Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), or the $275 million to buy five F-15 airplanes assembled in the district of House Minority Leader Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) each represents way more money than the NEA has ever had to spend in any year.

Public art museums, on the other hand, are not only unlikely to be coming up with many soft-money contributions; they are forbidden to lobby, under threat of revocation of their nonprofit status. So military bloat gets characterized as essential expenditure for national security, while meager public support for art gets tagged a gross waste of taxpayer dollars.

In truth, the basic equation ought to be quite simple. Public support should be obliged to sustain public institutions. Art museums, no less than police departments or the Social Security Administration, have already had their social value and utility acknowledged by the public law that affords them tax exemption. They are owed full support so they can do the cultural work that is, finally, in our best interest--not the interest of Saatchi, Tiffany or Armani. Museums might then forgo replication of the pleasurable place occupied in daily life by theme parks, cocktail bars, movie theaters and gift shops.

It’s hard to say what will (or can) replace the Cold War as an engine for creating the political will essential to public patronage of the arts. Fear, which was the Cold War’s whip, is as powerful a motivator as exists.

While we’re thinking it over, though, the gaunt gray elephant of public patronage for art languishes unremarked in the national living room. The year 2000 dawns, and the conversation hasn’t begun.