I'm So Bored With the NEA

More blah blah blah on the clash over the NEA.

• John Holbo makes the right point about the general purpose of the NEA:

  [I]t is absurd that a bureaucracy should be in the new art business. The avant garde should should take care of itself, and its own. State-supported art should be derriere garde (since bureaucrats are artists at covering rears, if nothing more.) State-supported art should have something conservative about it. Its proper objects should be aesthetic analogs to national landmarks and wilderness areas. The NEA should be the department of conserving cultural matter which lots and lots and lots of people have already pretty much come to accept would be a loss to everyone if it went away.

  That's more or less how the NEA operates. Whether this scheme is worthwhile is up for deate, but Chait is operating under a Gingrich-inspired misperception of the NEA.
• Matthew Yglesias describes the opposition to his scheme to redistribute tax incentives from elite institutions to plain folks: "Lots of negative response to the culture vouchers concept, but the most common criticism—people will spend theirs on bad art!—illustrates precisely what's wrong with NEA-type schemes." But the NEA funds more than performances or exhibitions, and I don't think that people will volunteer their culture vouchers to organizations that provide invaluable facilitative roles: preservation, restoration, archival services, etc. We don't usually put the question of funding of complex fields up to a direct vote because people don't know and aren't expected to know how research and development result in the products that they desire.
• Chris Cagle elaborates on the arts-critical defense of the NEA—how the state can play a role in bridging the gap between artistic culture and national culture—which he described in comments below. I'm skeptical as to his historical example of Abstract Expressionism once being the art of American nationhood—at least in its time it was largely regarded as a vehicle for communism. AbEx is certainly accepted now, though, and insofar as the laity's understanding of AbEx was catalyzed by agencies like the NEA, its utility qua individual artist grants becomes a bit more apparent. I don't really know well enough to say whether or how NEA efforts softened the image of AbEx, but it's an interesting question.

It's really too bad, then, that the genesis of this debate is so stupid. Does Jonathan Chair really believe that had John Kerry only taken a harder stance against Andres Serrano, we'd have the White House today?

Andres Serrano, Piss Christ, 1989

Posted by Kriston at November 21, 2004 2:49 PM