George Will recently provoked a lot of comment from liberals and leftists with a recent column calling for a more conservative National Endowment for the arts. As a statist conservative, Will has no problems with state-run art, he just wants it to reflect his values,
The NEA is here to stay, which is fine, if it can learn to do no harm and to do occasional good. Government, which subsidizes soybeans, can subsidize art, too, if government can entrust cultural policy to people—postmodernists need not apply—who know how arts differ from soybeans.
Of course the state has proven it is no better at subsidizing art than it is at subsidizing soybeans. What is interesting, however, is the necessarily weak response by liberals and leftists typified by Salon.Com’s Carina Chocano.
In her confused response to Will, Chocano runs through the standard pro-NEA arguments. Art that is considered canonical today was considered heretical in its time, blah blah blah. The thing she doesn’t seem to notice is that her argument is exactly identical to Will’s — art is inherently political act and spending on the arts an inherently political activity.
Will argues that funding the postmodernist art that the NEA seems so fond of is an intolerable rejection of Western civilization, while Chocano ends up calling Will’s notion of political tests for art a fascist conceit even though, of course, she is simply arguing for just another set of political ideas.
Which is why the state should not get into being a patron of the arts in the first place. It simply cannot do so without favoring one political position over another. As Chocano points out, states that have set themselves up as arbiters of what “real” art is hardly had a good track record in the 20th century and the United States would do well not to emulate them.
Sources:
Privileging’ Postmodernism. George Will, Newsweek, February 5, 2001.
The postmodernist problem. Carina Chocano, Salon.Com, February 8, 2001.