Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 23, 1995 TAG: 9507210082
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: G-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JAMES K. GLASSMAN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Republicans, and even some Democrats, don't believe funding the arts is a proper function of the federal government - even if we had the money, which we don't. They're right, but there's an even better reason to cut off funding: Government money makes bad art.
The NEA was created 30 years ago, and if the intention was to produce great art, it hasn't been very successful. I'm no expert, but it seems to me great painting came to a screeching halt after Jackson Pollack and Ellsworth Kelly.
What the NEA has promoted is not art but a culture of grantsmanship, which, only naturally, produces banal, politically palatable works. The NEA system encourages artists to gear their efforts to win the approval of professionals and bureaucrats, sitting on boards that in turn have presidential appointees and legislators looking over their shoulders.
The NEA itself spends only $167 million of the taxpayers' money each year, while the arts receive $9 billion in private philanthropy. But the endowment, as its adherents never tire of saying, provides an imprimatur that attracts more funding. It's an enormously powerful force that's responsible for much of the mediocrity that pervades art today.
In fact, it's the best NEA-funded art that's caused the agency the most trouble: Mapplethorpe and Serrano, to my mind, are pretty good, but it's perfectly understandable that Congress does not want to fund sadomasochistic photographs or crucifixes in urine.
But if not the NEA, then who?
A couple of years ago, Richard A. Goldthwaite, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, wrote a fascinating book titled ``Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300-1600.'' In it, he argued that the reason Italy produced so much great art in the Renaissance was that a particular group of rich consumers - merchants, nobles and clergy - commissioned and paid for it for their own pleasure and glory.
Legend extols starving artists like van Gogh, but in fact many of the greatest artists understood commerce and thrived: Durer, Rubens, Bosch, Picasso, even Goya. At the National Gallery of Art (an example of appropriate federal funding of the arts), you can see the fruits of this kind of commercialism in the current exhibit of the magnificent work of James McNeill Whistler.
Believe it or not, smart consumers with good taste can elicit better art than neutral and benign government agencies.
As Goldthwaite says about museums today: ``These veritable temples to the consumption habits of the past, where we worship as art one of the dynamics that gives life to the economic system of the West, mark the supreme achievement of capitalism.''
But Goldthwaite's paean to consumerism also raises a key question: If the raw forces of supply and demand are enough to produce great art, why have we seen so little of it in the past 30 years? The NEA can't be solely to blame. After all, the 1980s made a lot of people rich, but few of them used their money to commission the contemporary equivalent of an altarpiece painting by Botticelli.
Of course, there's a chicken-and-egg problem: No modern Botticelli, no demand for his work. So why is there a paucity of artists? Tibor Scitovsky, another innovative economist, has a theory: ``Thanks to our technical inventiveness, we have greatly increased the effectiveness of labor power in producing comfort, but novelty and its stimulus spring largely from imagination, and we have not managed to increase the effectiveness of human imagination in producing novelty.''
The inevitable result: Novelty, the wellspring of great art, prices itself out of the market. Relative to ``comfort'' goods, art is too expensive to produce, so the creative people who normally would become artists head for other lines of work.
Another economist, William J. Baumol, writes that certain sectors such as art, in which productivity gains are impossible, suffer from ``cost disease.'' That's why, as Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., a Baumol fan, recently pointed out, there were 228 shows on Broadway in 1925 but only 19 today.
This, then, is the background for government support of art: It's an example of market failure. It's a public good that's just too costly for the private sector to support alone.
Sorry, but I don't buy this argument. The private sector may have failed, but government is no substitute. The NEA has spent $2.5 billion in the past 15 years alone and, in terms of high art (as opposed to crafts and folk dances) has almost nothing to show for it.
Let's wait for great patrons to arrive on the scene once again to inspire and enrich great artists. In the meantime, let's keep government and art separate - and remember that it's art that's worth living for, not government.
As Whistler, a man who never received an NEA grant, put it in 1885: ``False again, the fabled link between the grandeur of Art and the glories and virtues of the State, for Art feeds not upon nations, and peoples may be wiped from the face of the earth, but Art is.'' Exactly.
James K. Glassman writes on financial affairs for The Washington Post.
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