Culture Rover

should the u.s. government have a secretary of the arts?

What is most striking about the current push for — and backlash against — establishing a federal Department of the Arts is that debates about the state’s role in sponsoring art almost instantly become referenda on the nature of American democracy. Thinking about the funding of art seems to bring out divergent opinions of what exactly American democracy is.

On one side, proponents of establishing a European-style culture ministry contend that the U.S. needs to bring “coherence” to support for artistic endeavors in order to better protect and preserve the national cultural treasures of the country. They go so far as to argue that a more coherent arts policy could bring a stronger sense of unity to the polity at home and improve U.S. relations around the world.

On the other side, opponents of creating a federal level department of arts and culture think that government funding and organizing would inevitably bureaucratize what is the best quality of American arts (and by implication American democracy): its decentralized, anarchic, disorderly nature.

Albert M. Bender, Art Project in Chicago Illinois, 1940.

This is, in a new form, a replay of FDR’s New Deal vs. Republican opposition. It’s the 1930s all over again in more ways than one: economic crisis not only leads to political reevaluations, but also raises debates about what role culture should play in the fate of the republic.

The story runs deeper, too, as it always does. The current debate contains weird echoes from the struggles between federalists and republicans, circa 1800. The question returns again in America: which is the best way to foster a robust democracy? Hamiltonian centralization or Jeffersonian decentralization?

Centralization promises more opportunities for artists, and in doing so, it might also, somewhat contradictorily, better protect the diversity of American arts and culture. This is the “coherence” that supporters seek: a way to identify and rectify imbalances in artistic support in order to defend the pluralism of American culture.

Not so, opponents claim. Suspicious that “coherence” would inevitably narrow opportunities for the arts to palatable forms because of the political risks involved with supporting the marginal or edgy, they long to guard the arts against what they see as the tyranny — even the unintentional, well-intentioned tyranny — of centralization.

They would rather risk impoverishment. A Department of the Arts would, they believe, put us into the movie Culture Wars: The Sequel, in which Al D’Amato and Jesse Helms wannabes will win easy political points for once again pulling the crucifix out of the jar of urine.

Poster created by  Federal Art Project in New York City, 1936-1941.

Both positions on state funding for the arts — and on American democracy as a whole — warrant more explication and a willingness to entertain uneasy questions.

The opponents,  such as CultureGrrl, contend that a national arts department would turn culture into a “political football” as it has done in the past. But this seems rather like blaming the victim. Arts and culture are already politicized. After all, it is the fear of political manipulation that motivates CultureGrrl and others to petition against a Secretary of the Arts.

But they do raise an intriguing point: is it the pluralistic disorder, the messy incongruences and lack of unity, that defines the arts in America (and by implication, democracy in America)? How would a centralized authority enrich and extend this distinctive quality of American culture through political means? How to bring “coherence” to what is, at its most ideal, something profoundly and beautifully incoherent? The problem is a real one.

And yet, as suggested above, it is indeed the very problem FDR faced with the American economy in the 1930s. You could not protect liberty anymore, FDR discovered, by constraining state power; in a complex industrial economy, individuals were too weak to claim hold of their freedom. Most would lose their liberty to the elite economic powers who stepped into the void left behind by limited state power.

This is essentially the position taken by supporters of a national-level Department of Arts and Culture. Former National Endowment for the Arts head Bill Ivey, for instance, argues that when the state does not step in to fund, monitor, and shape cultural life, the market commodifies and conquers the civic dimensions of art and culture. What should be our common heritage becomes at best watered down and at worst destroyed in the march of corporate consumerism. The mad, disorganized dash for profit from and funding for the arts leads to a profoundly undemocratic disorder, rather than a democratic one.

On balance, the supporters strike me as on the right track. However, they need to address more clearly the critique of CultureGrrl and others. The question is: How can the U.S. create a central authority whose purpose is not just to cohere the arts into a treasure of national heritage? This is a worthy project in of itself, but it should not be the only purpose of a Department of the Arts. If it is, the use of central power will ironically work against the desire of supporters to bring out the best in American aesthetic life. Daring, unexpected, and challenging art will fall by the wayside of consensus-affirming culture.

In the rush to support a Department of the Arts during what many supporters feel is a historic opening, proponents are not confronting the deeper challenges of such an agency. If a Department of the Arts could also find a way to unleash the unruly, pluralistic, and profoundly democratic republic of arts and culture in America, it would do a great service not only to American aesthetics, but also to American democracy.

Alexander Dux, WPA/Federal Art Project poster, 1939.

If the puzzle of centralization and disorder, coherence and incoherence, could be solved (or weirdly, not solved but rather transformed into a puzzle whose pieces keep spinning and never fall into place), then a Department of the Arts would be a fine thing. Politics and culture could come together in a robust, multi-roomed mansion of the people, a palace of the commons, a culture in motion, where arts and policy would dance together.

Sometimes they would dance in unison, sometimes they would step on each other’s feet. Sometimes the music would be an old Appalachian fiddle tune, sometimes it would be a John Cage composition. Sometimes they would be gazing up at Thomas Hart Benton murals and sometimes at obscene Maplethorpe photographs. Sometimes they would whisper back and forth about infrastructure appropriations, sometimes they would stop and fight about abortion and the death penalty. Sometime arts and policy would leave the party happy, and sometimes they would never want to speak to each other again. But the dance would go on.

I’d like to be at that party. If my tax dollars can go to what seem to be unjust and illegal wars overseas, why can’t they go to figuring out the right way to fund the arts and culture at home?