Questions of Taste (and Power)

Pat Buchanan's terror campaign in the Republican primaries has weakened and disoriented George Bush, and I can't say I'm sorry. It has also forced debate about the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) back into the headlines--on the most skewed and reactionary of terms. Never mind that Buchanan's homophobic NEA attack ads were themselves the sleaziest things seen on broadcast TV in this decade. The issue is back out in the arena.

Bush reacted by firing NEA chief John Frohnmayer. His party chairman, Richard Bond, suggested publicly that the government should "get out of this business" of deciding "what is art."

By the time you read this, Buchanan may well have been laid quietly to rest--and the NEA issue with him--for this year. But given Buchanan's success, it is almost certain to return for as long as we have a public arts agency.

Art subsidies do involve some decisions about what is art. But they also involve judgments about what art is necessary or worthy, and, perhaps most important, about who decides. It's a complicated and problematic issue, and one that requires more than 30 second's (or even one page's) worth of thinking. But here goes...

FIRST OF ALL, the Right, for all the wrong reasons, is on to something important with its arguments against subsidies of adventurous and avant-garde art. In a democracy, public money should mean public accountability. So there is good reason to question the expenditure of taxpayers' money on cultural products that are patently offensive, and even repugnant, to a large number of taxpayers.

But (at least in theory) diversity, pluralism, and freedom of expression are the core values of American culture and politics. More so than the sanctity of religious images, the flag, heterosexuality, or certain culturally conditioned language taboos, freedom of expression is what we created a republic to safeguard.

Also, the cultural Left is correct in its charge that the Right is using a few small grants made to obscure artists as a smokescreen to make government an instrument with which to censor a wild and woolly American culture into something more to the Right's liking. The cultural jihad seems especially aimed at eliminating open homosexuality from legitimate public discourse and presentation.

The Right ideology is expressed ultimately by Richard Bond when he suggests that decisions about art should be market decisions. But we have an NEA in the first place--and virtually every other nation on Earth has a (proportionally much larger) arts agency too--because the capitalist market is the enemy of art, not its facilitator. The market generally has room only for those cultural products with proven popularity, high demographics, and a certain bland middle-of-the-road political correctness.

Genuine, and even insurrectionary, expressions of people's culture do make it into the marketplace. But in the process, those expressions, and their expressers, find themselves caught up in a maddening process of commodification which distances them from their community.

The most successful, and interesting, American cultural communicators (for instance Springsteen, Public Enemy, Madonna) understand this process and make it part of their work. Still, left to itself the market works against both innovation and authenticity, and so is death to culture.

Of course liberals in the NEA debate want what liberals always want, to take decisions away from the people and turn them over to trained, credentialed, professional experts. But the real problem with the NEA today is not the funding of a few New York experimenters in sexuality, but the lack of funding for real-life art of the real live people in their communities.

THAT WOULD mean, in music, for instance, public support for popular arts like rock, rap, country, gospel. These are forms available in the commercial culture. But only on market terms. There should be public support for them so that production of these forms does not always have to be divorced and alienated from the cultural communities they represent.

I know there are analogs to these musical examples in dance, drama, and film. And I bet there are in the visual arts, of which I know less.

Of course that doesn't deal with the question of what to do about the patently offensive, really out-there stuff with which the Buchanans make hay. But perhaps it would help address the objections of the sincerely offended if the arts funding process were decentralized. Maybe we could have a national fund that dispersed almost all of its moneys out to the community level where it could be spent by elected councils. Then people could fight the issues out face to face.

If such institutions existed, I'd go to mine and, when it came my turn to vote, I'd say that a healthy culture needs its weirdos and its lunatic fringe. And I hold out hope that, at least in most localities, a majority can be convinced by that position.

In the end, I am convinced that cultural tolerance can't be bred by bureaucratic edict. It can only come from increasing people's daily life exposure to differences and their real-life access to decision-making power.