State Support For the Arts: A Question of National Survival

Richard Jackson, 1987

If it weren't for the emperor Charlemange, for his extensive program of public support for the arts, the very page I'm reading from today would be different, for it is printed in letters that originated in the manuscript copies of ancient classic works Charlemange ordered preserved. In fact, that these letters are called Roman only points out the fact that it was his Christian empire's public support of the arts that led to the collecting and preserving of so much of western cultural heritage we find so valuable, from Greek Plato to Roman Vergil. What he initiated, the so called "Carolingian Revival," was successful in civilizing his basically semibarbarian realm, in bringing art not just to the nobles, but to the rising middle class of artisans and tradesmen, and also to the lower classes whom he felt would be ennobled. It was Charlemagne himself who traveled to Italy to see what aspects of Classic architecture could be adopted to his publicly funded building programs. It was Charlemagne who encouraged the monks to copy sacred texts and encouraged the embellished versions-- what we call "illuminated manuscripts" -- the Utrecht psalter and the Ebbo gospels, for example, which are the first creative impulses for what would later become the flourishing of Renaissance art. And it was the rule of Charlemagne, followed by the equally state supported public arts programs of Otto I, that led to the Romanesque revival throughout Europe.

As intriguing as Charlemagne's story and importance are in the history of public support for the arts, I might just as well have begun with Pisistratus, the Athenian leader who set out to make Athens a cultural center. It was Pisistratus who gathered foreign poets to his court on the public payroll, who arranged for the state to patronize artists and sculptors, who improved and planned public shrines. It was Pisistratus who had the city state hire minstrels to go around reciting the epics and hymns of Homer so that his works, till then only available to a privileged few, would be available to everyone. It was Pisistratus who brought folk dance and dialogue performances together in the city from their birthplaces in the countryside which led, eventually, to their transformation into the great Greek plays we know today. It was Pisistratus who first started great public festivals of the arts available to all citizens to honor the city. For the Athenians, it was only natural that a democracy should pay the cost of supporting its literature, art, and music in the same way it supported its fitting out of warships, manufacture of spears and shields, its running of the government.

The governments of Pisistratus and Charlemagne, and the many governments before and after them, or at least the ones who were influential enough for us to remember, have understood the importance of public support of the arts: commissioned buildings, statues, paintings, literary works, music have enriched the lives of their citizens because of that support. One might think of the famous Uffizi gallery in Florence, originally a public building designed by the painter and architect Vasari through a grant from the city fathers; or we could think of the vast amount of music composed by Mozart commissioned and paid for by his emperor; or we could think of Rodin's "Monument to Victor Hugo" commissioned by the French republic, or his "The Burghers of Calais," commissioned by the city of Calais; we could go back to remember that Vergil's Aeneid was a state sponsored epic poem commissioned by Augustus; we could go back to the famous Egyptian library of Ptolemy I at Alexandria. It is in this great tradition that perhaps the most famous NEA sponsored project was completed, for it was two NEA grants that funded the sight search and then the design competition that resulted in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

It could have been Pisistratus who wrote: "the world leadership which has come to [us] cannot rest solely upon superior power, wealth and technology, but must be solidly founded upon worldwide respect and admiration for the nation's high qualities as a leader in the realm of ideas and of the spirit." But it was not; those are the enabling words of the Act of 1965 which founded the National Endowment for the Arts, the public arts agency most under fire recently. They are words born of a vision that goes back as far as Pisistratus and the Athenians, a vision that says that the soul of the country resides in its creative energy and that this soul is manifest in what we call culture. It is a vision which suggests that it is not only the function and duty of the state to promote the arts for the sake of its citizens and for the quality of its life, but also for the state's very survival, its very ability to endure spiritual challenges from within and from without. This is exactly what President Eisenhower meant in his 1955 State of the Union Address: "In the advancement of the various activities which would make our civilization endure and flourish, the federal government should do more to give official recognition to the importance of the arts and other cultural activities." What Eisenhower was doing was recognizing the enormous stake a state has in supporting the arts, a view George Washington espoused when he wrote that arts are "essential to the prosperity of the state." It was what John Adams meant when he wanted his grandchildren to be able to have "the right to study painting, poetry, music and architecture." It was what led to 19th century discussion in Congress that led to public funding for the Smithsonian Institution, for the Library of Congress, for the Freer gallery.

But this is not to suggest that America has been unambivalent in its support for the arts. It is interesting to compare the American and French revolutions on one point. The king's palace was taken over by the revolutionaries and made into the Louvre, the best art museum in the world and a hallmark of French culture and spirit. American revolutionaries had to wait until 1938 when Andrew Mellon donated a building for a parallel national gallery. And though we don't have a tradition of state support for the arts that the admired and emulated cultures of Europe do, a tradition based on classic, feudal and renaissance models, there is a tradition nonetheless., as I have started to suggest. Perhaps this tradition begins to flower with increased public and private cooperation in this century. For example, the Armory show of 1913 which introduced European modernism to this country was a show that had the effect of revitalizing American art so that by 1934 Time magazine could describe a distinctly regional American art. The growth of society in the first half of this century was also a growth in demand for the arts and led to such things as American dominance of modern art by the 1940's, an American's winning of the Moscow music competition in 1938, and, in the public sector, the state sponsored WPA work projects that included paintings, plays, commissions for public buildings, statues, even he appearance of art in department stores. One of the great and distinctive works of American art, Walker Evans' great photographs done with government support through the New Deal's Resettlement Administration. We should note, too, that since the NEA began, every Pulitzer prize winning play had its origins in an NEA sponsored theater.What all this has led to is the beginnings of a change in the way we see the place of our culture. As President Reagan's Task Force on the Arts reported, Americans now see culture not as something we import but something we also export. A recent US News and World Report said: "the artistic impulse that created this golden age and lifted America to its position of world leadership was aided immeasurably by the National Endowment for the Arts."

I should add, too, that as crucial as the examples of Charlemagne and Pisistratus are for my argument, they constitute only a small chapter in the history of public support for the arts which our country has started to participate in. It is a long history of public support that has given us the vast majority of every major artwork-- music, sculpture, painting, literature, architecture-- that we have today and which we define as our western tradition. What sort of a cultural tradition would we have today if in the past, for example, the city states of Venice, Florence, Pisa and innumerable other states did not have the vision to understand that the good life for their citizens meant a close connection to the arts. These states realized that the arts contributed to active, creative, informed citizens and that these qualities get translated into industrious, forward looking, problem solving citizens. Such city-wide programs in the United States have been funded by the NEA under its Design Arts program and other programs such as Challenge grants, expansion grants, advancement grants, and individual fellowships: these are all meant to act as catalysts for private funding and they generate thousands of dollars of business for each dollar spent. Such programs have transformed Portland, Oregon, for one example, into a sort of thriving Florence of America, a center for music, arts, theater, literature, a city now noted for the design of its public buildings and the breadth of its public arts programs. It is a city companies want to locate in and people want to live in. Similar projects have begun to revitalize the waterfront in Baltimore as well as sections of Charleston SC, Minneapolis, Galveston and numerous other cities. In Boston and Roxbury three NEA grants for a total of only $84,000 have led to a Museum of History of Blacks in Boston and the American revolution, a heritage trail, and various restoration projects that have begun to economically and culturally revitalize the community.

Such projects reveal the two basic aims of the NEA as defined in its 1965 Declaration of Purpose: the first is "to foster excellence, diversity, and vitality of the arts in the United States." This is achieved by exactly the sort of diversified programs described above affecting as many people as possible in as many different, interlinking ways as possible. The second charge directly echoes the proven programs of Charlemagne and Pisistratus, not to say the programs of the renaissance city states, and all the countries whose cultures we define as central to our western culture: "to help broaden the availability and appreciation of such excellence, diversity and vitality." The NEA realizes that these are not simply qualities of art, but of clear and creative thinking people and societies everywhere.

This is why, for instance, John Scully, Chair of Apple Computer, writes: "I want to work with people whose imaginations have been unleashed and who tackle problems as challenges rather than as obstacles. An education enriched by the creative arts should be considered essential for everyone." Kenneth Derr, head of Chevron USA, writes in support of public supported arts education programs, a cornerstone of the NEA: "Every part of a vital society depends upon creative thought. The world in which we live and work, and in which we create our future, should be a world in which new ideas are valued, and where restless creative minds seek better ways of doing things. The energy that keeps a child's foot tapping, that paints purple leaves on a pink tree, that ranges freely in an open world of the imagination, will bring to our society a vitality that will energize any corner in which it finds itself." That is why, as Governor Campbell of South Carolina once said, it is no secret that the Japanese have perhaps the most productive and technologically innovative country in the world, and they at the same time their public policy also requires "intensive sequential arts education from kindergarten through twelfth grade." IBM, Ford, Apple and Hewlett Packard Computer companies have set about lately convincing others about the importance of creative design packaging, -- of art in business, that is. Much of the impetus for this awareness has come from the fact that the NEA in 1988 and 1989 provided $82,000 in support of TRIAD, the first major comparative, international study of the role of industrial design in manufacture of successful products, a study that received a lot more attention among our competitors in Japan and Germany than it did here.

But let's say for a moment that we abandon the NEA, this agency which has drawn the most fire lately. What are we giving up? What are we willing to give up? Are we willing to give up projects like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington that has gone so far to healing a nation? Perhaps some of the other public monuments, art works, really, funded by public monies? The NEA, for instance, works with a variety of grant programs, some of which I've already mentioned, and its grants are matched on the average by $5 of other funds for every NEA dollar. The agency acts as a catalyst to initiate projects and seed funding from private sources which has, by the way, increased thirty fold by some counts since the agency started leading the way with such matching programs. Here are several statistics showing changes in our cultural life since 1965 when the NEA began. In 1965 there were 650 nonprofit presses publishing artistic books, today there are 3743; in 1965 there were 60 local arts agencies, today over 3,000; in 1965 there were 110 symphonies, today there are 230; in 1965 there were 37 professional dance companies, today 250; in 1965 there were 375 significant museums, today 700; in 1965 there were 27 opera companies, today 120; in 1965 there were 56 nonprofit theaters, today 420. This is a list we could go on with for longer than I have time for. What should we give up since most of these will collapse without NEA financial and artistic support? And we should remember that the PBS Great Performances, the American Playhouse, American Masters, Live From the Lincoln Center and numerous other T.V. programs are funded directly or indirectly by NEA.

Perhaps it is a question of money, and certainly any state must allocate its resources by what's available. Let's not kid ourselves -- art has never paid its own way, and if past cultures had asked it to we would have no artistic tradition to speak of today. Even in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia recently, countries with strong literary traditions, the rise of the profit motive has meant the publication of inexpensive pulp novels at the expense of what we would call serious art. It may very well mean that those Eastern European countries, where poets and playwrites have actively and directly exhibited the very qualities Pisistratus and Charlemange valued so highly by becoming heads of states, may fall into cultural decline if they cannot restructure a democratic support system for the arts. It was because of such economic realities that Pisistratus and Charlemange, for example, knew that the general population needed encouragement. And closer to home we might mention that while a gathering of 18 American and European writers received scant and misleading attention in one of the local papers, The Chattanooga Times, the same paper published a story about a popular romance writer visiting the area that received five times the space, a picture and front page coverage in an inside section of the paper. Serious art, I mean to remind us, and as I will argue this case more thoroughly in a few moments, is not popular and comfortable, but rather difficult in its questioning of our everyday assumptions-- and so, less popular in our general culture. But as far as figures go, let's remember that in the case of the NEA we are talking about $179,000,000 in a $1,000,000,000,000 (trillion) dollar national budget. That's about .0000179 of the federal budget. That's.0018%. That's less than the Pentagon's Military Band program by over 10 million dollars. That's less than the USA spent in the first few hours of the Gulf war. For all arts programs in the USA, we spend .71 cents a person a year. In Germany, a country that has a long tradition of state supported art, and so a tremendously influential culture and an economy that is supplanting ours in the world, the figure is $73 per person. In fact most other civilized countries realize what Pisistratus knew, that the arts, while they generate spending in other areas, are not money making enterprises and need public support to survive in the long run. That is why the per capita figure for arts spending in France was $32. In the Netherlands $33. In Italy $31. In Sweden $30. In the USA, I repeat, less than a dollar per capita.

Several years back, Arthur Schlesinger wrote: "we will win world understanding of our policy and purposes not through the force of our arms or the array of our wealth but through the splendor of our ideals." Well, we might add, we must think our ideals amount to about .71 cents worth of influence, according to the figures I just mentioned. Now this lack of foresight on our part raises another issue, perhaps the real issue here today. An essential ingredient in those ideals Schlesinger writes about is freedom of thought. As Senator Yates once said: "The communists tell their artists what to do with their art. We don't." But of course, the very notion of censorship and state control of the arts is the reason controversy about federal and state funding of any art is now an issue at all. A lot of criticism is based on misinformation, if not outright lies. For example, one allegation says that the NEA granted $20,000 to fund a photo of Senator Helms in urine, whereas the truth of the matter is that $8,000 was funded for a full season of exhibitions, only a fraction of the local arts organization's budget anyways, and the photo, which had him in beer, not urine, was in a show whose total cost was $180. We could go through every allegation and prove them equally or more misleading: Andre Serrano's work depicting Christ in urine was created before the partial funding by the NEA to an organization which also funded many other projects besides his (other agencies funding the granting organization were the Rockefeller Foundation and Equitable Foundations). Even the Mapplethorpe exhibit was part of a program of shows by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, and only for that city, not even for Chicago and other places where the controversy arose loudly, and only 7 of the 120 photos were deemed objectionable by critics.

But the issue is really not numbers and dollars and percentages, though these suggest the very important consideration that critics unphased by accuracy and misleading information in their criticisms are considerably dishonest. This dishonesty includes the President of the Massachusetts based "Morality in Media" who had this to offer about the Mapplethorpe exhibit: "People looking at these kind of pictures become addicts and spread AIDS." And it includes not only current critics but those like Senator Robert Reynolds who condemned the WPA theater project in 1940 for obscene material, material that even the staunchist critic today would not blush at. In fact, we should note here that only 15 of the over 85,000 grants made by the NEA over the years have been considered dubious on any grounds. But the issue is, finally, how strong we think our democracy is. It is easy to allow other views by different groups, whether these are artistic, political or social views-- when we agree with them. But that is not the measure of a democracy, of any state's strength, really, as Schlesinger knew, as Pisistratus knew, as Charlemange knew, as Washington knew. That's easy; the real measure of a democracy is how many of these divergent artistic views a democracy has the faith to allow. The real measure of a democracy is how many criticisms it has the faith to listen to at once. The real test of a democracy is how much it trusts its own citizens to judge for themselves, to think independently and not by party line or by bumper sticker slogan. The censors in our country don't believe this. These people simply don't trust democracy. They want to dictate taste because they are afraid the values they hold will vanish: they don't, for my money, have enough faith in their democracy. Take the Rev. Wildman's recent campaign against the NEA. His people sent 50,000 postcards, but, ironically, they were mostly preprinted. Well, now there's free thinking and self expression and independence of thought for you. There's a man who doesn't trust his own followers to write a postcard; how could he ever trust them to read on their own, or even compose a poem? or paint a picture?

By contrast, Pisistratus sponsored state drama and poetry that was satire, and the object of that satire was the state itself, the very government and the officials supporting it. Today, in the face of increasing censorship in the USA and the loosening of censorship laws in the rest of the world, it seems that those censoring groups in our country simply don't have Pisistratus' faith in their democracy. President John Kennedy said in October of 1963: "If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him." These censoring groups don't have Kennedy's faith in their democracy. Lyndon Johnson said that government should not "seek to restrict the freedom of the artist to pursue his goals in his own way." These censoring groups don't have Johnson's faith in their democracy.

And we might add the words of Czeslaw Milosz, the exiled Polish poet and Nobel prize winner whose country has a rich artistic tradition, when he talks about the way that so many Americans have narrowed their focus in art, which is to say, for him, in politics, too: he says that too many Americans "have never undergone the experiences that teach men how relative their judgements and thinking habits are. Their resultant lack of imagination is appalling. Because they were born and raised in a given social order and in a given system of values, they believe that any other order must be 'unnatural,' and that it cannot last because it is incompatible with human nature." What Milosz sees lacking in many quarters is precisely what art fosters: imagination, creative and independent thinking, self criticism and criticism of the status quo. These are the values a state not only should foster, but must foster if it is to survive in the long run, if it is to grow, if its spirit, as in the visions of Kennedy, Johnson, and Washington, is to be a world influence.

Even from the individual artist's point of view, I believe that the state does not have to become a "ministry of culture" that will dictate works (this is, by the way, a clever metaphor, "ministry," meant to suggest some Stalinist plot). History tells us, in all the examples I have given, that attempts at censorship will always be with us, and creative artists will always find creative ways around these attempts. It happened with Vergil. It happened with the painter,Veronese, whose picture of the Last Supper was rejected by the Church-- he simply changed the name. It happened with Michaelangelo who had to cover up the private parts of God and Adam on the Sistine chapel ceiling, but did so with draped clothing that was more than suggestive. Censorship happens today with various copyright laws, not just the more publicized forms we hear the loudest outcry about. For example, a recent New York Times article described censorship in the form of laws dictating quotation from private papers and interviews that is about to seriously restrict the writing of biographies. In fact, we might say that one aim of art is simply to probe and test such laws. The question of possible censorship, then, is a related to but also very distinct from the question of public support for the arts; censorship is an issue that must be worked out later, as it has always been worked out through the ages.

From this perspective of the individual artist, we might also look at the example of James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men which shows us how pervasive censorship is in everyday life, how naive it is to think that just by eliminating a so-called "Ministry of Culture" that censorship will disappear. This highly acclaimed and unique book was written during the depression after Agee and the photographer Walker Evans, whom I mentioned earlier, on loan to Time Magazine from the Federal Government, traveled among the poor of Alabama to record their lives. In a sense, the Government indirectly and Agee's publishers more directly imposed forms of censorship. Time, for example, kept the pressure up for a certain journalistic style that Agee successfully subverted, and the publisher made him take out certain words "illegal in Massachusetts." For Agee, art was always something that went against society's restrictions, as a sort of needed conscience for society, but is always doomed to be tamed, diluted by society: "Every fury on earth has been absorbed in time as art, or as religion, or as authority in one form or another," he writes in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. As Agee knew, forms of repression have always occurred, are always points to be negotiated or circumvented by the artist.

In a larger sense, I suppose I have been arguing a vision of our American democracy, one that embodies the ideals of Pisistratus and Charlemagne with respect to the need for art among the citizenry, for the aims of the presidents of Apple Computer and Chevron for a creative thinking and problem solving workforce, for the aims of Washington, Eisenhower and Kennedy for a creative and enlightened populace, the aims of Mr. Schlesinger and the NEA for an multi-faceted American culture that will make some good difference in the world. I believe that these ideals mean that there is no need to censor art in particular if we have faith in our democracy's ability to be an arena of competing ideas and not a one party and totalitarian rule; rather, we should support it in general, without restrictions, as a buffer between government control and the individual artist, just as its 1965 "declaration of Purpose" clearly states. As Nobel prize winning writer Robert Penn Warren has said: art involves the "destruction of order for the sake of reordering." I suppose this sort of self examination takes some courage not just for the artists ut for the general population. So, yes, as several artists have said, from Plato to Shakespeare to Emerson, art is subversive; but it is subversive in a healthy way, for the purpose of art, as Milan Kundera, the exiled Czech novelist has said, is to ask questions-- about our values, our conscience, our vision. They may be uncomfortable questions, but a great democracy, I believe, will encourage such questionings, --even pay for it-- will encourage a free market system of competing ideals and visions. I believe that it is precisely through programs such as the NEA offers that such a spirit will continue to thrive and to grow. If there are not enough of us that have that faith in our democracy, it will not remain a democracy for long. There's a lot at stake here, the survival of the state, and so, finally, the state's legitimate, dutiful concern. No, I am not arguing that art will save us, that state support for the arts will save our nation, but it can go a long ways, as Pisistratus and Charlemagne knew, as Washington and Kennedy knew, to giving us the creative habits of mind by which we can save ourselves.