Bauerlein is having buyer's regret here. He's been lying down with dogs for a long time and surprise! now he's got fleas. It's very hard to keep culture wars from becoming wars against culture.
There is a study to be done about how the conservative high-art set, The New Criterion and the like, took the maxim that any enemy of their enemy is their friend to their anti-liberalism, into fantastically twisted defences of Trumpism. John Ganz did a piece on Roger Kimball some years ago, if I remember
I struggle to recall any progressive saying, during the Biden years, that the use of the NEA for instrumental political purposes was deleterious to art regardless of the associated politics and that such behavior should be discontinued. The progressive view is that art should be used in this way: it follows from the progressive declamation that all art is political that art that isn't promoting progressivism is countering it.
One of the chief reasons to wind down the NEA is that it has no path back to art for art sake. If progressives only sniff their noses up at didacticism when it's oriented patriotically (I'm not accusing you of this, but other writers complaining about Trump's directives for the organization), then the game is given away. The antagonists are just using a branch of government to hector their enemies at taxpayer expense and turnabout is fair play. The libertarian argument to dissolve the weapon is the only moral one.
"One of the chief reasons to wind down the NEA is that it has no path back to art for art sake." You seem to be implying that, indeed, all art is political nowadays. (A truly frightening thought...)
I remember that Dave Hickey made a similar point about the NEA. He argued for a free-market approach to art creation and consumption, by saying that art was basically political, and attempted to create constituencies out of like minded viewers. He said that by binding art to a government bureaucracy, constant curation became more important than the quality of art being displayed. Maybe we’ve lost our taste for transgression, which seems to me one of the best ways for art to approach culture without merely echoing or being reactionary to it.
Cato is utterly deplorable, still calling balls and strikes as Trump sets up concentration camps (bad) and strips regulations (good). Everybody decent there left for Niskanen a while back
Whitman, Twain, Berlin, Fitzgerald . . . none of these people got funding from the NEH or the NEA. Instead, all of them participated in the marketplace of the public square, and that was what made their work so strong. And that's been true for almost every other major American cultural figure. The paradigm of state funding of the arts is inevitably corrupting, because it creates an environment where artists are creating works in order to satisfy bureaucratic gatekeepers rather than the general public.
I'd argue against this framing, Mr. Whitfield. It would imply that any government-commissioned or government-supported art -- not just NEA-commissioned -- is intrinsically corrupted by the public/political nature of its commission. As the post notes, this could be said of any privately commissioned or supported art as well . . . or, for that matter, of any art that is designed to sell to specific individuals or the general public. The "marketplace of the public square" seems no less intrinsically "corrupting" than the marketplace of "bureaucratic gatekeepers." It's just that "marketplace of the public square" conforms to certain presumed virtues under some frameworks and "bureaucratic gatekeepers" is designed as a pejorative in that free-market frame. (A very large portion of canonical art in human history has been the product of some form of sponsorship by government or politically situated patronage, and every government-commissioned building or monument is tainted by the mark of bureaucratic gatekeepers to whom the architect or designer must appeal.)
Bauerlein is having buyer's regret here. He's been lying down with dogs for a long time and surprise! now he's got fleas. It's very hard to keep culture wars from becoming wars against culture.
There is a study to be done about how the conservative high-art set, The New Criterion and the like, took the maxim that any enemy of their enemy is their friend to their anti-liberalism, into fantastically twisted defences of Trumpism. John Ganz did a piece on Roger Kimball some years ago, if I remember
I struggle to recall any progressive saying, during the Biden years, that the use of the NEA for instrumental political purposes was deleterious to art regardless of the associated politics and that such behavior should be discontinued. The progressive view is that art should be used in this way: it follows from the progressive declamation that all art is political that art that isn't promoting progressivism is countering it.
One of the chief reasons to wind down the NEA is that it has no path back to art for art sake. If progressives only sniff their noses up at didacticism when it's oriented patriotically (I'm not accusing you of this, but other writers complaining about Trump's directives for the organization), then the game is given away. The antagonists are just using a branch of government to hector their enemies at taxpayer expense and turnabout is fair play. The libertarian argument to dissolve the weapon is the only moral one.
"One of the chief reasons to wind down the NEA is that it has no path back to art for art sake." You seem to be implying that, indeed, all art is political nowadays. (A truly frightening thought...)
Strictly speaking, there's no political art, only propaganda and art interpreted politically. But there may be no apolitical use of the NEA.
I remember that Dave Hickey made a similar point about the NEA. He argued for a free-market approach to art creation and consumption, by saying that art was basically political, and attempted to create constituencies out of like minded viewers. He said that by binding art to a government bureaucracy, constant curation became more important than the quality of art being displayed. Maybe we’ve lost our taste for transgression, which seems to me one of the best ways for art to approach culture without merely echoing or being reactionary to it.
Cato is utterly deplorable, still calling balls and strikes as Trump sets up concentration camps (bad) and strips regulations (good). Everybody decent there left for Niskanen a while back
I don't think either Whitman or Twain would last long in Trump's America.
Whitman, Twain, Berlin, Fitzgerald . . . none of these people got funding from the NEH or the NEA. Instead, all of them participated in the marketplace of the public square, and that was what made their work so strong. And that's been true for almost every other major American cultural figure. The paradigm of state funding of the arts is inevitably corrupting, because it creates an environment where artists are creating works in order to satisfy bureaucratic gatekeepers rather than the general public.
I'd argue against this framing, Mr. Whitfield. It would imply that any government-commissioned or government-supported art -- not just NEA-commissioned -- is intrinsically corrupted by the public/political nature of its commission. As the post notes, this could be said of any privately commissioned or supported art as well . . . or, for that matter, of any art that is designed to sell to specific individuals or the general public. The "marketplace of the public square" seems no less intrinsically "corrupting" than the marketplace of "bureaucratic gatekeepers." It's just that "marketplace of the public square" conforms to certain presumed virtues under some frameworks and "bureaucratic gatekeepers" is designed as a pejorative in that free-market frame. (A very large portion of canonical art in human history has been the product of some form of sponsorship by government or politically situated patronage, and every government-commissioned building or monument is tainted by the mark of bureaucratic gatekeepers to whom the architect or designer must appeal.)