“A Fancy Kind of Poodle.”
By H.C. Johns
(Cross-posted at The Other Right)
Given the special kind of hostility I usually reserve for the National Review’s web content, I was surprised by just how good Michael Knox Beran’s piece on the ideology of the National Endowment for the Arts is. As usual, there’s a nod to the to the standard “lazy artists on public dole” dreck, but the rest of the piece is great. Take a peek:
The NEA, in “bringing,” as it professes to do, “great art to all 50 states, including rural areas, inner cities, and military bases,” is a $155-million-a-year import-export business. It exports art from places where it is made to places where it is not made, much as a businessman might export plastic toys from China to California or Connecticut. This is a palliative.
The NEA’s import-export approach to the arts derives from its flawed Romantic model of creativity. In the Romantic model the artist is an alienated, Byronic figure. He lives in a kind of artistic industrial zone, typically a bohemian neighborhood in a great city, and he mingles, for the most part, with other artists. He is not part of a larger community in the way Aeschylus and Sophocles were part of Athens; instead, the artist has, ever since the Romantic revolution, been estranged from civic life, his existence a kind of protest.
By trucking artists from their lofts in Tribeca or their garrets in San Francisco — a disproportionate amount of NEA money goes to California and New York — into “rural areas, inner cities, and military bases,” the NEA perpetuates the Romantic stereotype of the artist as alien, a circus performer who has only the slenderest relation to the non-artistic natives. Such an artist may be on closer terms with his metropolitan patrons: but they patronize him precisely because he is a weirdo, an expensive pet on par with a fancy type of poodle.
I’ve written before about how the decline of localized culture fits into small town brain drain, and Beran’s article highlights one approach to this issue on the policy front. The NEA is the largest of a group of institutions whose policies reinforce the idea of art as a thing undertaken in urban venues, by urban people, and in directions unrelated (if not openly hostile) to the cultures it is exported to. If localist Front-Porcher types are looking for ways to reverse the decline of Middle American small towns, this might be a feasible starting place, policy-wise: make the NEA’s goal to encourage culture in the places it already exists by shifting funding priorities to localized talent, and away from the export model that Beran describes. Making smaller towns viable places to launch and maintain a creative career could be an important component in making them viable communities in the long-term, though given the huge economic forces arrayed against them I hesitate to think that this (or any) policy is capable of really reversing their decline. Still, one must try, and the humanities are as good a place as any to start.
Filed under: media/culture
Great Post. Artistic types have been migrating to cities for a long time, but your point about fostering a culture of artistic alienation in cities and then exporting the product to the hicks is spot on.
My only point of disagreement is that artists have always clustered together. For instance, New Hope Pennsylvania was a locus of artistic activity for years. In part this was because New Hope, as an old mill town was both cheap and scenic. The locals were generally accepting of the artists because the artists brought in a bit of money. It also had excellent rail access to Philadelphia and New York. New Hope is now a gentrified faux bohemian tourist town catering to rich yuppies and homosexuals. Actual artists are getting scarce due to the cost of living in such a milieu.
Perhaps what the NEA should do is to view art as just another tool in urban renewal. All around the country it is the artists and antique dealers who gentrify neighborhoods only to be priced out by yuppies.
As an official Front Porcher, I would say that neither the NR post nor this one knows what it’s talking about. For most of its history, the NEA was little more than a grant-making institution, where is gave grants primarily to cosmopolitan artists in cosmopolitan centers; it was, thus, just the sort of institution anyone concerned with local community might rightly villify.
Under Dana Gioia’s stewardship, the wide range of new initiatives did not seek to “bring artists” from the cosmopolis to the cultural frontieres. It sought to sprout local programs in locales all over the country, and to build up self-sustaining arts programs in those communities.
One can spy Romanticism just about anywhere, if one uses a loose enough definition of the term. In the present instance, I would call its use a naive smear and a superfluous slander.
Of the many initiatives begun during Gioia’s tenure, the most impressive was the restoration of poetry recitation contests. Students were given the opportunity to memorize any poem from a short, but excellent, anthology of lyrics, ballads, and other short poems and to compete in their recitation in a multi-round tournament after the fashion of a spelling bee.
After decades of garbage about teaching students to “learn to learn,” getting them simply to memorize and retain great language will probably have a greater effect on the quality of their speech and their sense of language than twelve sorry years of public school language arts combined.
Gioia, of course, has departed, and one can probably expect that the NEA will return to its typical, feeble ways. If you want a critic of much of its work, I’m your man; but I would beg you to choose for criticism those programs that actually merit opprobrium.