An Old, Bad Idea for the Arts
Many will say (often in a testy voice) that the arts deserve a cabinet-level presence because they are just as important to the country as the Defense Department. While that's something of an apples and oranges comparison, the deeper problem is that it assumes that the country's defense and its arts can be furthered via the same sort of bureaucratic means. But while our nation's defense would collapse in the absence of the centralized power of our Defense Department, having a Department of Culture -- or even a "Cultural Czar," to use that awful label we've apparently become so fond of -- would be neither an effective nor necessary way to guarantee the health of cultural expression in America.Read David Smith in the WSJ here.
4 comments:
Well for one, this is a Wall Street Journal editorial - the same publication that regularly makes not-so-veiled insults about homosexuals and women. The worldview of WSJ is conservative, and anti-government - so this editorial coming from them isn't even near a surprise. Second, this writer has just regurgitated exactly what is wrong with the public perception of the arts in this country. Instead of championing the artists of the past who have excelled b/c of their individualism, he extorts a commonly-held view of the arts that is embedded in a kind of bitter red state populist screed that has only really been with us for a two or three of decades; that the arts are for the elite few and government participation in it would imply that whatever artists are making by themselves is worthless to anyone who wasn't born (read, privileged) with an appreciation for the arts.
A trend that has been with the US arts community as a real strength for only about a decade or so has been the community arts movement, which has its own whole set of issues and seeks to address the problem of asserting art's 'usefulness' to society by focusing on social change, education, and citizenship. But let's face it; Putting art back into schools is not going to change the way artists express themselves individually; the nation's schools have too much else to worry about before they can worry about how to include the arts in their failing cirriculum plans. Why would artists try to capitalize on an angle in advocacy that they barely have a strength in? For a political battle that they won't win while too many schools are still below par in academics? They can barely get the time with local governments as it is. My argument is not about preservation for artists - it is about taking a top-down approach for once - I am all for having a Cultural Czar.
What is clear to me is that Americans have many ideas about democracy, but secretly, many of them do not like what democracy actually looks like - the government of the US has not, in the past, really gotten into promoting individual visions at higher levels of government because at higher levels of government, political theater and the assertion of common values dominate. The UK has done an excellent job of giving individual artists support because they understand what an artist community looks like in reality; A REALM OF COMPETING VISIONS AND PHILOSOPHIES THAT ARE AVAILABLE TO ANYONE. There has been too much of a focus on streamlining government in the US. The US is obsessed with utility, and the arts community of the US - the cities, the rural areas, the suburban enclaves of creative people that exist, continue to be underfunded because there is no one at a higher level of government that can provide the vision for a realistic arts community to the people that can help give artists more funds to forward the state of the arts in the US.
Arts education in schools? Biggest curve ball for forwarding the arts agenda in this country. Give me a break.
Less government is the best government!
how sweet, did you pull that statement out of cereal box from Dick Cheney's kitchen?
Right, one Culture Czar equals big government. The arts community is asking for very little here.
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