Endowing Culture
The Democratic Muse.
by Edward C. Banfield.
Basic Books. 244 pp. $15.95.
Culture and Politics.
by Ronald Berman.
University Press of America. 172 pp. $10.95.
Excellence & Equity: The National Endowment for the Humanities.
by Stephen Miller.
University Press of Kentucky. 192 pp. $17.00.
The evening before starting this review, I was part of the audience for the Nashville Symphony’s annual opera production, this year a satisfactory rendition of La Traviata. As usual, the printed program named and thanked hundreds of individuals, corporations, and foundations whose contributions helped underwrite the large costs of staging a full-fledged grand opera and thus enabled me to buy a ticket (up near the roof, to be sure) for ten dollars. But there, listed alongside the private donors, one also came upon a grateful acknowledgment of the support of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and its Tennessee state affiliate.
Thus arise the questions that Edward C. Banfield seeks to answer in a provocative Twentieth Century Fund study: is there in the American democracy a compelling reason for government—especially but not exclusively the federal government—to augment private philanthropy in subsidizing the opera and other visual and performing arts so that more of us can enjoy them at lower prices than we would otherwise have to pay? Are there also harmful consequences of such subsidies that may offset whatever good they do?
These are interesting and important issues, but in the real world they are essentially moot. A few months hence, the Arts Endowment and its sister agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)—the main subject of Ronald Berman’s and Stephen Miller’s books—will celebrate their twentieth anniversaries. Conceived and gestated in the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, born in the most fecund period of the Great Society, and having passed through a remarkable growth spurt in the early 70’s, the twin endowments are now mature members of the Washington family. They have large and clamorous constituencies around the country. They enjoy the support of Presidents and key Congressmen of both parties. Though at the start of the Reagan administration their fates were briefly in doubt, in time they were blessed by a Presidential Task Force and are now so securely settled that Mr. Reagan’s Arts Endowment chairman, Frank Hodsoll, is today a prominent member of the otherwise predictable crew of arts advocates, foundation executives, and academics who are flaying Ban-field’s book and disputing its conclusions. The only recurrent dispute between the White House and the endowment-boosters on Capitol Hill concerns spending levels.
At the Arts Endowment, the objects of these expenditures—now totaling some $150 million a year—are not much different from what they have ever been. Individual artists of many kinds receive grants and fellowships to sustain their “creative” work in many genres. Institutions, such as museums, opera companies, and universities, obtain funds to acquire, develop, produce, display, and perform. The media garner subsidies with which to beam various artistic performances to mass audiences. And quasi-governmental agencies, such as the state arts councils, automatically receive sizable sums both to distribute at the retail level in their communities and to aid and abet the “art lobby” that in turn makes sure that Congress hears plenty about the urgency of increasing the President’s budget for the Endowment.
Banfield regards such activities as inappropriate and unnecessary on several grounds. Because there is no generally agreed-upon definition of “art”—and because the Endowment has shrewdly avoided settling on one of its own—there can be no meaningful standards against which to appraise particular artists, institutions, or projects. The Constitution contains no explicit mandate for the federal government to develop the aesthetic sensibilities of the populace, yet utilitarian arguments for public support of the arts—easing urban tensions, improving mental health, fostering tourism—imply wildly unrealistic expectations and thus (if the NEA were ever to evaluate the impact of its programs, which it has not done) near-certain failure.
The Arts Endowment, Banfield contends, can be certain of accomplishing only one thing: transferring resources to individuals and institutions that are very pleased to receive them, are increasingly dependent upon them, and ardently desire more. This is a familiar enough governmental pattern, but Banfield argues that in certain respects it may lead to actual harm: to subsidies for the production and display of shoddy art, to a widening gap between the fine and applied arts, and also to needlessly rapid inflation in the “value” of original works of art as subsidized museums bid vast sums against one another, thereby enriching some art dealers and artists but making it harder for ordinary people to own works of art.
Government support has not only affected commerce in the arts; it has also accelerated their politicization and that of the culture in general. In the early years of the Carter administration, Banfield recalls, Joan Mondale was not only the Vice President’s spouse but also honorary chairman of the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities, in which capacity she presided over regular meetings of a group of officials who concluded “that a comprehensive plan for government action was needed to raise the cultural life of the nation.” This led to the preparation by the Arts Endowment of a 150-page “General Plan” and to a round of congressional hearings in which then-chairman Livingston Biddle (former college roommate and aide to Claiborne Pell, whose Senate subcommittee oversaw the work of the Endowment) began to muse on such matters as the utility of arts programs in reducing truancy rates, in eliminating problems caused by ethnic differences, and so on. A bit skeptical, Congressman Sidney Yates (who then as now chaired the House subcommittee that controls Endowment appropriations) said, “I wonder whether we should explore truancy. You are going to wind up with something like Vietnam or some other national goal.” Biddle hastily replied that the elimination of truancy was not necessarily the point; rather, “that through the arts, young people were becoming interested in education.” “Perhaps you will find the kind of social ends you want to reach,” Yates observed; “I had some trouble with that one.”
That nothing much came of the NEA master plan, however, had less to do with ideological dispute than with the organizational imperative that has dominated this agency since its inception: meticulous avoidance of clear definitions, precise standards, and large distinctions, lest the Endowment rile any elements of its ever-growing constituency for ever-growing appropriations, approbation, and legitimacy. Though we should probably be grateful that the nation does not yet enjoy an official, federally-sanctioned definition of “art,” we must understand that this is primarily because those administering the National Endowment for the Arts perceived that any such definition would curb their essential opportunism. Had they concluded otherwise, we would likely be working our way toward a national arts policy that would one day rival the Internal Revenue Code.
Banfield’s treatment of these matters is already the subject of intense controversy. Hilton Kramer has written in the New Criterion that the book “turns out to be anti-democratic as well as anti-aesthetic,” in part because of its suggestion that government should assist with the manufacture and distribution of high-quality reproductions of paintings and sculptures rather than helping a handful of major museums control access to the costly originals. This scheme, Kramer contends, ignores the key distinction between a “work of art” and a facsimile thereof, and would drive the original works into the private collections of wealthy connoisseurs where they would be forever concealed from the gaze of ordinary people.
Another sizable flaw in The Democratic Muse is its inattentiveness to the fundamental difference between the Arts Endowment’s two main activities. One might be deeply skeptical about the government’s role in subsidizing the creation of artistic works—doubtful that suitable aesthetic standards can be maintained, even more doubtful that government should delve so deeply into the culture as to set any such standards—while still welcoming federal support for the conservation and display of works of art that authorities deem outstanding. Moreover, if the Arts Endowment is indeed here to stay, such a distinction could yield more workable guidelines for those who set its policies, appropriate its funds, and administer its programs.
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The central issues faced by the National Endowment for the Humanities are somewhat different. Though preservation and display of works of humanistic scholarship have always been part of its mandate, the NEH was created primarily to support advanced research in these disciplines. In that sense, it is more closely akin to the National Science Foundation than to the Arts Endowment. But because scholarship in the central disciplines of the humanities is a cause without enormous popular appeal, the Endowment’s leaders have proffered more sweeping rationales for its work.
Former chairman Ronald Berman was extremely successful in this effort during the early years of the Nixon administration—the period in which both endowments achieved their greatest growth. In Culture and Politics he recounts a consequential conversation in the Oval Office during which his “main business was selling the agency to the man who could do the most for it.” He made four points to the President: expanding the Humanities Endowment was a way of reducing “the isolation of Republicanism from the intellectual mainstream”; it would help restore respect for serious disciplinary study on the nation’s tumultuous college campuses; it would cause “large audiences outside the universities” to develop keener interest in the humanities; and it would hasten the reversal of the cultural decay of the 60’s and the restoration of “intellectual and moral seriousness.”
No doubt these visions were tempting at the time. Certainly they seem to have persuaded President Nixon to give Berman his head—and to ask Congress for huge increases in the Endowment’s budget. With the benefit of hindsight, it seems fairly clear that such claims were exaggerated, even hubristic. But the attempt was made.
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Ronald Berman is a Shakespeare scholar of consequence, and as chairman he had a clear sense of what the humanities are, why they are important, and how to tell good from bad. (The NEH’s four leaders have all had “credentials,” even as the chairmen of the Arts Endowment have all been amateurs with respect to the substance of their agency’s work.) Yet fully half his book—essentially a memoir of four years as chairman—recounts efforts not so very different from those undertaken at the Arts Endowment to expand audiences, to build constituencies, and to invent defensible justifications for the expenditure of more money than the agency had ever had before. These included subsidies for a number of television series, the mounting of “blockbuster” exhibitions at major museums (the history of art having been defined as one of the humanities, the NEH Could edge onto the NEA’s turf in this manner), and the conversion of what might have been a crassly commercial 1976 bicentennial celebration into something of a showcase for the American heritage.
Berman’s taste was generally keen and his stewardship of the Humanities Endowment yielded few disasters. Indeed, his eventual fall from grace (as he tells it) resulted mainly from his refusal to yield to congressional pressure to spend money on activities he deemed unworthy. In particular, Berman got onto the wrong side of Senator Pell—the principal villain in this saga—when he resisted the peculiarly populist demands of that patrician solon to award small grants to “grocers and woodcutters” with which to read great books in their spare time, and to give automatic annual subsidies to humanities councils in the fifty states. Pell eventually came to regard Berman as both an intellectual snob and a recalcitrant bureaucrat and set out to block his reappointment. The Ford White House was as weak-kneed as the White House usually is when an agency head acquires enemies on Capitol Hill, and after a protracted effort by Berman’s admirers, the whole painful episode was brought to an end by Carter’s election and the subsequent appointment of Joseph Duffey to the NEH chairmanship.
In addition to offering a lively saga of bureaucratic expansionism and Washington intrigue (and far too many typographical errors), Culture and Politics contains a thoughtful, short disquisition on the politics of culture and the role of government in supporting the arts and the humanities. Though more incisive with respect to the foibles and machinations of the Arts Endowment, Berman acknowledges a few missteps taken in the name of the humanities while he headed NEH and is properly critical of efforts to redefine the humanities into agents of moral uplift and to construe federal support for their study and teaching as if this were a social welfare program. “The humanities cannot, I almost regret to say, make us better citizens. It is the great misconception of our time that doing things that are good for us, we become good.”
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Stephen Miller also knows well both the humanities and, as a result of many years on its staff, the Humanities Endowment. He may, in fact, know it too well, for his book contains so much detailed information as almost to obscure his theses, which might better have been advanced concisely in essay form.
As the title, Excellence and Equity, suggests, Miller is much taken with the tension between the high hopes of the scholars who originally urged establishment of the NEH—to advance the humanities primarily by supporting first-rate research—and the populist impulses that have tempted its leaders over the years to enlarge its base of support and to please its congressional overseers by expanding the Endowment’s “public programs,” by distributing the agency’s largesse more broadly than “merit” would warrant, and by capitalizing on diverse contemporary trends and political fads.
That tension is real enough, and is more than amply illustrated in Miller’s pages. But it is also one that cannot be wished away, nor is it likely that restructuring the agency (as Miller suggests) would solve the problem. All government agencies are political creations, and all must pick their way across a shaky tightrope stretched between their particularized missions and their need to maintain public support.
The more important question, perhaps, is how specialized agencies such as the twin endowments are regarded by the Presidents who select their leaders. And whom do they select? In 1977, President Carter chose Senator Pell’s protégé to head the Arts Endowment. As for the NEH, the New York Times reported a White House memorandum instructing the committee then searching for Ronald Berman’s successor to pay less heed to the “Ivy League, academic, and scholarly establishment” and to look for a chairman who would “be familiar with organized labor, ethnic organizations, community and junior college organizations, and principal educational broadcasters. . . .” The person selected was also the spouse of a key White House political strategist.
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Today, the endowments are no longer growing rapidly, but both still occupy sizable niches in intellectual, scholarly, and cultural affairs. The NEA, again headed by a well-connected political operative, continues to subsidize my enjoyment of Traviata but does not appear to have become any more precise about its responsibilities or punctilious about its standards. It is thus an easy mark for criticisms, including those advanced by Edward Banfield. But they will have scant impact, for the NEA has fastened itself with silken cords to the artistic and cultural elites of virtually every community in the United States. It helps pay for institutions and organizations that are widely assumed to do only good things, and its very failure to be rigorous about definitions, priorities, and program evaluations has left it so shapeless as to have practically no enemies, save for the fastidious few who wince at the sight of public funds used for the ugly and trivial as well as for the beautiful and lasting.
Over at the Humanities Endowment, by contrast, one now encounters intellectual ferment, principled argument, and a much bolder strategy. The current chairman, William J. Bennett, has set about to restore the intellectual integrity of the humanities insofar as it is within the command of a federal agency head to do so. In matters of domestic cultural and education policy, he now occupies a position roughly analogous to that of Jeane Kirkpatrick in foreign policy, and is equally unabashed, articulate, and steadfast. Not only is the tiny NEH education division doing more to strengthen teaching and learning in the nation’s schools than the entire Department of Education, but the Endowment is also (along with the Justice Department) the only agency in Washington to refuse to classify, hire, and promote its employees according to race, ethnicity, or gender.
The NEH is thus no less “political” than its twin but—at least for the moment—it evokes a quite different image of politics. The Arts Endowment embodies the domestic equivalent of appeasement, making it indistinguishable in this regard from a hundred other Washington agencies. The NEH, on the other hand, is currently succeeding at something that is rare indeed for a government agency: communicating principles, standards, and clear ideas about what is important. As readers of the July COMMENTARY know, it invited Sidney Hook to deliver the 1984 Jefferson Lecture, perhaps the most prestigious intellectual event under government auspices. And it has enabled thousands of schoolteachers to spend the summer studying classic texts of the humanities under the tutelage of competent scholars.
Culture, Matthew Arnold wrote, seeks “to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere.” That this quest is worthy, even noble, does not mean it is without risk when attempted by government. Yet it seems to me we must assume that Washington’s twenty-year incursion into the arts and the humanities has become permanent. At least for the present, one of the responsible agencies is conducting its affairs in a manner that Arnold would approve. The second is rather more problematic. I sense that it is doing some good and little actual harm. But perhaps my judgment has been clouded by the fact that Violetta died so well in the closing scene the other evening.
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