To the Editor:

In his article, “Art vs. the Arts” [November 1979], Ronald Berman is concerned principally with the visual arts. They are, he believes, threatened by two elements in our culture: the emergence of public patronage, with its insistence on majority participation, and the attitude, voiced by many visual artists, that “standards are relics of the past.” Together, he fears, these elements may undermine the adherence to standards and to quality which helped to generate great art in the past.

This important issue was raised in a forceful manner in Britain two years ago. In resigning from the British Arts Council, Roy Fuller held that “public money for the arts cannot be properly dispensed without a strong regard in the dispensing body for standards of excellence and principles of value.” He went on to denounce the Council for “shirking” its responsibilities out of a “morbid fear” of making artistic judgments. In response, the Secretary General of the Council, Roy Shaw, agreed that standards are essential (“If we abandon this notion of standards, chaos is come again”). He ranged himself with Fuller and against the artists who rejected the concept that there are standards of excellence in the arts. He maintained that the Council could and did make valid judgments of artistic quality.

A third view was expressed by Lord Redcliffe-Maud who affirmed his own belief in standards of artistic excellence, but who noted that “neither in painting nor in music have we reached agreement even among serious critics on standards of judgment by which the genius can be distinguished from the phony.”

I share Lord Redcliffe-Maud’s opinion as far as the visual arts are concerned. And I am certain that democratic government is a clumsy mechanism for arriving at the artistic judgments which, on occasion, must be made. For this, and for many other reasons, I have argued for the past fifteen years (I served as deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts from 1969 to 1978) that governments should not undertake to be direct and predominant patrons of the individual creative artist. (The House of Representatives, incidentally, took the same view in 1968, and prohibited the National Endowment for the Arts from making direct grants to individuals. The Endowment, unhappily, chose to ignore it.)

Mr. Berman is saddened because the Arts Endowment cannot lay claim to the creation of any great work of art. My own view is that government lacks the wisdom to attempt any such exalted task. He notes that “it is easy to attack NEA for its subservience to institutions.” Again, I prefer a subservient to an overbearing role. In most 15th-century paintings, the Virgin and Child are front and center; the patron kneels in a corner and comes up to the Virgin’s ankle. That, I think, is as it should be.

Michael Straight
Bethesda, Maryland

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Ronald Berman writes:

Michael Straight is one of the most knowledgeable men in the art world and his comments deserve to be taken seriously. He has mentioned the British Arts Council and suggested that its operation may bear on that of the National Endowment for the Arts. In some respects it does, but I would put a somewhat different interpretation on the issues.

There are really two sets of issues: political and intellectual; as we often find them, quite separate. There is good reason to doubt that government agencies are able to judge art—but not much reason to doubt that art can be and should be evaluated. The presumption is that NEA panelists, reviewers, and board members supply the expertise that the staff alone does not have. While the agency ought not to insist on its own interpretation of things, it ought to recognize that it has to set some kind of standard. Mr. Straight’s own book, Twigs for an Eagle’s Nest, has some of the funniest pages ever written on that subject, especially those describing his reaction to a (funded) application for dripping ink from Wyoming to Idaho in order to honor Jackson Pollock and Ezra Pound.

Standards are set and distinctions observed every day for example, when museum exhibitions silently include some things and exclude others; or when art histories talk about the development of our culture in reference to understood values, objects, techniques, styles, ideas, and accomplishments’. I have myself greatly benefited from scholarship on this matter, especially by writings like Jakob Rosenberg’s On Quality in Art which assess the degree to which the artist uses or exceeds the techniques available to him. Very few critics or historians would agree with the statement that we can’t distinguish between “the genius” and “the phony.” If we can’t do that, we can’t do anything.

I don’t object to Van Eyck painting the patron in a corner and coming up to the Virgin’s ankles—what I want is to see a reasonable facsimile of the lady herself.

But, of course, the main issue is political. We are not really talking about the self-effacement of the Renaissance but of an agency that donates entertainment. Its principles are to spread money as far as it will go; to imitate the workings of HEW and other domestic agencies; to insist upon forms of equity like age, color, and sex which are moral and political rather than artistic; to disseminate its funds among fifty groups—the State Councils—whose primary function is lobbying for funds and spending them on the creation of a bureaucracy; to encourage political and quasi-political groups to support the administration by conveying funds to them, regardless of artistic effect, function, or capability; to identify art as hobbies, crafts, individual pursuits, group modes of “participation,” regional fairs, clambakes, or assertions of consciousness; and to suggest, above all, that the distribution of funds from a pork-barrel is the same thing that Van Eyck understood as patronage.

So, I agree that government, or any other source of funds, should recognize the limits of its own imagination. But I do think that standards may be seen wherever art differs from what is not art. The main issue is the political benefit that accrues from the disposition of money: sending dollar bills flowing down a viaduct to every constituency within our electorate. We will have few Van Eycks, but a great many (funded) projects for dripping ink from Cody to Pocatello.