There is an article on the National Endowment of the Arts in Commentary this month (via Arts and Letters Daily) with a suggestion about the role the organization should play that may not please everyone.
The author, Michael J. Lewis, an Art and Architecture professor at Williams College recounts the history of the organization from President Johnson’s declaration at the NEA’s founding that “There is a quality in art which speaks across the gulf dividing man from man and nation from nation, and century from century. . . . The stakes may well be the survival of civilization” to the obscenity accusations of the 80s and the caution exhibited in the years that followed.
Lewis argues that NEA funding practices, rather than freeing artists to experiment actually promote mediocrity by funding the under served instead of quality artists and succumbing to political pressure from elected officials. (I should note that a number of his citations from two other Commentary articles on the NEA so the opinions are a little inbred.)
Having failed to cultivate new works on a wide scale, Lewis argues the NEA should re-purpose itself to preserve existing works.
“The audiences for music and dance have long been graying (perhaps whitening is now the better term), and there is much concern that they will vanish within a generation’s time. Here, the role of the NEA would not be to create but rather to preserve or, if it comes to that, to “cocoon” art by means of a holding action: for instance, subsidizing classical orchestras and ballet companies so as to maintain a cadre of professionals who will keep alive what would otherwise become a dead language. As it happens, this is precisely the area where the NEA record has historically been brightest.”
I am not sure if I appreciate his reference to orchestras and ballet companies as working in a dead language (or soon to be so.) But maybe that is a truth that needs to be faced. At the same time, I am also not terribly comfortable with the idea that the NEA should enable ballets and orchestras to avoid innovating their practices. Though I am sure if this philosophy was embraced, the nation’s flagship ballets and orchestras would be the ones receiving the funding leaving the smaller organizations to innovate or disappear.