āThe Corn Parade,ā 1941, by Orr C. Fisher, Mount Ayr, Iowa. The NEA had nothing to do with this art.
People expect me to be angry about proposed cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), so my inbox has been flooded with comments about it.
āWhat has the NEA actually done for you recently?ā Iāve asked in response.
āWell, I like their murals in the post offices,ā answered more than one correspondent.
āThat was the WPA,ā I answered, āAnd you should know that.ā
My first job, in the late 1970s, was in a museum. The greater part of my working career has been spent either as a self-employed artist or working for non-profits in arts-related fields. In the trenches, far from Carnegie Hall, the NEA is absolutely irrelevant.
In 2012, the NEA published How the US Funds the Arts, intended in part to demonstrate how backwards we are compared to other nations. For performing art groups, only 1.2% of revenues came from the Federal government. And performing art groups, by their cooperative nature, are more likely to need crowdsourcing of some kind than are visual artists.
āKen and Tyler,ā 1985, by Robert Mapplethorpe, is NOT the piece that caused an outcry after being purchased with support by the NEA. You can look that up yourself.
The problem with the NEA giving $30,000 to the Institute of Contemporary Photography to buy violent and homoerotic images by Robert Mapplethorpe wasnāt just the content; it was that Mapplethorpe was already a successful artist. That money didnāt go toward making new art; it went to collecting the work of a recently-dead artist, which was really about investment, not about developing new art.
Giving Andres Serrano a $15,000 award for Piss Christ not only offended the taxpayers; it set in stone the idea that we should have rules about paying for the stuff. This, falsely labelled ācensorshipā, paradoxically gave offensive art more power than it ought to have had. Itās now thirty years later and weāre still dealing with the flashback.
Government bureaucracies are slow-moving ships, whereas artists are generally light skiffs moving in the breeze. For example, the NEA frequently makes individual music grants to support āartistic achievement, significant impact, and continuing contributions to the development and performance of jazz.ā Now, jazz is nice, but itās hardly cutting-edge. Cutting edge is being done by teenagers in their parentsā basements.
Immersion (Piss Christ), 1987, Andres Serrano, caused a backlash about NEA arts sponsorship.
And thatās my real beef with the NEA. It isnāt there to fund new art; itās there to prop up art that appeals to the chattering classes.
Artnet, which tracks market prices, makes an annual list of the most expensive living artists. Consulting this list will give you an idea of what the real tastemakers in the world buy.
Meanwhile, the masses stubbornly insist on buying music, movies and paintings that reflect their āpedestrianā taste. Mock it if you must, but our pop culture is a vibrant scene thatās been aspired to and copied worldwide for more than a century.
Want a copy of Robert Mapplethorpeās Self Portrait with a Whip (1978)? Iām not going to stop you, but you can pay for it yourself. Want a nice painting of a lighthouse? Iām not going to stop you, but you can pay for it yourself.