Whose Art Is It Anyway? (Page 4)

But be they playlands or profundatoriums, there remains the question of who should pay for building art museums and operating them. State and municipal governments are strapped trying to finance grammar schools, police forces, fire departments and homeless shelters. While art museums may not be the biggest potential drains on their budgets, they do have a certain Marie Antoinette-ish vibe in times of public-sector austerity. Maybe we should allow civic-minded rich people, with passions for art and giving away art, to do it. But declining to tax the rich if they'll build a museum instead, which is just the kind of indirect subsidy Cowen celebrates, is fiduciarily the same as taxing them and having the government build a museum with the proceeds--perhaps not in matching amounts, but certainly in principle.

Full disclosure: I've had three National Endowment for the Arts individual grants during my career. The grants led to promotions and better college teaching jobs, which led to a grubstake to get to New York, which led to a fuller career as an artist and a critic, which led to... and so on. I wouldn't be sitting here in comfy circumstances writing this essay without having gotten them. Yet I maintain that taxpayer support of contemporary art is fraught with so many difficulties that it's best to let contemporary art find its own audience and support base without government assistance, just like some of America's most significant contributions to world culture--jazz, rock and roll, hip-hop, Hollywood movies and the sitcom--have managed to do. Another reason is that it's inherently unfair--isn't it?--to directly or indirectly subsidize elegant, oversized frosted glass windows in modern art museums while many public schools in the same city can't afford to replace broken panes in their classrooms.

Way back in 1953, Larry Rivers painted a cardboard-cutout-looking parody of George Washington Crossing the Delaware. He said, "I was energetic and egomaniacal and, what is more important, cocky and angry enough to want to do something no one in the New York art world would doubt was disgusting, dead and absurd." In my opinion, Rivers's George Washington is a good work of art. So are Kuniyoshi's Circus Girl and even Mapplethorpe's rectal bullwhip photograph. Because I love art, because I think I know in my kishkas a good piece of art when I see one, I'm basically in favor of it somehow being made available to the public.

But I'm not quite arrogant enough to believe my choices would be so good for everybody else that they ought to be enforced with public money. So while there's a lot of passionate yes-yes in my heart, there's also a rational no-no on my lips and on this page. Cowen's foot-in-both-camps dilemma is also mine, in spades. Turning to Kammen in the hope that the historian's wider perspective will provide guidance on the history of taxpayer support of art turns out to be futile. The most cogent words on the subject in Visual Shock come from--ye gads!--the longtime right-wing Congressman from Illinois, Henry Hyde: "Public funds in a democracy are to be spent for public purposes, not for the satisfaction of individuals' aesthetic impulses." To be fair, Kammen's subject is much broader than whether or not public funding of contemporary art is a good thing. It's about art controversies in general. And about those he concludes, "When unprecedented aesthetic possibilities conflict with national values (pertaining to the American flag, for instance), or with traditional social values (pertaining to nudity or explicit sexuality), contestation is likely to occur." Now there's something, at least, on which we can all agree.

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