Laurence A. Jarvik is editor of The National Endowments: A Critical Symposium which you can find at Amazon.com by clicking here.

9 July 1997 Art After the NEA The modernist project in art was perhaps best described by philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset in his essayThe Dehumanization of Art . It was a revolutionary artistic movement rooted in the experience of the First World War and the technological changes unleashed by the Industrial Revolution. Earlier artists, especially during the Romantic period, had been interested in conveying human qualities, creating sympathy and empathy between artist, subject, and audience, and reaching a mass public. Romanticism was a popular movement, "first born of democracy," in the words of Ortega y Gasset. Modern art, on the other hand, is interested in mechanical qualities, and tries to alienate the audience. "It is essentially unpopular, moreover, it is anti-popular," says Ortega y Gasset. "Any of its work automaticlally produces a curious effect on the general public. It divides the public into two groups: one very small, formed by those who are favorably inclined towards it; another very large -- the hostile majority. . . Thus the work of art acts like a social agent which segreates from the shapeless mass of the many two different castes of men." He adds that the anti-democratic and unpopular element inherent in this artistic movement necessarily produces opposition. "Accustomed to ruling supreme the masses feel that the new art, which is the art of a privileged aristocracy of the finer sense, endangers their rights a men. Whenever the new Muses present themselves, the masses bristle...." But at the time Ortega y Gasset was writing -- the American version of his book was published in 1948 -- modern art was not only directed towards an elite audience of art lovers, it was supported primarily by wealthy individuals, who sought to differentiate themselves from the masses. There was no conflict between the goals of modern art and the desires of those who were paying for it. But unlike the private patrons of modern art who were the beneficiaries of its elitism while paying the bills -- the Rockefellers, the Guggenheims, and the Blisses -- the modernist project necessarily insults a democratic populace which is taxed to support the movement. That is why the debate over the NEA has been so heated and passionate. For the NEA has institutionalized the modernist aesthetic, with its inherent elitism and unpopularity. Ortega y Gasset warned that such art could never garner public support, much less honestly win in open political debate, precisely because it is based on the notion that all men are NOT created equal: "If this subject were broached in politics the passions aroused would run too high to make oneself understood." That is why Ortega y Gasset concluded his essay with the challenge that the task facing critics of modern art was a serious one. "All the doubts cast upon the inspiration of those pioneers may be justified, and yet they provide no sufficient reason for condemning them. The objections would hve to be supplemented by something positive: a suggestion of another way for art to differentiate from dehumanization and yet not coincident with the beaten and worn-out paths." The challenge was offered in the face of ascendant modernism at its peak. And although an answer was attempted with the Pop Art movement best represented by Andy Warhol, the modernist embrace of unpopularity as a hallmark of artistic integrity remained until quite recently. However, its is clear that the exhaustion of the modernist movment and its ideological and technological premises have become apparent to contemporary critics, even those who had been champions of what Time Magazine art critic Robert Hughes once called "The Shock of the New." In his recent PBS television series and companion book on the history of American art, AMERICAN VISIONS, Hughes presents more pessimistic interpretation of art history some fifty years after Ortega y Gasset. His narrative stretches from the simple carved wooden chests of Puritan pioneers through the paintings of Thomas Cole and John Singer-Sargent, sculptures of Augstus St. Gaudens, architecture of Stanford White, through post-war modernists and pop artists such as Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol. For most of the history he tells, Hughes' tone is celebratory and respectful: America entered the 1960's as a great and secure nation, reasonably certain...that its culture and moral framework were unique in the world; its destiny was virtuous, its prosperity immense, and even its huge internal problems of inequality and racism could eventually be fixed by good laws written by good men. Nothing could resist American know-how and American can-do.... Then Hughes' language darkens. He chooses Robert Smithson's apocalyptic Spiral Jetty to symbolize the fate of the arts in America after 1968, a year he dubs annus horribilis : Smithson had been preoccupied with entropy: 'evolution in reverse,' the decline of systems, enforced by the second law of thermodynamics, under which energy dissipates and all distinct form blurs and disintegrates across the span of geologic time...In 1969 Smithson took out a 20-year lease on an abandoned lakeside industrial site. The water was red from saline algae and fouled with chemicals and tailings; the shore, littered with obsolete machinery. The whole place looked like a ruined moosncape... The Spiral Jetty remained visible for two years, until the waters f the lake rose and covered it. It is still there, under the reddish muck. Hughes goes on to characterize contemorary artists such as Bruce Nauman as examplars of "autism" and describes him occupying the niche of "artist as nuisance." Nauman's work includes "Shit in your hat--head on a chair" and "Carousel." Hughes calls these works "sinister", "irksome" and concludes the latter is "a glimpse of Hell." He calls Jeff Koons sculptures and artifacts such as blown glass of himself having sex with Italian porn star Cicciliona "nauseating," "uncutous", and "claptrap." Hughes also castigates overtly political art, which he condemned for projecting "Manichean ideological sterotypes." He asked: When so much bad art was budy defending the wretched of the earth, did it make one a fascist, a sexist or a racist to speak of taste? He described the work of contemporary American artists as "thin, overconceptualized stuff, offering little esthetic presence and rudimentary ideas." Identity politics have made for narrow, preachy, single-issue art, in which victim credential some first and esthetic achievement a very late second -- all posited on an unrealistically schematic division of the world into oppressors and victims. Its mood is dicactic, sometimes irritably so, but it teaches little. Hughes lambastes Barbara Kruger for her 'reruns' of John Hetfield's Dada collages and Jenny Holzer for her 'Truisms' a collection of "phrases -- one hesitates to call them epigrams, Holzer being no Oscar Wilde," in Hughes' words, with "no claim to wit or any literary status." His analysis: Today's political art trades on its marginality to an absurd degree, knowing that its audience -- its only possible audience -- lies within Artworld, but at the same time indulging in ritual denunciations of 'elitism." Hughes concludes that for art identity politics and political correctness "has been troubling when not actually ruinous." He quotes painter John Trumbull's 1793 lament that the "the whole American people had become violent partisans" and describing the current state of the arts as "an atmosphere of inflamed accusation in which allmoderation is lost; scholarship and the arts then become scapegoats, grotesquely politicized stereotypes in our 'culture wars'." But on the other hand, in the equally durable words of Scarlett O'Hara, tomorrow is another day. Hughes does not know what the future holds, but he realizes that modernism is dead. Others have stepped into the breach, with positive proposals. One alternative for tomorrow has been offered by Eugene Veith, Dean of the School of the Arts at Concordia University in Wisconsin. In his book "State of the Arts: From Bezalel to Mapplethorpe," Veith hopes to encourage a Christian artistic alternative, crafting works of glory and beauty, based on the understanding that beauty is a quality of God and the perception and creation of beauty are gifts of God, and the purpose of art is to glorify God. Naturally, such religious works of art would be inappropriate for taxpayer subsidy, because of the establishment clause. However, the voluntary actions of churches and their congregations, and the growing Christian market would be a natural environment for such alternatives to prosper. A more secular aesthetic, based on Darwinian biology and other developments in science an technology, has been offered by Frederick Turner, a professor of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. Interestingly, he comes to conclusions similar to those of Veith. In his book "Beauty: The Value of Values," Turner champions what he calls the New Formalism and the New Narrative in poetry. He says the experience of beauty is an adaptive function that drives evolution throught sexual selection. Turner believes neurotransmitters in the brain respond to inherited patterns of aesthetic beauty. Art, according to Turner, will need to return to beauty in accordance with man's biological inheritance. In his "The Culture of Hope: A New Birth of the Classical Spirit" Turner elaborates on his theory, arguing that cosmological theories provide evidence for the importance of classical conceptions of beauty, order, harmony, and meaning. He concludes with prophetic chapter entitled "The Culture of Hope:" I have argued that we stand at the end of one cultural epoch and the beginning of another... All the ingredients are in place for a great age of literature and art ... as elitist as the NBA and the Olympic games .... When thepublic loses its suspeicion that the arts are a subsidized form of self-esteem therapy, it will return There will be a revival of the great classical forms of the human arts.... this return will be coupled with the new electronic technology... These are just two of the possible artistic movements which might flower after the NEA, for just as a garden cannot flourish when choked by weeds, so too America's artistic soil must be cleared and the weeds uprooted so that new plants might grow.