IN countries
like the Czech Republic and Slovakia, or even Britain, "national artists"
(poets, novelists, etc.) are national by virtue of a people's primary
declaration/patronage (never mind if by people it's usually just that
people's educated class) and not by the whims of either a 6-year term
government or a "culture committee" cum clique.
In the
Philippines, where it's common knowledge among musicians that "gold" and
"platinum" music records are declared gold/platinum not by their market
but by a recording company's PR department (whose staff's job
includes---at best---enjoining signed artists to have their friends call
FM stations to request for their songs, or---worse---paying program
directors or individual deejays to play the songs), we know that industry
friends-endorsed "national artists" in popular music exist like a joke,
demeaning thus their achievements in their field. But at least such
cheating feats of marketing is yet tested on the nation and one's either
embraced or denied affection by the people.
It is, however,
different in the less popular art fields. In these fields, I cringe at the
mention of "national artists" not because the nominees often don't deserve
a national audience and patronage, far from it, but because the word
"national" is traditionally understood to mean belonging to a
people/market instead of belonging merely (or primarily) to a "cultured"
elite, much less to such entities as a roster of tastemakers placed at the
cultural centers of the planet's various republics, and thus must be
contextualized.
Sadly, in our
own republican islands, the people as helpless taxpayers can only
nervously laugh once they learn they're paying for the privileges of what
to them may just be weird (esoteric, or exotic) national artists they
don't know. Not that I think the people shouldn't be happy to pay up,
being an artist of elite poetry and fiction myself -- but that, as a
populist, I can't imagine myself forcing my unlettered neighbors to favor
certain "high standards of art" over the so-called lowness of their own
barangays' unrecognized "folk art."
The reason why I
react to presidential proclamations of certain figures as national-this
and national-that is because I don't quite appreciate the virtue of an
elite group's (or that of a figure of fake populism) lording it over the
so-called "masses" in issues relating to national culture, much less
issues that demand a redefinition of the word nation.
