Leadership in Arts--Oxymoron or Opportunity?

By Alan Fern

At a meeting of art museum directors recently, the main theme was "The Culture Wars," a 1980's term applied by Senator Jesse Helms and other conservative revolutionaries to the powerful and divisive clashes over social values, ethnicity, and sexuality that began to characterize our national debate over the arts. The battering suffered by the arts, still keenly felt by everyone at the meeting, prompted me to consider what contribution the arts can make to the nation as we enter the next millennium.

A Washington Post story reinforced the concern. Jacqueline Trescott quoted David Boaz of the Cato Institute as saying, "The government should stay out of arts and ideas." Surely Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, and the other founders of our nation would be surprised at this injunction to stay away from ideas. But the culture wars continue, and some people still insist on a separation of state and culture. Ideas can be subversive, and it is dangerous, say these people, to expose citizens to challenging thoughts lest they begin challenging authority. Had this been the case in the 1770s, there would be no United States of America!

I agree with the libertarian Boaz that arts and ideas are linked, as Picasso's Guernica, Dostoyevsky's novels, Beethoven's symphonies or Michelangelo's painting and sculpture attest. But I differ with his conclusion. Nothing is more fundamental to a civilization than its arts and ideas though people in a given age may not sense at the time how significant and durable arts and ideas of their era will prove to be. Most of us are vividly aware of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, Mozart's symphonies, and the paintings of Manet, Monet, and Degas. Yet we know little about the political leaders and issues of seventeenth century England, how the homeless and indigent were treated in eighteenth century Austria, or the state of medicine and surgery in nineteenth century France. The arts communicate across time and national boundaries, remaining alive after political issues, military conflicts and scientific practices--central issues in their day--are forgotten or supplanted.

It is dismaying that arts and ideas seem so little appreciated in the United States compared with other nations. François Mitterand, as president of France, anticipated the end of his political career and his life by building a new opera house at the Bastille, adding to the Louvre, creating a new art center and a huge national library, all to stand as his permanent legacy. Meanwhile, following an attitude that entered the White House with Ronald Reagan (the only president to have come from a career in the arts), the 104th Congress moved to abolish the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. Some in the 105th Congress will probably try again. Richard Armey opposed the NEA in the 1970s when Nancy Hanks was its chairman. He has risen in power, and she is gone. True, he is quoted as saying he does not have the votes to abolish the Endowments, but he may try again.

In the 1990s China, Taiwan, Japan, Russia, Germany and Mexico increased their offerings of major art masterpieces to U.S. museums. Meanwhile, our federal support for the arts was reduced, and the United States Information Agency eliminated the sponsorship of most major U.S. artists touring abroad and virtually stopped presenting art exhibitions overseas.

Sadly, there is more art on the Internet's World Wide Web than on U.S. television, except possibly PBS which the 104th Congress tried to exterminate. Morley Safer on CBS's 60 Minutes did a smirking story about excesses in the New York gallery scene and the rage for new and non-representational painting. But no one did a major TV story about the crowds lined up to see major museum exhibitions like the Vermeer show at the National Gallery.

The Washington Post and the New York Times increasingly cover the arts as arenas of conflict, recording problems with opera and symphony boards, noting the increasing commercialization of the theater, and criticizing museums for accepting private funds without suggesting other ways of counteracting the diminution of federal and local support.

New taxes on book inventories carried over from year to year by publishers, wholesalers and booksellers make them reluctant to keep books in print or to publish titles that may sell slowly but steadily. The effect is that serious books quickly become unavailable or are rejected in favor of fast-selling popular fiction, pop-psychology titles, and scandalous biographies.

In the United States today, the arts find themselves in an ambivalent condition. On the one hand, there are the problems suggested here--and many more that could be mentioned. On the other, there are notable successes. Millions of people attend museum exhibitions. A large public listens to music, subscribes to the opera and ballet, and patronizes the theater. Live audiences for the arts rival those of sports, though television certainly gives the edge to sports, and few people gamble on the outcome of a play or a ballet except the backers. It is said that there are four times as many professionals in the arts today as when I started working in 1950. Whether or not this number can be verified, certainly there are many more museums, orchestras, regional theaters and dance companies today.

Yet for many in our nation, the arts are seen as marginal or even evil. This may well have its origins in the struggles of early European settlers who had to expend all of their energies and resources in overcoming a manifestly hostile environment. But even if they had had time for the arts, many of them probably would have had no use for them. The Puritan religious fundamentalists did not welcome the arts into their lives. For them, dancing, music, imaginative literature, and painting were the frivolities of the immoral ruling classes from whom they were escaping. They could be free from those corrupting influences in America.

In contrast, for the American Indians, story-telling, music, dance and visual arts were and are fundamental parts of everyday life, tribal history and religion. The reciter of the Sagas or the Greek epics in antiquity and the griot in African civilizations made imaginative literature central to life. Architecture, sculpture, painting and music were anything but marginal to the Catholic Church from very early times. The arts have established national identity, fostered discipline, led to a fuller understanding of human qualities and celebrated moral values in most cultures. Why has this been less true in the United States?

In addition to our Puritan origins, the answer may lie in our concept of leadership as well as in the way artists see themselves today. As a nation, we increasingly tend to respect charismatic personalities in politics, religion, business and entertainment but not in the "serious" arts. More than ever since the advent of television, we want to be led by attractive people, and we are not as willing to listen to people with untrained voices and messy hair.

Having leaders also implies that there are followers. They exist in a communal, social context. Artists once placed themselves squarely in "conventional" society. They were members of guilds in Europe and operated their workshops like businesses. The most successful Renaissance and early Baroque artists, like Rubens, accepted diplomatic missions, served as community leaders, and were famed beyond national boundaries.

At the time of the American and French revolutions, this began to change. Increasingly, artists came to think of themselves as solitary characters who judged themselves not on how they came across to others but on how effective and influential their work was.

It is inexplicable to me why Puritan attitudes of some seventeenth century settlers should have endured to the present in the arts, but from all appearances they have. And I believe the persistence of these views in a substantial fraction of our population accounts for the present perilous condition of the arts in America. Artists are thought by many to be non-productive users of time and energy who do not produce anything useful and are unable to meet a payroll. This is nonsense, of course. Productions at the opera or exhibitions in a museum involve huge payrolls and the involvement of hundreds of people. The arts contribute demonstrably to the economies of communities.

Still, one encounters many people who think that artists deal only with deviant or exuberant sexuality, oppose the political and social establishment, and generally make themselves a nuisance to our well-ordered, peaceful and moral society. This view is absurd since we do not live in a well-ordered, peaceful, and moral society. Indeed, if we look into the lives of artists today, we will find that they, like most of us, are trying to come to grips with the problems in our communities, the pervasive public posturing and immorality, and the danger of irretrievably blighting our urban and natural environments through selfish and thoughtless actions.

The artist is prepared to communicate a vision to others; if this vision is rejected or misunderstood, the artist goes on working anyhow, impelled by internal imperatives. This cannot possibly work for a charismatic leader whose vision must be understood and accepted by followers, or the leadership transaction does not take place. Yet, if we had but listened to them, many artists in our recent past might have been leaders in the quest for a more just and productive society. Thoreau and Emerson in their writings, Georgia O'Keeffe and Paul Strand in the visual arts, and Eugene O'Neill, and Arthur Miller on the stage all have had profound things to say about the relationship of humans to each other and to the world around them. None has been honored with public office or rewarded at the level of a sports hero or movie star.

Even if we take away the obvious role of the artist as a commentator on society, the arts are of central importance to us. The work of the artist is to bring a vision to others that communicates qualities and values addressing our fundamental humanity. Through the arts, we are enriched by harmony and beauty, we experience deep emotion and make fresh relationships. Through the arts, we participate in these experiences apart from the everyday business of our own lives, and we return to our other activities changed--with our horizons expanded--if we have properly attended to the artist's voice.

Practicing the arts ourselves, even in a very casual way, can sharpen our senses, allow us to discover unsuspected areas of creativity within ourselves and create something in which we can take personal pride. The arts can teach, divert and amuse; they can direct our attention to what we have not noticed and point out significance where we had been unable to detect it.

Yet our political leaders with only a few exceptions, have tended to isolate the arts from everyday life, to condemn them to marginality, and to deny the significance of the arts for any national purpose. Edward C. Banfield, an influential political theorist, has written:

"If aesthetic experience contributed significantly to the welfare (however defined) of large numbers of individuals, it would not necessarily follow that it would serve the public interest.... Giving people pleasure has never been considered a proper function of the U.S. government, except as it may be supposed to affect, for good or ill, aspects of life that are the proper concern of government."

Banfield relies on The Federalist Papers for much of the authority he gives to these ideas, and insists that the founding fathers were clear on the limitations they wished to impose on the central government's scope. He is flatly wrong. In rebuttal, here is a passage from the first "State of the Union Speech," delivered by President Washington to Congress on January 8, 1790:

"There is nothing which can better deserve your patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness in one.... Whether this desirable object will be the best promoted by affording aids to seminaries of learning already established, by the institution of a national university, or by any other expedients, will be well worthy of a place in the deliberations of the legislature."

Two hundred years later, the "legislature"--following the misleading reasoning of conservative political and social theorists--proposes to do away with the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities, which certainly promote learning and creativity. We never did establish a national university. Hence, I have been deeply discouraged about the prospects for the arts in the new millennium.

But the outcome is not yet determined. There is cause for hope. President Clinton challenged the Congress with an unexpected statement in his 1997 State of the Union Address:

"...the enduring worth of our nation lies in its shared values and our soaring spirit. So instead of cutting back on our modest efforts to support the arts and humanities, I believe we should stand by them and challenge our artists, musicians, and writers, challenge our museums, libraries and theaters. We should challenge all Americans in the arts and humanities to join with our fellow citizens to make the year 2000 a national celebration of the American spirit in every community--a celebration of our common culture in the century that has passed, and in the new one to come in a new millennium, so that we can remain the world's beacon not only of liberty, but of creativity, long after the fireworks have faded."

No chief executive in recent history has spoken so clearly about the arts and placed them so firmly in his agenda. Until this speech, I regarded President Clinton indifferent to the arts. Including them in his mandate for the second term was an act of courage as well as of leadership.

Why courage? Because this is a troubled time for our civilization. We are still fighting the culture wars. And until the President's speech, no person in a position of leadership was willing to expend any political capital in ending this conflict.

With the challenge placed before Congress by the president, the narrow view has been publicly questioned; and at last there is hope that the radical, constrictive views will be debated with more light than heat. Certainly, artists will not go away, whether or not they are supported or celebrated. Dedicated artists cannot help expressing themselves.

Now that one element of our political leadership has expressed an interest in enhancing the role of the arts in the United States of the new millennium, it is up to the rest of us to assist in overcoming the prevalent nervousness about the morality and reliability of artists. Given the failure of the press and media to expose and help correct this bias, it is left to museum directors, musical directors of symphony orchestras, theater producers and other arts professionals--supported by committed members of the public--to provide leadership. We must remind the doubters that future generations are as likely to judge us by our arts as by anything else we produce.

Let us celebrate the powerful creative talents in our society, not discourage them nor force the appreciation of past creativity to be available only to the determined elite. As we move toward the next century, let us rid ourselves of the austere and crabbed Puritan legacy and recognize that the arts can provide our society with fundamental human values if we let them flourish. We need to become powerful advocates for the power of the arts to delight and improve humankind. In short, we must elevate the arts to their appropriate place in our society.

Alan Fern ('72) serves as director of the National Portrait Gallery. A graduate of the University of Chicago, he was recently honored by its alumni association as "one of America's leading museum executives, whose work ensures a high level of cultural achievement in the nation's capital."

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