by Rafe Champion

Jonathan Chait, ‘A Progressive Case Against the NEA,’ The New Republic, September 29, 1997.

The US National Endowment for the Arts hands out large sums of money, some of it used by beneficiaries to produce works such as the notorious Piss Christ. Republican party critics of arts funding are routinely labeled as narrow-minded people, promoting ‘an intolerant social revolution that will soon engulf us all.’

Despite being a liberal of the US variety (believing in state intervention) Chait considers that there are good arguments against state aid for the arts and especially against the way the NEA operates. He insists that ‘we liberals don’t want to let the government do just anything …we only want the state to intervene to correct clear cases of market failure.’ Most art (at least writing and painting) is not like major public works that individuals cannot afford to undertake. Nor is art a necessity that liberals regard as a matter of entitlement, such as education and health care. It is more like clothing and entertainment which, even for Chait, can be safely left to the market.

Chait confronts three defences of NEA funding. First is the suggestion that federal funding takes the arts to remote areas. Against this, Chait reports that a disproportionate share of the money ends up on the East Coast. In any case, the aim of decentralisation could be better served by block grants to the states. Second is the claim that NEA funding should support great art which is not appreciated in its time. Chait replies that government is in a particularly bad position to do any such thing. Indeed avant-garde works are likely to do best under decentralised sponsorship. Third is the idea that arts funding is a good investment, surely the least tenable of the three arguments.

In view of the strong feelings that have been aroused in the US debate on the role of the NEA it is surprising to find that private sector charity accounts for 99% of fine arts funding. In this situation it is tempting to say ‘who cares’ about the residual 1% of public funding. Chait argues that the NEA exerts undue influence over private donors and so exerts control over artistic production which is out of all proportion to the amount of public money spent.

Mark Schneider, Paul Teske, Melissa Marschall, Christine Roch, ‘School Choice Builds Community,’ The Public Interest, Fall, 1997.

School choice has come a long way since 1987 when Minnesota was the first US state to approve school choice, that is, schemes which permit children to attend a public school other than the one that is nearest to the home. Since then, over half the US states have considered or implemented some form of school-choice reform. Critics argue that school choice will undermine the sense of community that attaches to the school by making education just another market commodity. The authors of this article describe the results of a study which showed that choice produces not only satisfied consumers but also public benefits in the form of increased parental involvement in the school and more contact with the teachers.

The authors conducted their study in two very different areas to check whether the socio-economic class of the area has any impact on the outcome of school choice. It turned out that the effect was slightly stronger in the middle-class area than in the less affluent central-city area that was selected for comparison. Still, the increased parental involvement at the schools in the poorer area may have been more significant in its impact (though the magnitude of the increase was small) because the initial level of involvement was very low.

Brian Ashbee, ‘Naked Pleasure,’ Art Review, September 1997.

Ashbee examines the way that some strands of modern feminism have invaded art criticism and history to provide a gross misrepresentation of the attitudes on the part of males which have motivated them in painting nude females. Ashbee draws upon a typical example of the genre in an essay by Frances Frascina titled ‘Art and Semiotics,’ which suggests that the paintings of North African women by Delacroix, Ingres and Matisse can be depicted as metaphors for the evils of colonialism. Viewers may be liable to a charge of complicity in colonial subjugation and even in the forced prostitution of native women. This type of commentary has lost touch with the reality of artistic production, which is likely to be motivated by enjoyment of the subject combined with an element of technical challenge. Other factors may be involved such as a religious theme, the conditions of a particular prize or exhibition, an attempt to reach a particular market or please a patron.

It is ironic that these highly politically correct schools of thought find (and revile) perverse sexual themes in great works of the past while in some modern galleries ‘no act is now too gross, no bodily fluid too intimate to prevent some desperate artist from using it as a tool of supposed self-expression.’ This type of ‘art’ surely deserves harsh criticism from those who claim to deplore exploitation, but of course the radical critics share with the modern avant garde the aim of ridiculing polite society, both ancient and modern. ‘So when we turn our jaded and disabused vision on the art of the past, it is not surprising that we interpret it according to the appalling standards of our own time … finding in Ingres the leer of the page 3 girl.’ 

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