I've written about this topic before ...
But ... seeing this piece at The Baffler on the Cato Institute hosting an art show, I was reminded of the other piece I'd linked to in the past about Cold War policy and American art policy. But first ...
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But for all its adeptness at attacking the leftist vision of contemporary art that apparently predominates today, the right has struggled to articulate what they’d like to see replace it, let alone advance any remotely compelling alternative canon. [emphasis added] Conservatives have, in recent years, become increasingly preoccupied with this lacuna and the need to fill it, worried about the implications of ceding the realm of culture to the left—after all, as the late Andrew Breitbart often said, “politics is downstream of culture” and, though he was mostly talking about Hollywood movies, others have echoed his call for the creation of a genuine culture of the right. These efforts, however, have rarely amounted to much: Kimball and the New Criterion crowd champion painters like the flimsily Caravaggesque Odd Nerdrum, whose works are bad imitations of the Old Masters. (If a workmanlike command of classical technique is all it takes, then the world’s best artists are the Chinese copyists in the Dafen oil painting village who churn out Rembrandt replicas on demand.) Sean Hannity might love the fawning painterly allegories of Trump-administration propagandist Jon McNaughton—whose closest formal analogue is, ironically, high Stalinist socialist realism, with its hysterical glorification of the leader-cum-savior—but the plutocrats running the show are still shopping for Warhols at Sotheby’s
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If we head over to The Imaginative Conservative ... how imaginative are the ruminations on the established canonical artworks that developed, by and large, during "the long 19th century"? Eh ...
Some of that crisis had to have involved conservative arguments that there shouldn't even be an NEA because the NEA was used to bankroll artwork that was considered obscene and maybe not even art. The National Affairs feature I linked to earlier was a very readable summary of how American arts policy in the Cold War was so thoroughly defined by a global anti-communist stance that the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War became a crisis, and that the culture wars of the last few decades erupted because the absence of a global ideological adversary through which American arts policy could be defined left a crisis of purpose which became the basis for liberal and conservative culture wars as to the purpose of American art.
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Our Cold War cultural policy did its job as long as the Cold War lasted. But it didn't take long after the fall of the Soviet Union for it to become incoherent to the point that we forgot we had a cultural-policy agenda. Supporting a mixture of academic avant-gardism and individual expression tailored to promote the idea of a free society as opposed to a planned one not only stopped looking like a public priority, but in the late '80s and early '90s it looked like an absolute waste of public resources.
As soon as there was no international culture war to fight, a domestic one began over Robert Mapplethorpe's erotic photography (especially one self-portrait with a bullwhip) and Andres Serrano's piece "Piss Christ" (a photograph of a crucifix submerged in what Serrano alleged was his own urine). The NEA had issued a grant to the Institute of Contemporary Art to display a Mapplethorpe exhibit, and a grant of $15,000 through an affiliate to Serrano for "Piss Christ," inevitably raising the question of why the public sector was putting money toward something so offensive and inaccessible to most Americans, or why the public sector should fund the arts at all.
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Both sides of that culture war completely missed the specific, historically contingent character of the NEA's function. Both saw it as a question of whether the government should support arts per se. To one side, the NEA was synonymous with pure waste, something that government has no interest being involved with; on the other side, the agency was synonymous with art itself, as if artistic priorities were necessarily the cosmopolitan academicism and personal self-expression (both equally removed from the experience of boorish Kansans who happened not to appreciate seeing their Lord in urine) promoted by Schlesinger, Greenberg, and Eliot's description of Valéry. Both sides conceded the triumph of what Eliot described as legitimate modernism, and both missed the fact that the United States has a particular cultural policy. The NEA and NEH were never meant to be neutral promoters of pure art; they had an agenda for a particular moment.
But this is not the only cultural agenda America could possibly have. The current approach was tailored to be effective in a particular global moment that has now passed. Before the Cold War, the most significant federal intervention into American culture was the Works Progress Administration, a flagship New Deal agency. The WPA's approach to culture was, in many ways, the opposite of what the government later adopted during the Cold War. Its goals were, like later iterations of culture policy, tailored for its own particular historical moment, of course. But those goals were oriented toward the domestic realm, not the foreign.
Instead of making grants to individual artists with little (explicit) care for the end result, the WPA assigned writers, artists, directors, actors, and photographers to specific projects. Cultural projects that the WPA devised were in keeping with the general purposes of New Deal agencies — it approached culture as a kind of infrastructure, attending primarily to rural areas that had been hit hardest by the disruption brought by macroeconomic forces. In addition to being hit economically by the Depression, small towns and rural areas (cultural critics of the time feared) were losing cultural ground due to the emergence of consumer goods — especially in the mass markets for entertainment represented by radio and movies, and added mobility represented by affordable automobiles — in the first decades of the 20th century.
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Now this interests me because I was a kid during the final decade of the Cold War and I was going through high school during the years after the Berlin Wall came down and the USSR was collapsing. It was, to translate the times in terms of superheroes, the shift from Christopher Reeve Superman to Michael Keaton Batman. Who cares about that distinction? Well, to put this another way, The X-Files was another thing I got into and that whole show is predicated on a conspiracy theory and the conspiracy could (at the time) be summed up as follows--whatever "we" did to "win" the Cold War was evil enough to remove from us the assurance that we were necessarily the "good guys". There was a shift from the reassuring Superman saving the world from bad guys to Batman doing battle against corruption in the seats of power within "our" society, if that makes any sense.
The right has been busier adjudicating culture wars about the arts than it has been developing any kind of coherent approach to the arts. Being anti-communist is not necessarily the same thing as being "for" anything in more positive terms. Being against capitalism of one form or another isn't the same as being for something else.
If in military history axioms people are often busy fighting the last war they fought at the expense of not grasping what the real nature of the current conflict is, I am wondering whether in the last ten or twenty years whether the left and right in Anglo-American discourse have been re-litigating the Cold War and transposing those categories onto an intra-West understanding.
But this is where I would say I find myself not really on board with either conservative or progressive cultural narratives, which too often seem to break out into pro-canon and post-canon. We can't exactly control for that stuff at individual or even collective levels. Thirty years ago probably few film critics would have imagined the Marvel Cinematic Universe existing at all and to proclaim such a cinematic development a death of culture or a cultural catastrophe will have more than a whiff of reaction to it, no matter how progressive the label provided by those who dislike the films.
Personally, I liked Black Panther and I enjoy Spiderman and Batman films now and then and that doesn't mean I can't enjoy Ben Johnston string quartets or admire poetry by Wallace Stevens.
Ever since the Cold War ended we've had a range of possibilities for understanding what "we" want to do with the arts that doesn't have to be constrained to Cold War approaches. The culture wars of the post-Cold War American arts scene could be a kind of echo effect, I'm speculating, in which liberal and conservative groups in American arts simply began to translate each others' ideas in such a way as to recreate mythologies or myths connected to World War II or the Cold War. This sure seems to be what has happened with conservatives who are concerned about "cultural Marxists" and liberals who seem only able to translate and interpret contemporary events in terms of 45 being a fascist.
A conservative response to progressive arts or liberal movement domination of the arts that is committed to high arts is possibly moot in a neoliberal context. A Roger Scruton, at least, seems to stake out some form of highbrow art religion ... but I reject that--and that sort of arts approach requires government involvement at a level many American conservatives reject. But ... if we let the market decide then the market may have decided on a bunch of Marvel superhero films ... which certain some conservative thinkers would find dubious, probably not even really art. If we insist on a Western arts canon that is taught, well, then conservatives are ultimately invoking either private educational institutions .... or the role of government to develop a kind of culture ... which gets back to conservatives fretting that liberals and progressives seem to have dominated all of that.
Of course they have, inasmuch as a good chunk of the canons in the arts that emerged in the 17th through 19th centuries kind of developed with aspirations for liberal society.
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