Over the years I've worked at jobs where I had to listen to music. I'd have preferred no music at all to some of the stuff I'd hear hour after hour. After a while it seemed that the thing to do was start making jokes ... if only for myself. The songs won't be too hard to recognize from the lyrical content.
Friday, February 27, 2026
comparing Jessa Crispin on the garden of American heroes to Philip Jeffery in 2019 on the US history of arts policy as foreign policy (not domestic) catalyzing a crisis in the 1990s that came to be known as "culture wars"
https://theamericanscholar.org/what-is-an-american-hero-anyway/
What Is an American
Hero, Anyway?
Lists of great artists say more about the list-maker than the artist
By Jessa Crispin |
October 24, 2025
…
The rise of diversity
in the arts coincided with the fall of the so-called “high” arts in public
spaces and in universities. In the 1990s, arts and music education started
disappearing from public schools, attendance at opera houses and symphonies
began to decline, and university humanities departments went into budgetary
crises. This had more to do with the end of Cold War-era funding, which had
gone toward literary magazines, the visual arts, and arts education. But some
saw conspiracy instead of coincidence, as if the reason why the “Great Books”
curriculum lost favor was directly attributable to the rise of gender studies
departments.
For example, New York’s
Lincoln Center ended the longstanding Mostly Mozart Festival in 2023, which
programmed classical compositions from around the world, and replaced
it with “Summer for the City.” The new roster included a celebration
of hip hop, “the world’s first LGBTQIA+ mariachi group,” and other musical acts
whose primary selling points were related to identity. The reasons for
programming decisions like this are complex, but some critics saw a direct
correlation. Cicero is being replaced by Sandra Cisneros. Mozart is being
replaced by SZA. Cultural collapse is imminent.
And for people trapped
in cultural grievance, the hope is that through “elite replacement”—not to be
confused with the “great replacement” conspiracy—we will make art great again.
The problem with the culture, some believe, must be the wokeness of it all, the
dominance of women and other previously marginalized voices—even in spaces that
used to be safe for white men: The story of our Founding Fathers, for example,
is now being told by Hamilton. Thus, Project 2025’s plan to put
conservatives in charge of the institutions that maintain our cultural
production. The problems of American culture, however, go much deeper than
that, and “elite replacement” doesn’t really work if there’s no Leonard Bernstein
waiting in the wings with a big vaudeville hook to drag Lin-Manuel Miranda from
the stage.
…
The Garden of American
Heroes seems like an attempt to end this conversation about the canon, any
suspicion against greats of the past, and any accusations that the United
States might still be racist, sexist, or otherwise unfair to its citizens.
These are the good ones. There are no others. The canon is closed.
…
There’s a certain amount of acid snark I expect reading
anything by Jessa Crispin, and she delivers.
Now I do think there are two elements at play here. The garden of American heroes list, now that
I have looked at it, is at least moderately diverse if the list of heroes
includes the likes of Roger Williams, Jonathan Edwards, Barry Goldwater, JFK,
Ronald Reagan, Woody Guthrie, Duke Ellington, Johnny Cash, Whitney Houston all made the list. Having Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and
Miles Davis on the list makes sense and they are all jazz legends who made
remarkable music. Ray Charles made
it. I suppose if Crispin thinks the list
of heroes is bland that’s how she is about these things. I’d probably replace Lauren
Bacall with Lucille Ball but that’s me.
But Crispin’s claim that diversity in the arts began to
emerge in the 1990s has an element to it that can be confirmed from the right
side of the aisle of those who discuss American arts policy. I’m reminded of
Philip Jeffery’s long-form essay on how the end of the Cold War revealed a
crisis of purpose in American arts policy.
https://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/a-cultural-agenda-for-our-time
…
During the mid-20th
century, culture policy was foreign policy. Before the National Endowment for
the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities, the agencies that executed
American culture policy were the State Department and the Central Intelligence
Agency. The State Department's primary contribution was a series of art and
music tours around Europe. In 1946, it purchased 79 contemporary paintings,
including works by Georgia O'Keeffe, Edward Hopper, and Arthur Dove, for an art
show that went to Prague, Brno, and Bratislava, but the show was canceled
before completion.
More successful were
State Department-funded concert tours for musicians like Duke Ellington and
Dizzy Gillespie. Historian Michael Kammen wrote that jazz tours in particular
"achieved undeniable popularity wherever they went, and they were perceived
as the music of individualism, freedom, pluralism, and dissent — fundamental
qualities obliterated by communism." The contrast with communism was key,
and it also motivated the CIA's involvement in culture policy. The CIA famously
backed the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an international organization
launched at a 1950 conference in West Berlin to organize anti-communist
intellectuals. The CCF held conferences, published journals, and sponsored
exhibitions in 35 countries; Raymond Aron, Sidney Hook, James Burnham, Arthur
Schlesinger, Irving Kristol, Bertrand Russell, and many others were involved at
various points in its formation and operation.
An agenda of
"individualism, freedom, pluralism, and dissent" meshed well with the
ethos of mid-century American criticism. Leading liberal intellectuals in New
York established academic cosmopolitanism as anti-communism, and a number were
involved in the CCF. Art critic Clement Greenberg set the tone for mid-century
criticism — he demanded that art remain abstract and independent from the
political realm and avoid being "about" anything. "Art for art's
sake" was the prevailing doctrine. The instincts Eliot described as la
poésie pure migrated into painting with the emergence of abstract
expressionism, lauded by Greenberg for its focus on the individual artist's
process and technique.
Rumors of CIA
involvement with the CCF began to spread in the mid-'60s and were eventually
confirmed in a 1966 New York Times report. This led
policymakers to establish new agencies dedicated openly to carrying out a
national cultural agenda, rather than continuing to promote cultural freedom
covertly. …
…
In this telling of American arts policy history, the crisis
of the 1990s was victory, which is to say the Cold War ended and the fact that
American arts policy was an extension of anti-Soviet foreign policy rather than
focused on domestic policy the way it was during New Deal WPA projects led to
the shift Crispin alludes to:
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.
Ergo decades of conservatives talking about abolishing the
NEA and NEH. Jeffery’s counter-proposal was that the United States should
consider having a coherent domestic arts policy.
…
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.
…
That was 2019.
Still, I think I have “a” case that people on the left and right have
considered that the 1990s became a period of culture war and crisis in the
humanities and liberal arts in the post-Cold War era even if there are
inevitably debates about what the reasons for that were and what they
entail. I tend to be conservative myself
and from what I have read of progressive and liberal artists and arts partisans
Trump’s second administration is probably the last one within which people
would want the United States to suddenly decide it is vital to make a firm and
powerfully enforced domestic arts policy.
For someone like Crispin such an arts policy probably
should never come from Trump’s second administration. It’s also hard to shake a sense that if the garden
of American heroes was conceived during a Biden or Obama administration it
might get a chilly reception from Crispin anyway. Americans want to have their cake and eat it, too, when it comes to arts patronage and artistic autonomy, or at least the kinds of journalists and writers who write about the arts seem to want some ideal in which the artist can get the money and do whatever. That has been rare and even in the fine arts the position of being paid to basically write whatever you wanted because your benefactor liked whatever you did anyway only describes, so far as I know, the career of Franz Joseph Haydn.
And that leads me to another thought, about Crispin’s line
about how the canon is closed. That is precisely not what anyone
defending the garden would say, let alone anyone defending a Great Tradition in
an art. You never actually say that
the canon is closed! I’ve seen this
over the course of a decade or two in conversations about classical music and I
say we should let that field be a guide.
If I go by comments from someone from the Future Symphony Institute the
canon has never been closed. It’s just
that, well, nobody’s been worthy of canonization since Richard Nixon resigned,
okay? Closed canons are for observers of
religious traditions and Art is Art.
It could be that these days the one thing worse than not having a unified domestic arts policy would be having one with the guy we currently have in the Oval Office. If the American art canons in literature and music are anything to go by, we're better off with the post hoc situation we've had where if people admire Whitney Houston that gets recognized after the fact as it was with Ellington and Davis and Armstrong. There's usually never an Esterhazy in American arts production (and Joe would probably concede that his forebears in the Esterhazy clan bankrolling Haydn's symphonies was more cultural achievement than his writing the screenplay for Showgirls).
Thursday, February 26, 2026
At The Critic Anthony Cheng writes that contemporary classical musicians should champion new composers ... okay ... but that's piano ... in contemporary guitar music composer-performers are still very much around
...In thinking about the future of the art I have loved since I was eleven, it’s hard to think of an established contemporary composer/performer duo that exists on the world stage today. Looking at musical history, one recalls the relationship that existed between the Soviet-Russian greats — pianist Sviatoslav Richter and composer Sergei Prokofiev....
I do love me some Prokofiev piano sonatas but ... last I checked Liszt and Beethoven and Bartok were pianist composers who managed to get their own music across well enough. For pianists the conundrum might be that the kinds of pianist composers who were able to shape the repertoire over the last two centuries were also performers. If anything the separation of the performer and the composer might be a reason I can hardly think of any piano rep that has stuck with me. Keep in mind I'm a guitarist.
The segregation of composers and performers may preclude the possibility of new repertoire emerging for the piano. When I think of the classical guitar it's hard not to think of guitarist composers who blew me away by being formidable guitarists. Koshkin no longer performs but I have heard him perform his own music. The same goes for Atanas Ourkouzounov, Stepan Rak, Dusan Bogdanovic and Roland Dyens (I'm less into his music compared to the others). Angelo Gilardino was not a concert performer but no one who has studied his music can't miss what a capable guitarist he was and I still need to eventually blog about his wonderful solo guitar sonatas.
Maybe we classical guitarists think about these issues differently. A few years ago I heard Stephanie Jones play a recital of nearly all new music and it was a blast. I actually get disappointed if I go to a guitar recital and it's mainly warhorse literature. I think only Marcin Dylla could get me to be okay with Ponce's overlong variations and fugue on La folia ... he got me to not hate Ginastera's solo guitar sonata.
We're going through an exciting period for classical guitar now in terms of solo and chamber music but in mainstream classical music coverage the instrument doesn't even rate.
a sort of mid-week linkathon ...
This is a
bit of a mid-week linkathon with a theme. The news peg is obvious enough.
Tuesday, February 17, 2026 by Douglas Wilson
https://julieroys.com/christian-nationalist-doug-wilson-preaches-at-pentagon-prayer-service/
https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/19/politics/douglas-wilson-pastor-pentagon-service-christian-nationalism
Pete
Hegseth, the First Amendment, and Me. Oh, and Tucker. And the Swarming Harpies
I think at this point a way to translate Wilson’s recent
post.
Hey, stupid
godless liberals …
Does this bug you? I’m not touching you!
Does this bug you? I’m not touching you!
Does this bug you? I’m not touching you!
He needs all those so-called harpies to be who he is.
That Wilson was on Episode 13 of the Mark Driscoll show reminded me that preening self-ordained clowns seem to stick together over the years. Both these guys have some kind of compulsion to motte and bailey their way through one publicity stunt provocation after another. It may be necessary for me to note this now and then. I have never said "I'm done" with watchdog blogging, even if that aspect of the blog is mostly in retirement.
But I find the newer Christian Nationalists to be moronic because they want to combine the demonology of Merrill Unger with the exousiology of Walter Wink but don't seem to have the theological or exegetical chops of either the fundamentalist who wrote Biblical Demonology or the mainliner who wrote a trilogy. Contemporary alt-right Christian nationalists of Wilson's ilk can claim envy motivates people but hardly anyone shows the envy of the cultural influence the mainliners had and lost across the Cold War than Wilson when he envisions some kind of new postmillennialist American Christendom.
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