Is art good for you?

AS THE presidential election of 1972 approached, a middle-echelon official of the National Security Council, whose professional staff then numbered sixty, informed me that 58 of those staff members were going to vote for George McGovern and that only two, Henry Kissinger and his deputy, Helmut Sonnenfeldt, were going to vote for Richard Nixon. The point is that if McGovernism was able to permeate the staff of such a sensitive organization as the National Security Council under Richard Nixon, you can imagine the politics that reign in the halls of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), where, from my experience, simple McGovernism would make you positively right-wing. Hence all those NEH-funded documentary films ardently extolling the splendors of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the Polisario in the Western Sahara, and articles such as a recent one singing the praises of Fidel Castro in a magazine funded by the NEA.

The Reagan-appointed heads of the NEH and the NEA--William Bennett and Frank Hodsoll--have had mixed success in restraining their radical utopian troops. Bennett has taken a series of courageous stands, running (along with the Justice Department) the only agency in Washington that refuses to classify its employees according to race, ethnicity, or gender. Whereas Hodsoll, from all I have heard, has just been content to go with the flow. And even Bennett has been known to whimper and run off with his tail between his legs at a reprimand from the nation's conscience, the New York Times.

But Frank Hodsoll and is NEA have been far more naughty than Mr. Bennett's NEH. The last three commercial motion pictures I have seen with NEA funding are Testament (a poor man's version of television's super-spectacular, nuclear-pacifist The Day After), the ability anti-American El Norte (all saintly Hispanics and contemptible gringos), and a truly vile little film called Far from Poland, which is about the spiritual crisis induced in the heart of a true socialist because she wants to support the solidarity movement in Poland, but is warned but the voice of fidel Castro in the night that she is playing straight into the hands of America's reactionary forces, for example Beelzebub, otherwise known as Ronald Reagan, who sees Solidarity as justification for his despicable anti-Communism.

all of which is to say that I approach any discussion of the NEH and the NEA with a profound prejudice emanating from my disgust at their seemingly irreversible politicization, and from my despair that these organizations will ever be staffed by people who can surrender the notion that Christ's kingdon is come in Nicaragua, Cuba, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, South Yemen, Vietnam, or Cambodia, and who will give at least qualified support to the society under which they themselves flourish.

ronald Berman has recently written an engaging book, culture and Politics (see "The Right Books," April 6), about his trials and tribulations as head of the NEH from 1971 to 1977. Richard Nixon--not the artists' and intellectuals' favorite President, you might remember--thought that if he offered these people patronage they might like him better. It was just one of those ideas. But the ease with which funds were voted by a traditionally philistine Congress was surprising. The NEA, for example, which had a budget of only $8 million in 1970, a decade later was spending more than ten times that amount. The status of artists and intellectuals was rising, of course. It is well known that congressmen buy votes with the taxpayers' money--it is almost the American way of democracy. But the time has now come when congressmen will vote taxpayers' money just for the pleasure of rubbing shoulders with artists at cocktail parties. Art is suddenly very prestigious. And this in the face of a 1981 Roper poll showing that only 14 per cent of Americans think that art should be supported by the Federal Government.

One can hardly be astonished at the eventual politicization of the endowments after reading the official mission of the 1968 National Council of the Humanities (as it was called then), which was to encourage projects "relevant" to such things as "urbanization, minority problems, war, peace, and foreign policy; problems of governmental decision, civil liberties . . ." Perhaps art would benefit the poor and relieve tensions in the inner cities, as promised by David Rockefeller and Hugh Carey. Perhaps it would promote international understanding and being world peace, as promised by Jimmy Carter.

But now Edward C. Banfield, a professor of government at Harvard, has set out to examine, in The Democratic Muse, the question of whether the government has any business funding endowments and councils of this sort at all.

Emerson said that art existed to make men better. But did it? Banfield writes: "The art museum was founded soon after the Civil War as part of a long struggle by the Protestant elite, which ran the large cities, to moralize their populations by eliminating vice and inculcating the domestic and civic virtues." Prostitutes and alcoholics, after a good look at a Frans Hals, would go forth and sin no more, you see.

Hardly were the museums built, however, when the moralistic doctrines of Ruskin were challenged by the doctrines of Walter Pater, for whom art existed "for its own sake" and had nothing to do with truth or morality. Possibly by coincidence, it was at just this time that the great art museums fell into the hands of a new class of the super-rich such as J. P. Morgan, who became president of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1904. For this new elite the museum became a "depository of grandeur"--a place for storing and displaying rare and costly objects, which were being bought up and shipped over from Europe by the boatload. One suspects that the luster of vast wealth was still associated with art when, in 1961, the Metropolitan having acquired what was after all its 32nd Rembrandt--but for a headline-making $2.3 million (the first time a painting had sold for more than $1 million)--one million people filed by to see it, increasing the average yearly attendance at the museum by more than 40 per cent. When, two years later, the French government lent the Mona Lisa to the Metropolitan, two million people stood in line for hours to get a ten-second glimpse of it. But what were all these unprecedented millions of spectators getting out of these shows? Civic virtue? Education? Were the arts useful as a welfare program? For psychiatric therapy? Mental health? If the spectators were only getting an indefinable "enjoyment," should the Federal Government be subsidizing Disneyland?

But Nea funds were also made available so that "grocers" and "woodcutters" (in Senator Claiborne Pell's words) could read Beowulf long into the winter nights. And this wasn't a patch on the direct grants the NEA has made to artists, one of whom was funded for a season he wanted to spend with a sow, two rabbits, a buck, two doves, and a woolly monkey. They would all make nests, and would be visited occasionally by other creatures ("birds, mice, people, etc."). The artist needed food, materials, video equipment, and a motorbike with a large sidecar ("the educational value for all of us will be extraordinary"). Now here was a man on the "cutting edge" of the artistic sensibility. And if you think this sort of thing has come to an end with the Reagan Administration, Frank Hodsoll recently authorized what I can only call the "Ballet of the Dancing Earth Movers," which took place on a construction lot. The possibility of an audience for this ballet was highly problematical, of course, but it went forward nonetheless.

Professor Banfield's solution is Draconian. He would abolish instantly both the NEA and the NEH, and, if the thought about it a bit, I suspect he would abolish the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as well. His basic test is the following. Are these foundations in the "public interest" in the way a courthouse is in the public interest--whereas a statue in front of the courthouse is not? And he will not be put off by hypothetically beneficial side effects such as education. If heavy statuary is also good for ship ballast, it should be funded under a program for ship ballast.

An adult life spent mostly in Europe--no conceivable government in Austria, for example, would ever dream of defunding either the Vienna State Opera or the fabulous art collection of the Habsburgs--has left me with a less bitter opposition on public funding than Professor Banfield's. But basically I agree completely with Jacques Barzun when he wrote that art "can dignify and exalt the civilization that gives it birht and also weaken and destroy it." Hermann Goring was a great lover of art, we should remember, and Hitler and the Nazi creed swept through the humanities departments at the great German universities well before they caught fire among the general German public--hardly a point for Emerson.

In any event, total abolition of the NEA and the NEH is plainly not in the cards. But must our society be the first in history to subsidize artistic polemicists whose open purpose is its destruction?