Who Killed Culture

From barbarism to democracy, elites seek a suspect in the reported death of art.

By Charles Paul Freund

Lower your voice and show some respect: America's cultural establishment has collapsed in mourning. Even in the best of times, the nation's elite culture regards its health as fragile and its future as doubtful. But now it sits in doleful misery, its tunic rent and ashes sprinkled liberally on its bowed head. What happened?

Bad news indeed: The cultural establishment's last line of defense--the National Endowment for the Arts--has been routed. Now nothing stands between art and barbaric pillage.

Truth is, one piece of bad NEA news came after another last fall, rather like Job's servants arriving in relays to report his compounding ruin. First, the House of Representatives voted to kill the NEA entirely. The endowment survived thanks to the Senate, but its budget was again cut, this time to $98 million, a reduction of $78 million since 1992. Then, the Hill gave the NEA permission to pursue additional private funding--in effect, a license to privatize. To the high priests who tend culture's flame, this is tantamount to defilement, because private funds have private interests attached to them. Then, NEA head Jane Alexander announced that, after four years in the role, she'd had enough and was returning to acting. Alexander is probably the most effective lobbyist the NEA has ever had, and has been instrumental in keeping the endowment alive in the face of congressional hostility; her departure was perceived as a setback for federal patronage.

But the worst blow to American high culture was self-inflicted. In October, the NEA released a report on the state of the national arts, American Canvas, that was intended to celebrate Alexander's leadership. It is an incoherent document, on the one hand rejecting commercially generated culture while, on the other, accusing the high-end cultural establishment of failing to serve a popular audience. Worse, not only did American Canvas discern an undemocratic "elitism" among America's artists, it sought to subordinate cultural activity to modish social metaphysics, especially such values as diversity and multiculturalism. That report naturally offended those who have been contemptuous of federal cultural management all along.