THE COUNTERFEIT CAMPAIGN? Figuring Out What’s Real in the Political Debate : But When Has Government Not Supported Art?

Given the myriad grave dilemmas facing the United States today, it might seem surprising--even bizarre--that the tiny National Endowment for the Arts should be actively pursued as a major issue in the dog-and-pony show known as the presidential primaries. Yet, pursued it has been, and tenaciously so, in conservative Patrick J. Buchanan’s spoiler’s bid for the Republican nomination.

Forget jobs, health care, the deficit or any of a dozen pressing domestic issues clamoring for insightful leadership. In his stump speech, Buchanan declares his first order of business upon occupying the White House will be to march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Old Post Office Building and padlock the front door of its prominent tenant, the NEA. He wants the agency abolished.

This florid rhetoric creates a dramatic picture, clearly meant to enhance a bit of symbolism, both personal and public. The pledge means to conjure a “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”-style crusade, in which a decent, no-nonsense, all-American guy strides into the nation’s capital to do battle with an entrenched government bureaucracy riddled with waste and corruption.

For right-wing conservatives, the NEA has long stood as a prime example of the excesses of Big Government. Among President Ronald Reagan’s goals when he took office in 1980 was the dissolution of the NEA. When presented with overwhelming evidence of the agency’s past success, Reagan was thwarted in that ambition. Still, a conviction that the U.S. government has no business supporting the visual and performing arts has long been a prominent feature of conservative doctrine.

So, in his campaign to restore conservativism to the White House, Buchanan loudly trumpets the anti-NEA line. What is this conservative conviction based on? Where does it find justification? So far, two answers have emerged, one moral, the other practical. Both are flimsy.

Conservatives claim art is solely the business of the private sector--government should have no role in it.

Notably, however, conservatives are also fond of extolling the triumphant virtues, if not the downright global superiority, of Western civilization and its deep Eurocentric roots. What conservatives don’t get is the contradictory fact that emerges: A huge proportion of the artistic legacy of their beloved Western civilization owes its existence to government initiative and support.

Where shall we start? With the Parthenon in Athens, or Michelangelo’s marble “David,” commissioned as a proud symbol of the upstart city of Florence? Perhaps Rome’s sculpted column of Emperor Trajan would do, or the glittering mosaics of Justinian and Theodora in Byzantium’s capital of Ravenna. How about the exquisite manuscript pages in Charlemagne’s Coronation Gospels, or Rubens’ cycle of triumphant paintings for Maria de’ Medici, dowager queen of France?

There are thousands of examples. All were undertaken and underwritten by institutions of central authority, whether theocratic, republican, oligarchic, aristocratic, militarist or some other state configuration. Democracy differs markedly from them all, requiring its own unique mechanisms for subsidizing art. But it’s absurd to claim a democratic state should be exempt.

Indeed, where better than in the United States to end our little survey of the significance of artistic support by government? The first unassailable peak of internationally resonant American art is universally held to have been Abstract Expressionist painting of the 1940s and 1950s. Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, Philip Guston, Lee Krasner--in the 1930s and early 1940s, virtually every Abstract Expressionist of note had actively participated in the federal government’s Public Works of Art Project, later folded into the Works Progress Administration. Recognizing that fact, and desirous of maintaining the new international prominence of American art that followed, the idea of creating a National Endowment was born.

Conservatism’s practical argument against government support, which says the NEA flagrantly wastes “your tax dollars,” is no better. To begin with, the NEA spends your tax pennies , since its tiny annual budget of $176 million works out to about 68 cents per capita. Furthermore, NEA expenditures typically leverage private contributions at a ratio of nearly 6-to-1. That means your 68 cents generate more than $4 in private funds--a herculean feat in the often profligate world of public financing. Would that more taxes showed such substantial return on minimal investment.

If the feverish claims of tax-waste are considered only for those few NEA grants that caused controversy, the ludicrousness of the pragmatic argument becomes blatant. Since the original storm broke over Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe three years ago, the total of contested grant-funds amounts to $173,000. That’s 10 grants out of some 13,000 made since 1989. Compare this sum to the NEA’s total budget of $514 million during the period. The NEA’s hostile critics are apoplectic about the supposedly vile and reckless frittering away of .0003% of the agency’s budget.

Certainly the NEA is not flawless in its judgments. Some waste is inevitable. It’s part of the cost of doing business, public or private. But, ask your favorite businessperson if .0003% of a budget is unacceptable waste, as conservatives now claim. Then, you might productively ask why the United States is in such calamitous financial condition after 12 years of conservative economic theory.

Ultimately, of course, conservatives of Buchanan’s ilk don’t rest their argument for the abolition of the NEA on a pragmatic issue such as this. It doesn’t go to the heart of declared conservative principle, which objects to any government support for the visual and performing arts. The taxpayer gambit is merely a useful hot-button, ready to be pushed whenever the opportunity arises for distracting hysteria.

Since government patronage of the arts has been a proud mainstay of European civilization for milleniums, what principle could the blowzy bluster of Buchanan’s NEA demagogy rest on? The disturbing answer lies in the fact that the conservative assault has been directed almost exclusively at grants to artists whose work incorporates gay and feminist subject matter. The real tradition now being preyed upon and restored is the creaky old American stereotype of the arts as unproductive, unmanly and the sentimental preserve of women.

Racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, homophobia, nativism--Buchanan’s strategy to restore conservativism to prominence has been to divide and conquer. That the symbolic target of conservative ire against Big Government is a minuscule arts agency speaks eloquently about the disingenuousness of the conservative agenda, which is now fighting to enhance its wobbly position.

The objection to government funding of the arts is really about who gets federal money. Conservatives might crow about their unshakable commitment to principle, but their grandiloquent NEA-bashing demonstrates how unprincipled conservativism really is.