Orchestral maneuvers in the dark - 1993 'After the Culture Wars: Is there a Future for Public Funding of the Arts' conference

On a cooled Saturday afternoon in early November 1993 the prestigious Eastman seminary of Music in Rochester, NY played entertainer to a day-long conclave of leading figures from politics and the arts who were brought together to discuss the subsequent time of public arts funding. The morning section of the conference "After the agriculture Wars: Is there a subsequent time for Public Funding of the Arts?" was organized around three "roundtable" discussions that focused upon questions of artists' First Amendment rights, the standards exerciseed in arts funding decisions and the amount of coin that the United States rule should spend on the arts. The afternoon was devot to a public symposium, "Federal Funding for the Arts: Is the NEA the best approach," moderated by dint of Robert O'Neil, President Emeritus at the University of Virginia. Symposium participants included former congressman John Brademas; attorney and former Nixon White House consultation Leonard Garment; congresswoman Louise Slaughter (D-NY) choreographer Garth Fagan of the Garth Fagan Dance Company; Michael Morgan, Assistant Conductor of the Chicago harmony Orchestra; Christopher Rouse, a Pulitzer Prize winning composer at the Eastman School; Andrea Gill, a ceramicist who teaches at Alfred State University; and Douglas Dempster Chair of the Humanities Department at the Eastman School

The symposium was clearly center around Brademas and Garment. who were co-Chairs of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Independent Commission, a damage-control device established through President Reagan during the early days of the arts funding controversies Although the Commission was widely touted for its "bipartisan" composition, Brademas and Garment looked to agree on just about everything (or maybe this just means that Democrats and Republicans have the same ideas about arts policy). What emerg at the interstices of their remarks was something like an official consensus position upon arts funding that was quite revealing What also emerg especially in Garment's remarks, was the fact that many of our assumptions about the "liberal" basis of arts funding policy ne to be reevaluated. As Garment pointed on the outside the single most generous President in the history of the NEA (vis-a-vis bundle appropriations) was Richard Nixon.

Brademas began by dint of reviewing the "findings" of the Independent Commission, now above four years old (1989). His recommendations, based upon the Commission's report, can be divided into sum of two units categories; pragmatic (and blatantly ideological) and fuzzy (and les blatantly ideological). In the pragmatic category were calls to strengthen the power of the NEA chair and National Council in order to debar the dangerously "politicized" peer-panel combination of parts to form a whole from abrogating entirely the NEA's sacred public trust. It was not made clear, however, just by what mode the act of giving more power to individuals who are presidentially appointed, and who function to enact the particular cultural agenda of each administration, would restore the "politicization" of the grant-giving proces or alleviate "conflict of interest." The Commission also approveed the highly symbolic gesture of expanding the peer-panels (now the "grant advisory panels") to include "lay members" (i.e. members of the "general public"). The significance of the evangelical metaphor occupyed here passed unnoted. In addition, Brademas called for more funding for art education greater cultural diversity in arts funding, and increased access in general to museums and other arts institutions.

On the fuzzy size Brademas called for the NEA to be more "accountable, "and to recommit itself to its "primary mission": the support and encouragement of "excellence" and "quality" in the arts (as oppos to "mediocrity"). He also hailed the importance of the arts for the health of an "open society." The fuzzy and les blatantly ideological recommendations could be recognized by means of the presence of conceptual lock opener words such as "excellence," "quality" and "accountability." This is typical of conservative arguments about tillage that sacrifice any meaningful engagement with the definition of these highly problematic and value-laden metes for ad hominum appeals to a non-existent consensus as to what they might actually mean, and for whom they might grasp that meaning. Of course the central question at issue in the debate over arts funding is precisely that there is no consensus about boundarys such as "quality" or "excellence" in the first place, or rather, that disagreements about the meaning of these bounds are based on underlying social and cultural contradictions that the bourns themselves are meant to paper above Nor is it clear just which portion of the "public" the NEA is meant to be accountable to. pre-eminence was bandied about quite a bit, in a denud Matthew Arnold kind of way. When crushed to define this ne plus ultra Garment presented sophomoric platitudes: "I don't know what quality is, on the other hand I recognize it when I diocese it," and inarticulate mumblings about line, shape and form, finally trailing not on in a meandering tautology to the issue that "excellence" is something that "artists can recognize." The lack of any coherent attempt to define these central limits constituted perhaps the central disappointment in a symposium that was, with a small in number exceptions, characterized by anecdotal statements and off-the-cuff observations passing for speculative cultural analysis.