American self-consciousness in politics and art

ArtForum, Sept, 2004 by Arthur C. Danto

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There is a distinction between being in the world as an American and being an American citizen. One can renounce the latter, but renouncing the former is impossible, like renouncing one's language. Yet they are not entirely external to one another, inasmuch as the consciousness of being American includes in some degree an awareness of what it means politically to be American. This is especially the case with being an American artist in America, whether one is a citizen or not. So one wants to ask in what way American political institutions penetrate the consciousness of being an American artist. Everyone must acknowledge that the American government has never had much interest in the arts--has never felt, for example, that America's standing in the world has much, if any, connection with what American artists have done. Indeed, the practice of art in America has taken place in an atmosphere of near-total governmental indifference, except insofar as it falls under constitutional protections governing freedom of expression. The CIA's covert involvement with the dissemination of Abstract Expressionism internationally after World War II was opportunistic but in any case had nothing to do with what made that art possible in the first place. In general, I think, the making of art has been considered in terms of pursuit of happiness, as specified in the Declaration of Independence, and hence the exercise of a right, with no effort on the government's part to say how it should be done.

There was not a national museum of art in America until the 1930s, and even then it was not a museum of American art--though the idea of a national museum of art had been intimately associated with the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth century. Consider the Louvre, for example, which organized its collections into schools: the Italian, the Dutch, the Spanish, and the French--the latter to make plain to French men and women, to whom as citizens the museum belonged after the Revolution, that there was such a thing as a national school and that France could hold its head high among the nations because of Poussin, Claude, Clouet, Vouet, and others. The Louvre was far less a sanctuary for aesthetic contemplation and scholarly investigation than an instrument for forming a national consciousness. It was also a component of that consciousness, in that the art from the other schools had been expropriated by the French military. (Stealing the enemy's treasure as trophies, like stealing its women, is immemorially the victor's prerogative.) By contrast, our National Gallery of Art could not be a temple to the American spirit through American art, since the prevailing idea in 1937 (when it was founded) was that real art was something that happened somewhere else--a view American artists at the time shared. Duchamp addressed this point in an interview when he arrived in America in 1915, two years after the Armory show, and tried in effect to say that Americans should have no reason to feel inferior: