American Canvas: a roundtable on the 1997 NEA report

Kim: The ideas do address some crucial issues, and I agree with some of them, but the book seems dishonest to me as well. This issue of education and arts being a regular part of the curriculum and not an extracurricular thing - I do believe in things like that, and I wholeheartedly think that if art can make a bit of social difference, that's great. But whether or not we need the NEA to tell us to do that - American Canvas is almost like a handbook of what artists and communities can and should do, and that's part of the problem. It goes back to what Malgorzata was saying, of how ethnocentric this really is, and it sets up oppositions and hierarchies. Even though I agree with some of the ideas, it's very hard to swallow, and I keep going back to the question, "Why does the NEA need to exist?"

Murray: It's so anti-American. The American dream is the dream of the individual. People are awestruck by Michael Jordan because he's a fantastic individual, and he's great at what he does. I just got this vision of every child in America making art out of popsicle sticks and by the time I got to the end of the book, I just felt like I was choking. I feel American Canvas's aim is to control and stifle the imagination. After all, real vision can be powerful, uncontrolled. It would be a sad state of affairs if America was limited this way. If it lacked individual expression, lacked ever being able to express sorrow or anger or . . .

Diaz: Hatred.

Murray: Hatred. That's right. Or racism, or whatever, because without expressing those things you never work through them. At one point they said that art institutions should be more like hospitals, churches, and libraries. Well, first of all, hospitals have their own problems; and the art world, thank God, is not like the medical profession. And churches, in a lot of ways art provides some kind of spiritual place for people where religion has really fallen short, especially for our generation; and although libraries are wonderful, in a lot of ways museums are a more active place for people to be in. It's a visual world that we live in.

Brenson: Do you think they're preparing for their own demise in this book, because it does feel that they've given up the fight.

Murray: Absolutely. They take no pride in what art is or what art could be. That's what I meant about their vision of education. In the beginning, you agree, that's good, they should teach art in every school, but then as you get more and more into what they're really saying, I don't believe Jane Alexander is excited or impressed by art at all.

Brenson: Why do you say that?

Murray: Because there's this fear to be excited by something that might challenge people to think and might challenge people to feel things that aren't clean cut.

Lisiewicz: It seems like self-fear. The book points out how artists should be conscious of involvement in social and political forces, but it never considers how institutions, including itself, the NEA, are also part of those forces and have to find their own place within them in order to go on. It proposes solutions, but it completely withdraws itself. For example, it never even explained who Serrano and Mapplethorpe are, what the controversy was about.