Can we save culture? While conservatives were content to live their private lives, the Left has taken control of American culture

National Review, August 26, 1991 by Samuel (American pianist) Lipman

CULTURE shapes our lives and affects every action we take. The Left knows this simple fact; we seem not to know it, and as a result we are content to leave the Left in control of culture.

By "culture," I mean the realm of meaning and value--how we live and how we want to live. Culture is the mental component of life, and its capacity to influence the material, while not total, is enormous. This modern usage of "culture" includes education and entertainment, the high and the low, the serious and the popular, the private and the public. It is a usage far removed from the pure nineteenth-century conception of culture as aspiration and uplift, which I cherish, but culture, however defined, is still capable of being better or worse aesthetically, decent or sordid morally.

Let me begin with the recent controversy over the notorious National Endownent for the Arts grants for sacrilegious and obscene art first associated with Andres Serrano and Robert Maplethorpe. When the NEA scandal erupted, the response from the Left was that it is precisely the most valuable art that is the most provocative and destabilizing; and, furthermore, because of the value of such provocation and destabilization, public support must be unfettered by content restrictions. This liberal/radical response is easily understood: we could have expected nothing more from those who defend flag-burning as a form of political speech vital to our constitutional system.

The conservative response to the NEA scandal is not so easily understood. At first it consisted of shock and outrage, mostly coming from the religious Right. With this emotional outpouring came demands from Senator Helms for the prohibition of grants for works containing obscenity, pornography, and sacrilege. The Helms amendment, watered down in conference, was the first fruit of these demands. But restrictions on NEA grant-making proved a bonanza for arts advocates and the media, and unenforceable to boot. Sadly, the conservative outcry failed utterly to suggest just what content should be supported by government or by anyone else.

Other conservatives (notably Representative Crane) demanded the elimination of the NEA entirely. For them, the issue was not the objectionable content of these grants, but rather any federal support for art at all. According to this argument, culture is solely a matter of private taste and decision. I myself have heard Congressman Rohrabacher say that it was fine with him if a homosexual center wanted to exhibit the Mapplethorpe photographs, but that the Federal Government had no business paying for the exhibition. But disgusting art remains disgusting, however it is funded. While we may wish neither to subsidize nor to prohibit it, we cannot be indifferent to its influence on society.

These congressmen are not alone in wishing to sidestep the issue of content. Congressman Hyde, a valiant fighter against these dreadful grants, has recently written that all attempts "to enforce any minimum level of aesthetic achievement and ethical responsibility on publicly funded art is futile," and suggested that the NEA funds should be used for scholarships for students "majoring in the fine arts." In this way, the government could "nurture young artists without either outraging the public . . . or incurring charges of censorship and philistinism." The problem with the Hyde proposal is that art students must study something, and that "something" is just another term for content. Alas, the scholarships proposed by Congressman Hyde would be used for the study of just what he did not wish to fund in the first place.

The difficulty with the Helms, Crane, Rohrabacher, and Hyde approaches is not that they wish to control or even eliminate the NEA. The problem is that in viewing culture solely in terms of its governmental support, they have not gone on to consider that in culture what government does is only a reflection of what is going on in society at large. The problem of culture is a problem of the private realm, and must be fought out in that realm.

No Difference

IMAGINE that a group of 175 or so contributors had each guaranteed a gift of one million dollars to the arts every year for ten years--on condition that the NEA be abolished. How would the outcome of this privately controlled support differ from that of our present governmental support?

I suggest that the outcome would be virtually the same. There would immediately be a demand for the coordinatioin of these private grants. To arrange this coordination, the private support group would quickly hire all the senior staff of the old Endowment. Under the influence of this old-new staff, guidelines would be developed to guarantee approximately the same distribution of grants to the same recipients. The arguments for the artistic cutting edge, of Mapplethorpe and Serrano fame, would win the day again. So would the arguments for outreach and representation--and multiculturalism as well. for proof, just look at the current grants list of the corporations, foundations, and individuals who support the arts in this country. So the problem is not to get private bodies and individuals involved, but rather to change the present disposition of the private sector.