arts and society: Looking ahead, The

New England Journal of Higher Education, The, Summer 1998 by Coleman, Elizabeth

What do those who worry about the use of public dollars in a democracy for so individual and subjective a thing as art make of the fact that every other civilized nation in the world-democratic, socialist, capitalist, Northern, Southern, Eastern, Western, large or small -- somehow manages to see its way clear to doing just that, and on a scale well beyond anything the United States has ever achieved? Surely art and artists are no less unruly, provocative, and individual outside our borders than within them.

Some critics charge that artists have brought this lack of support upon themselves through their insensitivity to public taste and political realities. But whatever artists' obligations to the larger community may be, they do not include minding their manners and being politically correct.

This is not to suggest that the artist's freedom is without responsibility. The issue of what anyone owes to the broader community has particular urgency in this era of personal privilege and unremitting emphasis on the value of the individual. Unquestionably, to inquire into the responsibility of the artist beyond the development of his or her own talent is to enter very dangerous territory. But that only makes it more urgent that the issue of responsibility be engaged by those who love the freedom and even the unruliness of art, rather than by those who despise and fear it.

If we are serious about achieving a sustained policy to support the arts, we desperately need to build consensus about the value of art, artists and artistic freedom. Yet in our political life, we pay a good deal of attention to tactics and strategy at the expense of underlying philosophy.

Power of art

Intrinsic to the activity of the artist is the act of giving concrete embodiment to something within the artist, so it achieves a reality for others. In so doing, the world is enlarged, enlivened and, in some measure, changed. As such, that activity is the fullest possible expression of individual freedom-an act of profound generosity spun out of the artist's innermost resources. It is an activity in which humans come closest to imitating the divine. But when exploring the contribution the arts can make to maintaining a robust society-especially a democratic society-we can and should ask for even more.

Art is fueled by a restless and exhilarating quest for perfection-the perfect line, the perfect balance, the perfect gesture, the perfect word. It carries with it a relentless ethos. For the artist, the quest is endless: hour after hour, day after day, work after work. When the subject is art, we enter a universe where there is no such thing as "good enough," where the embrace of excellence is unequivocal.

Artists and lovers of art can teach us to participate in and to cherish the pleasure, the power and the exhilaration of that quest. And while art collapses distinctions between the young and the old, the privileged and the unprivileged, the powerful and the powerless, artists must not let this capacity become yet another rationale for abandoning standards of excellence. This is a particularly lively issue in a democracy, where the commitment to equal access often generates resistance to the virtues of excellence. Who are the real losers when we diminish the value of excellence in our determination to expand access? All of us, but most particularly those who have just been granted admission.

At the heart of the matter of what art and artists bring to this nation is their unique capacity to transcend differences, to make connections, to create community. Lerone Bennett Jr., executive editor of the magazine Ebony Forum, has captured this capacity with particular eloquence. In discussing a publication of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities entitled Creative America, he notes:

One of the principal findings of our study . . . is that the cultural sector is more integrated than any other sector of American life and is a living example of the strengths and possibilities of our oneness in difference and our difference in oneness. Few if any analysts have noticed it, but on this level, without any preaching or moralizing or subsidizing, Americans of all races and creeds are writing a new compact that carries the meaning of America to a new level and charts a new course for a new century.

On this level, we all speak jazz and the blues and gospel and Gershwin and Ellington and Rap and Macarena. On this level, we all conjugate Aretha and Dylan and Estefan and Bernstein ... On this level, there is no White or Black or Brow or Red or to be more precise, we are all Black and Brown and White and Red ...

The challenge of the 21st century is to make this oneness in diversity more conscious and to carry it to another level not only in the cultural field but in all the public arenas that bring Americans together and define them as Americans. ...

Bennett is right. It's not that the arts avoid the passions that can separate us or blind us-it is that they educate them. Like nothing else, they extend our reach beyond the limits and parochialisms of direct experience. There is no better teacher from whom to learn hope and no better way in which to learn empathy.