Trafficking in wonder: The arts and the liberal arts

New England Journal of Higher Education, The, Summer 1998 by Feinsod, Arthur

Like ancient Rome, the United States is better known for its pragmatic achievements than its aesthetic ones. Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, describes how those in democracies such as ours "habitually prefer the useful to the beautiful" and "require that the beautiful ... be useful." When choices need to be made between the two in our country, utility invariably wins out over art. The lightbulb of Thomas Edison is preferred to the light of Robert Frost's poems, Henry Ford's automobile to Tennessee Williams' Streetcar.

Nonetheless, the ideal of art lies just below the surface of our national consciousness and now and then influences our words and actions. After all, the WPA's Federal Arts Project did subsidize artistic experimentation throughout the United States while employing thousands of artists during the Depression; America did create a National Endowment for the Arts in 1965 that fueled artistic endeavor for decades; and President Kennedy did proclaim, "When power corrupts, poetry cleanses, for art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment."

Even arts education can claim the blessing of a U.S. president, indeed one of the Founding Fathers. John Adams wrote his wife in 1780: "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy... in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music [and] architecture." By our second president's timetable, we should all be deep in the study of art by now, but of course, we aren't.

If for no other reason, one would think that the liberal arts college would be a bastion of support for the arts, since liberal arts study and the arts are kindred spirits in both forswearing utility. A liberal arts education is meant to create "free" individuals by educating them in the broadest sense, not preparing them directly for any specific kind of work. Art is an application of skill toward the expression of beauty. When the criterion of utility is added, we move away from art and more toward craft. A work of art, in its purest sense, tends to be "useless," much like a liberal arts education.

One would think that the arts and the liberal arts would stick together: a camaraderie of the useless, two impractical buddies paddling together against the swift current of American pragmatism in the name of something higher. But facing the harsh realities of diminishing funds, neither the arts nor the liberal arts can afford to strap its cause to a partner perhaps more impractical than itself. Now paddling separately, the arts and the liberal arts, instead of standing firm for their own intrinsic value, struggle to find any argument that can save them. And the arguments most likely to be heard in our culture are those of utility.

Practical rationale

Rather than claim a privileged status apart from the mundane, the liberal arts now find themselves having to legitimize themselves by claiming that they indirectly create the skills to succeed in the "real" world. Responding to dwindling interest in a liberal arts education among secondary school students and their parents, Richard Hersh, president of Hobart and William Smith College, recently argued that people with liberal arts educations, having learned to think creatively and express themselves clearly, have a better chance of securing and excelling in professional jobs than those with specialized or vocational training through which they have accrued skills seemingly more applicable to the work at hand.

In parallel fashion, studying the arts in schools is advocated insofar as it can be shown to improve performance in more traditional academic disciplines. Paul Griffiths of the New York Times led off his recent endorsement of music education in a child's early years on the grounds that listening to and performing music enhances a child's ability to acquire math and language skills. He enlists the same arguments used to validate the liberal arts: "On a more practical level, a child involved in a musical performance is confronted with challenges that will be of lifelong benefit: how you present yourself in public, how you argue a case, how you interpret a document, what evidence you accept and what you question, where you draw the limit between what you are told and what you want, how you work with others toward a common goal."

Griffiths does ultimately posit musical education's intrinsic value by its "asserting the importance of things... that have no physical existence or monetary worth," but he feels obliged to lead with the argument most prone to catch the eye of the pragmatic American reader. In short, advocates of the arts-like those of the liberal arts-have had to proclaim their worth in practical terms.

In searching for ways to validate the arts, administrators of arts programs have focused not only on vocational training, but also on social utility. To secure funding, the arts have had to prove their success in steering the young away from criminal activities, providing substantial jobs for the unemployed or underemployed or building interpersonal skills for those alienated and isolated on our socioeconomic fringes-notably, the poor and institutionalized. While many of us would celebrate these as worthy goals, making these issues priorities turns the arts into social means, rather than ends in themselves. The frequent result is that inferior art receives support over quality art on the basis that it addresses immediate social concerns, delivers manifest social results and thus is easier to measure in follow-up evaluations. Lost is art that stirs a deeper consciousness about larger, more enduring issues, even social, political and economic ones, but doesn't attempt to fix anything here and now. Lost is art that provides unquantifiable gains through a deeply satisfying and enriching experience for the individual-art that engages artist and audience alike in an intimate and lasting relationship with transcendent beauty and longer-term significance.