More Conservative Rot

[Updates below.]

Farewell Mapplethorpe, Hello Shakespeare

Under normal circumstances, the White House announcement that the president was seeking a big budget increase for the National Endowment for the Arts might have been grounds for dismay. Pronounce the acronym "NEA," and most people think Robert Mapplethorpe, photographs of crucifixes floating in urine, and performance artists prancing about naked, smeared with chocolate, and skirling about the evils of patriarchy.

Thanks, but no thanks.

But things have changed, and changed for the better at the NEA. The reason can be summed up in two trochees: Dana Gioia, the distinguished poet and critic who is the Endowment's new chairman.

Within a matter of months, Mr. Gioia has transformed that moribund institution into a vibrant force for the preservation and transmission of artistic culture. He has cut out the cutting edge and put back the art. Instead of supporting repellent "transgressive" freaks, he has instituted an important new program to bring Shakespeare to communities across America. And by Shakespeare I mean Shakespeare, not some PoMo rendition that portrays Hamlet in drag or sets A Midsummer Night's Dream in a concentration camp. (Check the website www.shakespeareinamericancommunities.org for more information.)

Roger Kimball is the author of this garbage.

Mr. Gioia is moving on other fronts as well. He has hired a number of able deputies who care about art and understand that what the public wants is more access to good art - opera, poetry, theater, literature - not greater exposure to social pathology dressed up as art. After a couple of decades of cultural schizophrenia, the NEA has become a clear-sighted, robust institution intent on bringing important art to the American people.

So since you like it and agree with the message and content of the art, it should be publicly funded. Simply not on the table for discussion is the chance that some people truely do enjoy non-traditional, deliberately confrontational, and intentionally scatological forms of expression. Screw those dirty hippies. They don't know what real art is.

Who cares about "limited government" anyway when you can use the government to promote a certain kind of culture and art...especially when it makes your side look good?

It's quite odd, really. People keep telling us - that is, professors and CNN commentators and Hollywood actors keep telling us - how very stupid President Bush is. Yet everywhere one looks he is supporting some of the most intelligent and dynamic people ever to occupy their cultural posts. Dana Gioia at the NEA, his counterpart Bruce Cole at the National Endowment for the Humanities, Leon Kass and his panel of distinguished scientists and philosophers at the President's Council on Bioethics (see their website www.bioethics.gov to get a sense of the good work they are doing on clarifying the enormous moral issues surrounding the debate over biotechnology). The Left keeps screaming about how dim George Bush is, but in the meantime, he has illuminated one area of public life after another with immensely talented and articulate people.

Yeah, yeah, fuck principles! We need more elected people and their appointees explaining to us what's ART and what isn't!

There is plenty of room for debate about whether and to what extent government should be directly involved in funding culture.

NO, THERE ISN'T. If we are to have a government, then it's reach must be restricted to a few things of importance and taxing people to pay for the promotion of art - any art - has absofuckinglutely nothing to do with those things.

I'm with Rush on this:

Well, good, then they don't need to take money from other Americans! This reminds me of the argument over funding the Kansas City Symphony when I lived there. There were all these fund-raisers, and when people didn't open their wallets at them, the symphony demanded that the government force them to pony up the dough. I mean, nobody wanted the symphony, okay? Yet some people insisted the government fund the thing! I just don't understand this line of thinking. A lot of conservatives feel the same way, and they're none too happy with Bush these days.

It's just sick how something both as useful and repellant as tradition can blind the minds of people and lead them to bad conclusions.

UPDATE(6/18/2004 5:07pm)
Whom to Vote For?

Posted by Drizzten at January 30, 2004 09:37 AM