Historical ignorance bugs me. It annoys me even more than hyperbolic political rhetoric.
So after reading P-I columnist Joel Connelly's most recent column and Stefan's subsequent post I felt compelled to correct a few mistakes.
To recap, Connelly alludes to opponents of the National Endowment for the Arts as being Nazis. This is because the Nazis, after all, didn't like art and burned books.
A bad analogy, poor stereotype and factually wrong.
Germany's Nazi Party in the 1930s publicly funded artwork. The National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) was literally addicted to massive artistic displays to an extent that it still far surpasses the comparatively small budget for "arts" we federally earmark today in the United States.
Millions of Reichsmarks were levied on stadiums, statuary, paintings, plays, radio broadcasts and movies. You only need a rudimentary knowledge of World War II history to know that Hitler had instructed Albert Speer, First Architect of the Reich, to transform Berlin into the cultural capital of Europe by what would have been the largest public works program in history.
Joseph Goebbels, a philosophy major, failed journalist and novel writer, was the head of the Ministry of Cultural Enlightenment and Propaganda. Even here, notice how the importance of "cultural enlightenment" (read arts) was placed ahead of propaganda (newspapers and radio).
The danger with Nazism wasn't that it suppressed dissenting artwork in highly public, and generally ineffective, displays of book-burnings. It was that the NSDAP used the collective powers of the state to promulgate creative works which the party felt were appropriate. This deluge of propaganda posing as art completely flooded the country drowning out any competition in a wave of National Socialism. It created an odd schizophrenia in the German social psyche where movies like "Snow White" or "The Virginian" competed in the same theaters with "Triumph of the Will" and jazz bands strained against the blare of the "Horst Wessel Song".
Furthermore, the hierarchy of the NSDAP itself was filled with (failed) artists and writers and starry-eyed dreamers who felt they were making Europe into a beautiful cultural paradise for the children of the future. If World War I hadn't come along most of them would have probably spent their lives peddling second-rate picture postcards in the streets of Vienna.
I guess there's a lesson about never letting writers or folks from artist co-ops anywhere near the reins of governmental power.
You can look back seven decades later and admit that a small percentage of artwork produced in 1930s Germany is quite good. But, for me, the vast majority of Pan-Germanic art is just drek and given an open market of artistic ideals would never have been produced in the first place.
You can look back on several decades of art produced by the National Endowment for the Arts and admit that some of it is quite good. But the vast majority of it is crap which would never have been inflicted upon the public if there were a truly open market of artistic ideals.
So when economic conservatives criticize the NEA and federally funded art it is with the lessons of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union in mind.
Federal funding for arts creates a false economy where mediocre work is sustained and allowed to compete at a comparative advantage against creative minds who choose not to whore themselves for governmental grants. The dirty secret, looking back in history, is that the best artwork is done privately or at the behest of a patron by starving artists with pain in their souls.
Joel is a professional journalist with a working knowledge of history and he knows this or should. I know the pressures of coming out with a column twice a week can be tough and mistakes are made and short-cuts taken. But to have the lede of your story compare opponents of federally funded "arts" to Hermann Goering is absurd.
Leave that intellectual junk to the folks at MoveOn.org.
Post Script: Since this post is of an academic nature I will be highly wroth if any dim-bulb attempts to say that I'm comparing the federal government of the United States to that of National Socialist Germany. I'm not. Apples to Oranges. There are just some things which are better left to local municipalities, charities, private corporations and individuals.
I am not sure if you are criticizing Connelly as factually wrong because in addition to massive book burnings and desecration of modernist and avante garde art that was deemed "un-Aryan", the Nazis also lavishly funded their favored "Aryan" artists, or if you are contending the Nazis didn't destroy art they didn't like. In fact, the Nazis were notorious for destroying art and literature that was disfavored.
Posted by: wayne on May 16, 2007 04:31 PM"Furthermore, the hierarchy of the NSDAP itself was filled with (failed) artists and writers and starry-eyed dreamers who felt they were making Europe into a beautiful cultural paradise for the children of the future. If World War I hadn't come along most of them would have probably spent their lives peddling second-rate picture postcards in the streets of Vienna."
Ward here has precisely nailed a parallel that Joel Connelly missed in his haste to yell "Nazis!" - and gotten in a nifty backhand at Hitler while at it.
It is the hierarchies of the NEA and NEH that are filled with oh-so-qualified 'arts people', a mini-Cosa Nostra of the beautiful ones who have gotten entrenched in the arts-production end of the business. All those gummint arts funds are funnelled through these careerists to - guess what: other members of their own self-selecting clique. There's a monster conflict of interest at work here, loaded in favor of the producers of 'art' instead of the consumers.
Worse, out of the aesthetic orientation of these producers grows a self-concept that they should be arbiters of the manners and morals and customs of the rest of us. Hence they encourage art works not only to epater les bourgoises ('Piss Christ' comes to mind), but to instruct us in multiculturalism and such other PC preaching that can be put into plastic forms, to the benefit of the anointed 'artistes' but not much to the benefit of the rest of us.
And thus do we look on the mighty works of these anointed ones and despair - exactly as we do when we see the surviving works (or their historic photos) of the artists selected by the Nazis for subsidies to instruct the prewar Germans.
Posted by: Insufficiently Sensitive on May 16, 2007 04:42 PMCounterexample: Vaclav Havel.
Posted by: Bruce on May 16, 2007 05:26 PMI don't think anyone here is suggesting that these people shouldn't be allowed to produce their art.
I don't think anyone here is suggesting that they shouldn't be allowed to show their art.
I don't think anyone here is suggesting that they shouldn't be allowed to sell their art.
What is being said very specifically is that the government should not be funding artists specifically so they can produce their art. They are free to produce anything they want, just not on the taxpayers "dime".
Posted by: David on May 16, 2007 07:58 PMThe interesting bit is that there has been interesting art since the 1960s, as any review of SIGGRAPH conference proceedings will show. It simply doesn't fit into the tastes of the clique that decide what goes into museums. I don't doubt that these circumstances would change if the entire group had to please an audience rather than each other.
Luc Besson, director of the only french films to have been actually shown outside of france in major cinemas since the 1960s commented that subsidies for film in france had destroyed the french film industry because "they make films for each other and not the audience".
It ruins the artistic, creative process, IMHO. Art funded by "the people" has to please everyone, or at least try to. I seems an impossible task and one that I, as an artist, would never attempt. I'm too busy trying to please myself! I can't see ever giving up that freedom for the sake of a grant!
Posted by: ALP on May 17, 2007 09:54 AMIt shows a lack of imagination and rigor for an editorial writer to do this.
Try it yourself - I can't believe someone like you would like the color green - that was the color of the Nazis' uniforms.
Only a Nazi like you right wingers would listen to Wagner.
Of course George Bush likes sausage - don't you know that is a German food, favored by Himmler and Eichman.
What a pitiful state of discourse.
Posted by: Steve on May 17, 2007 11:12 AMWhat? Not in this country. It has to please the inbred aristocracy that always seem to end up in control of the selection process. Just replace said nabobs with a committee of, say, one representative from each state in the Union, taken at random from the phone book. That committee would more probably select art that fits the "art funded by the people" theme given above. It would also fetch howls and tortured editorials and lynch mobs from the would-be elites who would lose their jobs in that replacement.
Hey, not a bad thought. Maybe those offended critics could learn a thing or two about asymmetrical warfare, acquire a vest or two, and express the ultimate aesthetic criticism by the self-destruction method, each one taking out one piece of 'wrong' public art along with his/her expiring soul...
Posted by: Insufficiently Sensitive on May 17, 2007 12:07 PMHitler, who put the socialism back in National Socialism, pumped up failed artists (e.g. Hitler) with R-M squeezed from productive, tax-paying Good Germans. Hitler, who put the socialism back in National Socialism, was the enlightened progressive who hated fags (the kind formerly smoked by real men) and who hated red meat. He was the prototypical metrosexual vegesexual vegetarian that Seattle usually loves to love.
Hell, I'm surprised that someone from U-Dub doesn't go for an NEA/NIH grant to bring the old man back from the bunker so he can edit The Stranger.
Posted by: pferdescheist on May 17, 2007 02:49 PMSo your arguement for keeping funding for the NEA is that we have supported it in the past, so we must continue? How about the possibility that "we the people" have changed our minds on the importance of publicly funded art.
I'm not sure where you are going with the statement about "acts of withdrawing support or funds based on narrow subjectivities"- I don't want a narrow withdrawal of funds from the NEA, I want a removal of ALL funding from the NEA! I want ALL art projects paid for by private or corporate donations.
Posted by: David on May 17, 2007 08:27 PMYou could start your own revolution by only using privately provided services to prove your point, but you won't be able to get out of your driveway.
@21/22 A cursory browsing of an art history book covering twentieth century movements will show you that it is in a style of work not limited to Commies or Nazis. The Hammering Man was funded with both private and public money, more the former than the latter. Everyone isn't supposed to like everything, particularly in something as personal as the arts. I don't find the statue of Lenin threatening for a number of reasons, not least that there are so few examples of Soviet propaganda art from that period surviving in the US and it's a reminder of idealism gone totally wrong among its many other meanings. If you like more benign sculptures there's a big metal Tulip by Tom Wesselman on Third and Madison.
Posted by: Acid Brain on May 18, 2007 11:15 AMI don't suppose you would care to elaborate on this statement?
Posted by: huckleberry on May 18, 2007 12:08 PMArt is an intrinsically private human endeavor, and in its purest form is created by an artist regardless of whether anyone cares to appreciate it. If, however, someone does, a market is created and the artist may be able to make a living from his or her artistic expressions. To my knowledge, the widespread practice of perverting this process with socialistic idealism is rooted in the 20th century and continues to this day, but was unknown throughout the preceding "6000+" years of "human civilization and behavior."
Posted by: srogers on May 20, 2007 10:28 PMI think we differ some on application of terms but not much overall. I would like to step it out of the late twentieth century american conservative dogma for a minute and quit yelling "commies versus capitalists" across the yard.
How would one characterize the relationship Michaelangelo had working in Rome whether for the Pope or the Politicians? Was it a purely commercial arrangement between him and the clients for their own edification or was there a component there of the Parish who ultimately bought the work by proxy through their donations and taxes? Without digressing and getting into the Reformation, why is so much of the civic and religious work in the public eye? And Rome doesn't exactly have the franchise on the public art thing.
Similar arrangements of public art being created and installed under the patronage of representatives can be found in the earliest civilizations, though the specifics of the relationships are long lost to time. There is no truth that all art exists inside a trade vacuum where the exchange is a simple one-to-one between a single creator and a single purchaser. Though that is the norm and preferable for most works, it is not applicable to all works. I wouldn't call Michelangelo's David a perversion just because it was commissioned by the Overseers of the Office of Works of the Duomo. Who would?
Posted by: Acid Brain on May 21, 2007 05:49 PMI will agree with you that when a monarch commissioned a work of art, it was somewhat like the government providing a subsidy for art. However, these commissions almost never resulted in the public display of the art (it went on the walls of royal palaces), it was not paid for by direct taxation - the fuedal system was more complicated than that, and the purpose wasn't to deliver art to the masses because they were somehow entitled to it.
Finally, the patronage you refer to was the result of wealthy private families (ex. - Medici) patronizing artists whose work they admired. Sometimes it was done to secure their place in the aristocracy - one-upsmanship - if you will, but it was also done for the more pure motive of being able to enjoy the work of an artist who otherwise would either produce art for someone else or nobody at all. Art (like M's David) are never a perversion in themselves, but the process by which they are financed may be. If purchased by a private individual or organization and then put on public dispay as a donation: wonderful. If purchased with extorted money from individuals who did not wish to pay, for the supposed benefit of the public (but more likely to satisfy the self-centered, twisted consciousness of liberal bureaucrats): horrible.
Posted by: srogers on May 22, 2007 10:14 AMThe statue of David was commissioned by the public works commissioners of the Duomo as a city sculpture and was positioned outside the Florentine government buildings. It doesn't have a parallel with how we do things now, but if that's not public art in action then what is it?
Posted by: Acid Brain on May 22, 2007 01:56 PM