Artists: Another 'Entitlement' Group

I must admit that when I first heard about the National Endowment for the Arts conference call to enlist the arts community in propagandizing the White House’s agenda, I was a little mystified as to why it was so controversial. After all, the NEA, through its funding choices, has been actively undermining American values for many years. Way back in 1986 we were treated to the scandal of Andres Serrano getting $15,000 from the NEA for his mediocre photo of a plastic crucifix in his own urine – “Piss Christ.” That is just one of a myriad of egregious examples of NEA funding going to support dubious “art” that functions solely to corrode the fabric of civilized society.

Sure, the NEA gives money to major established arts organizations – symphonies, ballet companies, repertory theater groups, and the like — but that is how they maintain their veneer of staid respectability, all the while promulgating their Leftist, nihilistic agenda through their smaller grants. For example, I know a truly great American artist, Harry Carmean, who, among his other credits, was the Chairman of the Fine Arts Department at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California and taught there for 43 years. He applied for NEA grants repeatedly to help fund his work but was rejected each time because his paintings were deemed “not edgy enough.” Translation: he actually possesses artistic talent, skill, and discipline, which he uses to create beauty instead of pseudo-artistic, politicized claptrap. We all know he would have had a far better chance of getting a grant out of the subjective and ideologically driven apparatchiks at the NEA had he used dog feces to paint images of female genitalia.

Like President Obama and his advisors who live within an Alinskyite bubble of Leftist Chicago politics, the NEA also maintains a closed, incestuous relationship between it’s administrators and the “artists” it funds. To them, art, by definition, is inherently political in nature. To produce “real” art today, artists must embody narcissistic self-indulgence and infuse their work with identity politics or otherwise “challenge” their audience. To be “meaningful” art must shine a spotlight on the dark underbelly of society or explore the twisted depths of human iniquity. By contrast, art that celebrates the higher aspirations of humanity or embraces beauty as a mere end in itself is thought to be frivolous and, therefore, unworthy of financial support.

So, it came as no surprise to me that the White House and the NEA teamed up to conscript the arts community into helping promulgate their agenda. I’m sure that over at the NEA they are totally perplexed by any outcry against their call to enlist the aid of “socially conscious” artists to help push the self-evidently wonderful Obama Administration plans for radically altering the American landscape. The fact that their radical agenda is unacceptable to so many Americans has never even appeared on their radar.

The conference call initiated by the NEA brings up larger issues about what happens when the Government attempts to engineer society via its largesse. All along, the NEA has been doling out money to its group of anointed artists and now the Government is simply calling for payback. While all Government handouts come with inevitable strings attached, in this case, since the vast majority of artists on the receiving end of NEA munificence are on the Left, they see nothing wrong with overtly working to further the Obama Administration goals. This toxic symbiosis comes as a result of turning the arts community into yet another “entitlement” group. There are innumerable examples of artists complaining bitterly that their “freedom of expression” has been abridged when federal grant money is denied them. In other words, government handouts (of other people’s money) have so weakened them that they actually imagine it is a “right” to have their self-indulgent art paid for by the taxpayers.

It has long gone out of fashion for artists to simply want to create things of beauty and to derive satisfaction from bringing joy to the lives of those whose lives are touched by their art. Instead, for so many, artistic significance is now only measured by how politically or societally influential a work of “art” is. The White House and the NEA know well the psychology of their hand-picked group of leftist artistes. That is why they could be so confident that the “arts community” would jump onboard with both feet and embrace the opportunity to “serve” the President. The fact that grants might be coming down the pike for those who “serve” particularly well is, in the end, of only secondary importance to massaging their narcissistic feelings of self-importance.

Creating political propaganda is not the province of real artists, though. While it is obvious that throughout history great art has been created when artists have been commissioned to do so, all real artists recoil at the idea of making propaganda art to support the State. That these NEA grantees seem so willing to “make a stink” (as Yosi Sergant so colorfully put it in the NEA call) to benefit the Obama Administration says volumes about their lack of artistic integrity.