This Noble Land (23 page)

That still leaves the problem: Should tax dollars be allocated by committee vote to individual artists? This is a painful question for me to address, because my writing career has been unbelievably fortunate, and it ill behooves me to speak out against much-needed grants to deserving individual artists even though I myself did not require such aid. My decision runs much deeper than the channels of personal need, however, and I am against the grant system to individuals for many reasons. It is almost impossible to administer it justly. Despite every precaution it degenerates into a you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours operation. Men and women of real talent are rarely identified and thrown forward by the system, and daring artists in any field are infrequently awarded grants. Most significant, through the long reach of history the productive artist has most often come from that group of aspirants who work by themselves in such quarters as they can afford and in the lively competition of the marketplace.

Because such counsel, coming from me with all the advantages I have enjoyed, must sound callous and lacking in compassion, I can only say that I have always been aware of the vulnerability of unestablished writers and, because I have been excessively rewarded, have given most of the earnings of my writing to help those in the profession who were less fortunate than I was.

I realize that there seems to be a contradiction between the two parts of my advice about financing the arts: Funds for groups but not for individuals. My reasoning is this: The performance
of a play, an opera or an orchestra concert requires so many different participants and so much infrastructure, such as halls, dressing rooms and support staff like stagehands, that outside financial aid is almost obligatory, while the individual artists can work and perform alone. I believe this is a real distinction.

I feel similarly about the acquisition programs of art museums. It would be unfair for a museum’s board of directors to expect a curator using tax funds to purchase avant-garde art, even though often that might be the only kind worth collecting. Think, however, how the curator in the 1910 period would have been treated by the public if he had recommended the purchase of a portrait of a two-headed woman by an unknown Spanish painter named Picasso. Or should a curator using public funds be expected in the 1950s to buy for his local museum one of Willem de Kooning’s startling distorted portraits of women? Much better, I think, to encourage private individuals to do the collecting with their own money and in time turn the results over to some responsible museum as a gift to the community.

I was fascinated some years ago when the curators of the Philadelphia Museum of Art went back in history for nearly a hundred years and gathered together from many sources canvases that had been shown in the yearly exhibitions in that city. The display was dazzling, and had the museum staff bought only one painting a year, exercising superior judgment, the city would now have a collection of a hundred master paintings. But very few of them could have been purchased in years like 1869, 1897 and 1922, when expenditure of public funds for art of an unconventional kind would have been vociferously criticized. Philadelphia was also not yet ready for the avant-garde, and so did not purchase what could have been a master collection. However, even though the officials of the museum had not dared to buy the best, a scattering of private citizens were more venturesome.
They acquired some stunning canvases and in time turned them over to the museum.

To summarize my advice to the government: Support the art groups with tax dollars, stop the wasteful and unproductive system of grants to individuals, and encourage private citizens to purchase art and pass it along to public institutions. But whatever you do, encourage the public to support art programs in the schools, facilitate art festivals in the countryside, and establish the image of a nation that loves and respects the arts, for that is one of the hallmarks of a first-rate civilization.

Despite the present round of vicious attacks on the arts, I am reassured by the fact that in certain aspects we still have superb and almost supreme manifestations of our support for the more exalted forms of culture. In Boston, Philadelphia and New York we have world-class orchestras, with Chicago and Cleveland not far behind. In the Metropolitan in New York and the National Gallery in Washington we have collections of paintings that summarize the best in Western accomplishment, while the Modern in New York and the Getty in California are gems in their fields. The Metropolitan Opera in New York sets the standard for the world, as good in its performances as La Scala in Milan, and first-rate companies perform operas in many American cities. Broadway still vies with London for leadership in world theater, and the proliferation of theater groups throughout the nation is a tribute to our enlightened citizenry. The arts are alive, and it is a responsibility of our government to see that they remain so. It would be economically stupid to deny them tax support when they not only contribute so much to us spiritually but also stimulate the economy and pay back in taxes such a large proportion of what they receive.

To exemplify what can be accomplished by groups of private citizens, even without the infusion of great amounts of tax dollars,
I want to identify and praise four small museums, tucked away in odd corners of our nation, which represent local activity at its best. If you and your family are traveling in the West it would be worth a detour to go to the northwest corner of Wyoming, where the small town of Cody nestles among the hills and houses the Buffalo Bill Museum. Started in the town in which members of Buffalo Bill Cody’s descendants still live, it was little more than a minor tourist stop until a group of enthusiasts from all parts of the United States took an interest in it, and with their financial and administrative support quickly transformed it into a small but magnificent museum near the eastern entrance to Yellowstone National Park. It now consists of four separate museums: one honors Buffalo Bill and his flamboyant life; another houses probably the premier collection of Western art in the world, the Remingtons and the Russells and the best examples of so-called cowboy art; the third, a big, striking museum honoring the American Indian, has become the jewel of the lot, a surprise to the casual visitor who might not have been aware of the richness of Native American art; and the final museum has been contributed by the Winchester people, who have placed here their impressive collection of American firearms, including rare examples of their own product, ‘the gun that won the West.’

I have for many years been affiliated with the Cody and have marveled at its transformation into something fresh and new and better. It is a magnificent tribute to the people, especially those living in distant New York who have supported it.

In the west Texas cow town of Lubbock, Texas Tech University has created a museum of the Western rancher. On one of its fields imaginative professors of the institution have brought in bulldozers to erect substantial berms (artificial low walls constructed by bulldozing loose earth into position) to break the flat prairie into a score of nests each about the size of a tennis court or larger.
Into these earthen receptacles people of the university moved—one building to each bermed holding area—a collection of the actual houses, barns and workshops in which the ranchers of the area had lived. Into one big bermed nest they moved an entire barn, and into the smaller area across the way they imported a ranch house from seventy miles out in the country.

In time they covered a huge portion of their prairie land, with the pleasing result that the university now has an imposing outdoor museum of western ranch life. This is an outdoor museum worth seeing.

Equally imaginative are two small museums in the Philadelphia area, because they show what almost any community with imagination can achieve. Southwest of the major city in the picturesque village of Chadds Ford, near the Delaware state line, members of the Wyeth family of artists and their supporters have transformed a nineteenth-century gristmill into a lovely museum featuring the works of the family. It is a handsome place, well run and a delight to visit.

At about the same distance from central Philadelphia but to the northeast in the onetime village of Doylestown, Pennsylvania, a group of energetic young men convinced the political leaders of the area that the government should give them the remnants of a handsome old jail built of native stone in the 1860s. They converted this into a museum honoring the Pennsylvania impressionists, that surprising group of some dozen fine artists who settled in Bucks County at the turn of the century and made the area an art center for the times. Later, a score of famous writers came into the area—Sid Perelman, Oscar Hammerstein, Pearl Buck, the Broadway masters George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, Dorothy Parker and others—so the museum contains not only paintings by the early artists but also memorial tributes to the writers. The unused jail has been transformed into an art museum
that has become the pride of the community and a vital center for the education of children. This kind of imaginative use of our heritage is available to almost any community in the United States.

I believe that the four museums I’ve listed have been constructed without relying excessively on tax funds, but if the time comes when such assistance is required, funds should be made available; centers of interest like these are invaluable. They illuminate and inspire entire populations and make themselves a functioning part of a community.

There remains the perplexing question of why in recent years there has suddenly been a groundswell of opposition to the arts. For an answer one must look at the composition and behavior of the new political leaders who have suddenly found themselves responsible for dealing with this problem of the arts in an essentially macho society. Their commander, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, is himself an intellectual, a reader of books, a college professor and the author of a novel, with other books contracted for, but he and most of his followers appear to me to be viscerally anti-intellectual and ill disposed to provide funding for the arts. The Contract with the American Family declares open warfare on the arts in a spirit of crude anti-intellectualism. Its authors would have us believe that modern society can be governed only by people of a stolid, unimaginative middle class, but a democracy in particular requires public servants with a vibrant outlook to keep it functioning and healthy and in touch with modern developments.

The unfortunate cases I’ve referred to earlier—the erotic Mapplethorpe photographs of nude males, the crucifix in urine, the desecration of the flag—have handed the critics powerful clubs with which to attack the arts, the artists and especially the public funding. Their virulence is such that I am reminded of the quotation attributed to Hermann Göring: ‘When I hear somebody
say the word
culture
, I reach for my revolver.’ Such a remark is particularly reprehensible coming from a man who assembled a priceless collection of paintings stolen from the art museums in the European cities conquered by the Nazis.

I am confused when officials from the extreme right propose in
their
contract, which they call the Contract with the American Family, the abolishment of all funds for intellectual programs and especially the gutting of the PBS broadcasts that have been so helpful in educating our preschool children. They seem ignorant of the fact that the arts—along with professional sports—have been one of the ladders by which gifted young people in the inner cities can climb out of their ghettos. How does the strangulation of such programs strengthen family life?

The arts face a threefold crisis: First, the new political leaders seem to both despise and fear the arts, and they are trying to persuade the general public to agree with them; second, the new managers are determined to abolish all grants of tax money for the arts; and, third, some of the manifestations of our current arts, like gangsta rap, are so patently offensive that Robert Dole, the former Senate majority leader and the 1996 Republican presidential candidate, gained wide support when he inveighed publicly against specific companies for their contamination of American popular culture. I agree with him on his condemnation of lyrics that debase women and encourage young punks to shoot police officers. I have stated earlier that I would not defend this sort of speech under the First Amendment. Dole’s accusations formed a test case for me as to whether I really meant what I said. I did, and I support him in his attack on that hideous music.

Where the widespread attack on the arts will end I cannot guess. Occasional excesses render them vulnerable, and tax funds are visibly wasted in a handful of the grants, but it is irrational to condemn an entire segment of our society, and one that contributes
so much. To do so depicts us as boorish oafs to the foreign nations with which we must do business, and we broadcast to the world the word that in America Billy-Bob Bubba has replaced Ralph Waldo Emerson.

I hope a truce can be devised between those attacking the arts and those defending them, for to continue the enmity as it exists at present is worse than counterproductive.