We all know that the life of art is perhaps more than ever before determined not just by the encounter between the artist and the art public but also by the interplay between the art work and the social, economic, and political matrix in which art is inspired, funded, produced, and experienced. As modern life becomes more complex and at the same time more centralized, the process by which art exists increasingly becomes the object of rational analysis and calculation. This manifestation of what the French call planification—the institutionalizing of the making of goals and projections—goes by the name of cultural policy, a phrase whose inevitable associations with the Third Reich of Hitler and Goebbels seem to have done little to render moot.

Though it is perhaps unfair to prejudice a discussion of cultural policy by reference to the monstrous regime of Nazism, even in this unfairness there is a grain of truth: cultural policy is, and has been, a settled part of European life, and not just under totalitarianism. Among Europe’s many cultural policies, it is those directed toward high culture that have played the leading part. Admittedly, the phrase “high culture” is often problematical. About the only sure thing one can say about high culture is that everything belongs to its domain and at the same time nothing does. My own, no doubt incomplete, definition is this: high culture is concerned with, though not strictly limited to, art, literature, and learning that is either created