[T]he arts have recourse to every species of imposture; and these devices sometimes go so far as to defeat their own purpose.
—Alexis de Tocqueville
If I believed in reincarnation, I should wager that the art critic Robert Hughes was once a renowned patent-medicine salesman —in the Old West, perhaps, or maybe even in the less civilized reaches of his native Australia. The successful purveyor of nostrums must know his audience: how to flatter and cajole them and, especially, how to play on their fears. A certain smarminess does not come amiss. Sometimes the ills he warns about are real, sometimes they are completely imaginary. He must be ready to deal with both. And because the specifics he peddles are unfailingly bogus—even, occasionally, downright harmful—he must have command of a mesmerizing rhetoric in order to make a sale. It also helps if he knows the quickest way out of town.
What we might call the patent-medicine side of Robert Hughes has been obvious for some time. It was, for example, on prominent display in “The Shock of the New,” the television series on modern art that Mr. Hughes did for the BBC in 1980 and that was later shown on PBS and, in expanded form, published as a book. It was also on view in Culture of Complaint (1993), his contribution to the debate over political correctness. Culture of Complaint was a breathtaking performance. Mr. Hughes managed to adopt the argument against political correctness made by conservatives while at the same time preserving his liberal credentials. He did this by the simple device of attacking conservatives even as he deployed their arguments and recycled their ideas and examples. It was a neat trick. Culture of Complaint was a best seller, and one imagines that Mr. Hughes’s rivals in the patent-medicine business were green with envy—or was it from overexposure to his latest concoction?
In any case, Mr. Hughes is back, this time on the subject of public funding of culture. In “Why America Shouldn’t Kill Cultural Funding,” his cover story for the August 7 issue of Time magazine, Mr. Hughes has pulled into town with a new wagon full of his old medicine. It is difficult to imagine a more inviting topic for his talents. The complaint may be psychosomatic, but the symptoms are vivid: dizziness, blurred vision, inability to think clearly, and a propensity to frenzied moralism. In fact, the issue of public funding of culture has induced a kind of mass hysteria among bien pensants liberals. For complicated reasons having to do partly with cultural snobbery, partly with the widespread corruption of establishment values by a Sixties-style radicalism, institutions like the National Endowment for the Arts and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting have become synecdoches for the entire liberal world view. For many, it seems, the prospect of life without the NEA or “All Things Considered” is tantamount to an existential crisis: political catastrophe and moral collapse rolled into one.
Mr. Hughes preys expertly on these anxieties, dispensing the dreaded words “Republican” and “Newt Gingrich” to maximum effect. “The Republican leadership in Congress,” he intones, “means to sever all links between American government and American culture.” He speaks of “freshmen ideologues … squeaking with Newtish zeal” who are bent on a policy of “cultural defoliation—an attempt to destroy ‘liberal’ habitat.” (Promises, promises.) Nor is a little crudity beneath him: “These boys and girls aren’t even cultural Neanderthals. They’re Jurassic.” Gee. Subtlety is not one of Mr. Hughes’s strengths. What if the National Endowment for the Arts really were to be abolished: would that put America “alone among the nations of the world”? No, Mr. Hughes writes, offering his readers a bottle called “Sarcasm”: “little of Haiti’s national budget goes to culture. Zaïre does not support a national theater, and cultural grants in Rwanda, even for victim art, may be assumed to be fairly small.”
Not edifying, perhaps. But students of bombast will appreciate the skill with which Mr. Hughes wields his contradictions and sophistical equivocations. He is a master at the disarming non sequitur. In one sentence he complains that, “ever since the Puritans,” the arts in America have “always had to prove how moral they are”—the thought of questioning the moral tenor of an art work naturally being anathema to a sophisticate like Robert Hughes. A bit later he approvingly quotes James Madison to the effect that Americans owe it to “the cause of free government to prove by their establishments … that their political institutions are as favorable to the intellectual and moral improvement of Man as they are conformable to his individual and social rights.” But isn’t a concern about “moral improvement” exactly the sort of thing that Mr. Hughes excoriates in critics of the NEA? And how does James Madison come into the discussion, anyway?
As it happens, Mr. Hughes is fond of making references to the Founding Fathers, probably feeling that invoking them adds tone to his argument. At one point he tells us that “America’s Founding Fathers had no doubt about the necessity of the arts in a democracy. [Really?] They were radicals and revolutionaries who believed that the arts should be available to the many, not the privileged few.” Ah, yes: Alexander Hamilton, the radical; James Madison, the firebrand. And notice the sly way in which Mr. Hughes introduces the idea that “the arts should be available to the many, not the privileged few.” The implication is that critics of public funding for culture must be on the side of privilege.
At least, that’s one implication. It is part of Mr. Hughes’s method to take every possible position on every issue. At one moment, he beats the drum of democratic egalitarianism; the next he is insisting that “the NEA should be more elitist—rigorously so, in fact.” Almost every liberal bugbear is conjured up: Rush Limbaugh, George Will, and above all the “insatiable Christian right wing.” “America,” he writes, “is the only country in the Western world with a strong, and vengeful, current of Fundamentalist apocalyptic religion.” Did someone say “apocalyptic”? With the collapse of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War, Mr. Hughes informs us, “new Antichrists and minor devils have to be found inside America.” He ought to know, having uncovered so many himself.
Mr. Hughes admits that the sums of money involved are paltry. According to his own statistic, private patronage of culture currently outpaces public funding by a ratio of 16 to 1. He makes the familiar argument that even the relatively small sums expended are important, symbolically and as a means of attracting other support. “Over the past quarter-century, NEA seed money has been a boon and a blessing to America’s myriad cultural outlets.” Perhaps so. But the question Mr. Hughes neglects to ask is whether, over the last quarter-century, those “myriad cultural outlets” have been a boon to American culture? After all, we aren’t talking about the upkeep of the Lincoln Memorial or support for the New York Philharmonic. Among the spectacles those myriad outlets have supported with the taxpayers’ money have been Andres Serrano’s image of a crucifix submerged in urine, Robert Mapplethorpe’s sadomasochistic photographs, and all manner of grotesque “performance art” featuring bodily effluvia.
Mr. Hughes acknowledges that “the NEA should not have set itself up as the Lady Bountiful of the so-called cutting edge, as it did in the ’80s.” But taxpayer support of extreme figures such as Serrano or Mapplethorpe is only part of the problem. The real issue is whether spending public money aids or degrades the life of high culture in America. Mr. Hughes notes that “there was great art, drama, writing, and scholarship in America before 1965, when the endowments were founded.” The uncomfortable question he never asks is, What about American culture since 1965? Did the formation of the National Endowments and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting usher in a golden age of artistic achievement? Or have the last thirty years seen a progressive disintegration of intellectual and cultural standards throughout American society? Bruce Nauman, Keith Haring, Karen Finley, Mike Kelley—these are among the aesthetic non-entities celebrated by leading arts institutions today.
The truth is that the Metropolitan Museum of Art got along just fine before the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts. So did the New York City Ballet and the New York Philharmonic. Writers from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Robert Frost somehow managed to write without public largess, and neither Thomas Eakins nor David Smith depended on public grants to undertake their art. Allowing that “dedicated people create ingenious strategies of survival for themselves,” Mr. Hughes demands “But why should they have to?” To which one might reply, Why shouldn’t they? Why should someone who puts himself forward as an artist have an automatic claim on the public purse? For Mr. Hughes, the fact that the dancer Twyla Tharp lacks the money to have her own permanent company is “a national embarrassment.” But perhaps Twyla Tharp—a minor artist, after all—does not merit such an establishment, particularly at taxpayer expense?
Like many liberal commentators, Mr. Hughes speaks ominously about the influence of “market forces” on cultural activity. “Newt and his -oids,” he writes in one charming passage, “resent PBS’s small measure of independence from ‘market forces’— from corporate and hence, ultimately, political control.” What he doesn’t acknowledge is that talent attracts opportunity— and it does so nowhere more than in a capitalist economy where market forces produce so much surplus wealth.
Mr. Hughes begins his essay by quoting Alexis de Tocqueville on the arts in America and then asking “What would Tocqueville have thought of today’s assaults on the fabric of America’s public culture?” More to the point, what would Tocqueville have thought of this performance by Robert Hughes? “Hypocrisy reigns,” Mr. Hughes sniffs. “The right complains (with reason) about the dumbing-down of American education and then wants to kill one of the essential means of its spread and improvement,” i.e., the National Endowment for the Humanities. He goes on to make similar claims about the importance of PBS (which he describes as “intelligent television”) and the NEA. The real question, however, is whether such institutions have contributed more to the elevation or degradation of cultural life in this country. Mr. Hughes is correct about the prevalence of hypocrisy. But he is wrong about its provenance. Since he brought Tocqueville into the discussion, it seems appropriate to let that keen observer have the last word: “The hypocrisy of virtue is of every age, but the hypocrisy of luxury belongs more particularly to the ages of democracy.”
