Who Killed Culture

From barbarism to democracy, elites seek a suspect in the reported death of art.

Charles Paul Freund from the March 1998 issue

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One may well argue that the modern concept of imitative fine art has more coherence. (Or maybe not: There's a good case for re-evaluating mathematics' aesthetic dimension, not only for its relationship to harmony and proportion, but on its own, ever more expressive terms.) But there is no question about where the modern idea of fine-art appreciation ultimately comes from: It was created by the 17th-century European aristocracy. That group's understanding of art was based less on artistic expression than it was on the leisure class's refinement of character. In other words, the mere creator was secondary to the noble beholder.

Court life of the period was heavily influenced by the concept of the "courtier," especially as described by the diplomat and writer Baldassare Castiglione. This was a culture that celebrated the "arts" of studied behavior: mannered conversation, baisemain seduction, graceful athleticism (thus fencing), and an aestheticism based on the refined contemplation of art objects. That contemplative art culture operated according to rules described quite well by Rothstein. It was a culture in which the evaluation of art was guided by such undemocratic gauges as cultivated taste, extensive experience, and other marks of the leisure class.

The accelerating growth of markets in the 18th century shifted cultural power from the court to the city, invigorating the very idea of culture. But while the market proved itself an engine of creativity, it emerged as the enemy of courtly "refinement," an idea that has survived. The rising capitalist bourgeoisie, in its effort to ape the old aristocracy, fashioned its own ideal of the "gentleman" largely from courtier leftovers. Its embrace of contemplative art and "refined" taste as standards of civilization is the foundation for the entire edifice of the elite arts as we still know them, from galleries to museums to endowments.

Rothstein is eloquently supporting a rich creative and critical tradition that has developed in many interesting directions. But there is nothing universal about that tradition. And contrary to his assumptions, culture isn't a fixed, unchanging condition. Nor is that his last mistake.

Equality. Rothstein argues that artists are persons apart from the mass and deserve to be treated as such. In this, he is joined by New Republic theater critic Robert Brustein. Brustein believes that it is outrageous that creative people should have to waste their time seeking money, that they have "to interrupt their creative labors to write, phone, fax and otherwise dun their political representatives" for continuing public funding. Such people, he argues, are a necessary and indispensable elite. "Without an elite in the
arts, we have no leaders, which is to say we have no vision, which is to say we have no arts." Every possible accommodation must be given to such people, especially grants of money.

Artists are persons apart, of course. That said, it may be that others--nonartists--are entitled to make a similar claim. Nor is it clear, from one generation to another, who gets to be regarded as an artist. Certainly, artists satisfy a profound and demonstrable need for narrative and representation, sometimes inspiring centuries of passionate admiration and often creating the only lasting artifacts of their epochs. Still, the notion that self-identified artists must be on the public dole for our good as much as theirs is an
entirely modern conceit.

Our cult of the artist is really a 19th-century phenomenon. Bereft of their aristocratic patrons--who had treated them with little respect or regard--Parisian artists in the wake of the French Revolution set themselves up as wild-man eccentrics, earning the nickname of "gypsies" or, in the French-derived term, "bohemians." Of course, there were always such fringe groups; the poet Horace describes figures in ancient Rome who seem recognizably bohemian. But the 19th-century appearance of these figures in an industrializing Europe coincided with the rise of a middle class made wealthy through trade and hungering for status. The deal these groups struck--the new-monied class underwrote artistry, thereby buying itself social position through "connoisseurship"--is mistaken by some for an iron rule of culture.

The manner in which this drama played itself out in the United States at the time set the terms of our contemporary debate. Just when popular American taste was challenging the entrenched cultural elite of the early 19th century, a class of merchants arose who, once they'd made their money, determined to use their fortunes for the benefit of culture. They established American business patronage, underwriting national artists, importing foreign objets d'art, lobbying for a national gallery, and laying the groundwork for a tradition of social and cultural philanthropy that lives on to this day in such organizations as the Rockefeller Foundation, the Getty Trust, and the Aspen Institute. But it is their attitude toward high culture that has cast the longest shadow. To quote the grocer Luman Reed, who when he died in the 1840s was supporting numerous painters and had become the first American to build a private gallery as a shrine to the cult of art, "[T]he artists are my friends, and [my money] is the means of encouragement and support to better men than myself."

Luman Reed's humble, hat-off attitude in the presence of self-proclaimed artistry is now equated by the cultural establishment with taste and social duty. Where did such a perception come from? The bohemians, Romantics, Decadents, and other anti-materialists advanced an image of the artist as a visionary who lives outside time. This construction of the artist, while immensely successful, is wholly unhistorical; art has more often been understood as the tool of its political, clerical, and bourgeois patrons. (Worse, this romantic construction inspired an often arbitrary critical history of art that has completely overshadowed the record of its actual, material development.) There is only one other period in which imaginative creativity has enjoyed the same quasi-mystical stature, and one has to go back to classical antiquity to find it.

The Greeks had a notion of poetry as divinely inspired by the Muses, a form of "divine madness" during which the poet was possessed by a holy daemon and was, literally, a person apart. This is not the invocation of the Muse one finds in Homer. Rather, the Greeks seem to have picked up art-as-madness later, from the shamanistic cultures of the Black Sea, and much of what we know about this idea comes directly from Plato's dialogue Phaedrus, in which Socrates delineates several kinds of madness, including the poetic variety.

The view of the poet as shaman has shown real resilience; its most eloquent modern defender was the 20th-century poet Robert Graves (who wrote his justly famous novels as money-making ventures to support his poet persona). At the least, the idea has considerable metaphoric appeal. After all, the psychology of creative inspiration remains materially unresolvable, a mystery in the classical sense of the term. Even so, the notion that daemoniac poetic possession is a phenomenon amenable to the federal arts bureaucracy is a subject fit for Juvenal and his bitter satirical sense.

Indeed, the Platonic view of the matter is worth lingering over as one of the supreme ironies in Western cultural history. Our original source for the mystification of art--Plato--is the same figure who banished poets from his ideal Republic. Although Plato apparently accepted the reality of poetic possession, he regarded it as inferior to reason. For Plato, reason too was a divine gift, another daemon, and a far superior one, according to classical scholar E.R. Dodds. To Plato, poets, daemon-infused or not, were to be shown the gate. These voluble figures--often unsure of the meaning of their own declamations--stirred public emotion when what was really wanted was tempered accord. They were thus the enemies of those who could be trusted to run things well: truth seekers; the best people. And that brings us to our final suspect in the reported murder of culture.

Elitism. This is the NEA's own culprit. By "enshrining art within the temples of culture--the museum, the concert hall, the proscenium stage," says the NEA's American Canvas report, "we may have lost touch with the spirit of art: its direct relevance to our lives."

Actually, everyone in this debate is targeting "elites" of one sort or another. Playwright Kushner attacks profiteers who constitute, in his view, a commercial elite muscling its way into the cultural sphere. Critics Rothstein and Brustein are both defending and celebrating what they perceive as an elite of talent and vision. They suggest that those who would criticize such an elite, and that now seems to include the endowment itself, are spiritual sans-culottes sneering at their betters.

But what the NEA is addressing--at least in this portion of its otherwise incoherent argument--is neither money nor vision; it is addressing status. The sociology of art and culture has been largely ignored, but it is the key to understanding the mounting problems of the nation's cultural elite.