Less than a month into the Obama Administration and there
is already talk of enlarging the president’s cabinet — and I
don’t mean his liquor cabinet. Among the proposed new posts are a
Secretary of Peace and a Secretary of Arts. I can easily imagine
Yoko Ono as Secretary of Peace, but Secretary of Arts is a
littler trickier.
Legendary record producer Quincy
Delight Jones — himself not a bad choice for
the post — says he will personally “beg [President Obama] for a
secretary of the arts.” Meanwhile New York City Opera Orchestra
bassist Jaime Austria has set up an online Secretary of
Arts petition,
which has nearly a quarter of a million signatures. Former NEA
chairman Bill Ivey, a member of Obama’s transition team, is also
calling for a senior White House staff arts liaison. And last
year the U.S. Conference of Mayors offered a 10-point plan on how
the president could assist American cities, nine of which
basically said “give us more federal tax dollars.” A final point
argued for “the creation of a cabinet-level Secretary of Culture
and Tourism charged with forming a national policy for arts,
culture and tourism.” Want to know why our cities are in such bad
shape? Attend a planning session of the U.S. Conference of
Mayors.
A Secretary of Arts is probably the next logical step
on the yellow brick road to the Wonderful Land of Change.
Whenever new government departments or programs are approved they
tend to take on a Romero-esque life of
their own and are nearly impossible to kill. Not that I’m
comparing Washington politicians and bureaucrats to zombies. That
would be an insult to zombies. Expect the only objections to new
cabinet posts to come from small-government conservatives and
libertarians and their voices seem very weak and small these
days.
But wait, don’t we already have a large federal
bureaucracy for the arts? The State Department frequently sends
cultural icons on ambassadorial missions. State’s most popular
program is its jazz diplomacy project called Rhythm Road, run by
Jazz at Lincoln Center. Rhythm Road sends 10 bands to 56
countries a year. But that program is
dwarfed by the National Endowments for the Arts and the National
Endowment for the Humanities whose combined budgets in 2007 were
$265 million, and rising, thanks the Obama stimulus
package.
But evidently this pittance leaves unfunded too many
deserving performance and multimedia artists like the lovely and
talented Tracey Emin, who might have to dip into her trust fund
to finance her nude performances of a “menstruation ritual in a
shower.”
ONE MIGHT THINK state control of the arts would be the last
thing an artist would want. What business is it of some anonymous
philistine to withhold his imprimatur, or government seal of
approval, from a lovely and talented performance artist in San
Francisco because of what she wants to smear on her naked body?
(There seems to be a theme here.) One might think that rebellious
artists would cherish free expression more so than people who
don’t defecate on canvases for a living.
I am not alone in believing the arts would be better off
without government involvement. “The most significant cultural
diplomacy events that we’ve had,” is what Americans for the Arts
President and CEO Robert Lynch called the New York Philharmonic’s
tour of North Korea in February 2008. And, yes, that tour was
funded privately. Whether you think Americans should be
entertaining the friends of the World’s Craziest Dictator is
another issue. Whether you find it ironic that Americans are
trying to spread culture in the form of classical music to Asians
is also another issue. (A quarter of the musicians that play
professionally for the New York Philharmonic are Asian or Asian
Americans.)
The issue at hand is what’s best for arts and culture in
America. And without question the free market is the best thing
that ever happened to the arts. It isn’t cash-strapped
governments, but wealthy capitalists, who build museums, hire
great architects to design them, and fill them with the works of
artists both good and bad. In my hometown the two newest art
museums — the Pulitzer and the Contemporary — were funded by
donations from rich capitalists like Emily Pulitzer, large
donations from area businesses like Anheuser-Busch, and by tens
of thousands of middle-class art lovers.
I can imagine the greatest obstacle a Secretary of Arts
might face is trying to decide what is and what isn’t art. The
Secretary of Treasury and the Secretary of Agriculture at least
know what they are supposed to be advising the president about:
money and dirt. But what politician is so wise as to know whether
something is or isn’t art? Here’s a radical idea. Let the free
market decide.
