When Art Meets Politics

In his plea on behalf of government funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts, the managing director of the L.A. Philharmonic, Ernest Fleischmann, raises his voice in a Counterpunch piece, “Arts Are at the Nation’s Soul” (Feb. 20).

Indeed, they are. That’s why the cornerstone of this nation, the First Amendment to the Constitution, prohibited the government from abridging freedom of speech . . . which includes the arts.

Of course, proponents of the NEA deny that granting tax dollars to one artist while withholding them from another is abridgment of speech, but that’s exactly what it is, especially for the rejected artist and his or her audience. The power of the purse is the power to control, and the government has no constitutional right to any kind of power or control in the arts.

On a more personal note, and speaking as a writer myself, I would think that artists, of all people, should be too proud and independent to plead for or take government handouts. James Joyce cautioned artists, who are the conscience of our society and therefore, ideally, adversaries to those in power, to survive by “silence, exile and cunning.” I don’t recall Joyce advising them to go begging with hat in hand and slurp at the public trough.

AL RAMRUS

Pacific Palisades

Ernest Fleischmann’s “Arts Are at the Nation’s Soul” is a welcome addition to the rising chorus of voices in defense of public support for the arts in this country. The Newtoids in Congress are partially right, of course, to regard the arts as an obstacle to the Republican strategy of divide-and-rule. Art, like anything that stirs and enlarges the soul, is divinely subversive. Art unites us in a way fundamentally antithetical to the philosophy of the American right, whether religious or political.

An increasingly insistent religious tradition, which inherits the revivalist view of America as the “New Jerusalem,” will do what it can to ensure that its view, and no other, of what is acceptable art, prevails. From a political standpoint, the arts have always possessed an equality of opportunity that exists in few other fields of human endeavor. Art has always been one of the vehicles by which ignored and/or marginalized communities begin to enter the mainstream, letting the barriers of exclusion and division crumble a bit more and threatening the tactics of division.

The truth is the brouhaha over the NEA has very little to do with the arts and a great deal to do with the politics of race, gender and sexual orientation. The sooner we realize our civilization must be judged not only on how well we treat our artists, but also on how well we reject the hateful isms that divide us, the more effective will be the case for continued public support of the arts.

PAUL S. MARCHAND

West Hollywood