RUTHFULLY YOURS

Artists and their entourages wailed and rent their designer outfits, castigating the “cowardice” of those who pulled the clip. By way of contrast, the artist, who died of AIDS two decades ago, was portrayed as a courageous visionary. According to angry activists, the museum’s curators, who are paid with tax dollars, had no right to remove the offending video from a museum maintained by tax dollars. Anyone who couldn’t see the genius of filming ants on the Savior’s underpants, as well as the imminent danger of all-encompassing censorship, was clearly a creature fit only to work and pay taxes for others to spend.

The removal of the goofball video actually did raise three issues worth discussing. The first can be handled briefly: The ludicrous notion that there was anything “courageous” or “brave” in an amateurish video clip of ants wandering over Jesus on the cross. “Courageous” (and equally offensive) would have been creating, signing and displaying a Koran wrapped in bacon (that might have drawn an interesting response from the left’s Guantanamo constituency). Of course, none of our valiant artists—ever ready to deface Christian or Jewish sacred symbols and texts—are going to take that kind of risk with Muslim totems and taboos. When an “artist” is utterly out of inspiration, he or she can always gain peer approval by trotting out an image of the Virgin Mary smeared with feces–and no Christian activists show up at the loft to slit the artist’s throat. Our champions of freedom of expression won’t touch Islam, though.

The second issue is the assumption by artists and their groupies that they have a right to exhibit anything they deem worthy at taxpayer expense. They don’t. If a privately owned gallery or donor-funded museum wishes to display offensive, amateurish work, they have a legal right to do so. There is, however, nothing in the Constitution that obligates taxpayers to subsidize insults directed at themselves and their beliefs. The same lock-step leftists who challenge Nativity displays on municipal property believe that government has a duty to underwrite gratuitous insults to religion. No hypocrisy there, of course. Nor very much self-awareness.

The arts community, such as it is, elevates professional incest to the level of the later pharaohs, and curators competing for funds, public or private, are always looking for “exciting” ideas for shows that will garner them good clippings and set them up for better jobs later on. Some of these expensively educated people may even believe that the brief, asinine ants video is the equal of Goya’s “black paintings” (or of Mark Rothko’s black paintings, anyway). But one suspects that plenty of self-evident junk is included in such shows to create a sensation and win the approval of art-world arbiters. We, the People, are lectured that the purpose of art is to provoke, although we’re too down-market to understand it. But is cheap provocation really an adequate goal? Great works of art do provoke deep thought and complex emotions, they haunt us and sometimes bewilder us, but they draw us back again and again and again. The “provocative” art of our time is just a bore. It’s not that art has to be reverent—but it has to grapple with something greater than sophomoric insults. That pathetic little ant video isn’t art. It’s kitsch, the urban sophisticate’s version of Hummel figurines.

At this point, a personal note may be in order: I’m not a six-gun-totin’ yahoo who wants to use Impressionist landscapes for target practice (although I’ve never seen a Renoir to which I wasn’t tempted to apply a shotgun—kitsch is always the enemy). My private life swings happily back and forth between hiking in the Rockies and checking back in with my favorite Caravaggios in Rome (if “The Calling of St. Matthew” doesn’t move you, your soul is dead), between white-water rafting in Africa and contemplating the piercing Mary Magdalene of Georges de la Tour in the National Gallery in Washington. Of course, the fact that I’m not profoundly moved by the work of contemporary con-men who’re laughing all the way to the bank, whether it’s the butcher-shop displays of Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons’ life-size depiction of Michael Jackson and Bubbles, means that I have no artistic judgment.

Which brings me to the correct role for tax dollars when it comes to the arts: Preserving our cultural heritage. Our National Gallery of Art was, in the beginning, a gift from the great philanthropist, Paul Mellon, to the American people. Many other donors have added to our magnificent collection, and any of us can walk into the museum (and the other Smithsonian museums) to view the works of art we own for free. Using tax dollars for building-upkeep and the preservation of time-proven works makes sense to me.

But given the utter nonsense foisted upon us as “art” these days, I’d propose a rule that government-salaried museum bonzes will hate: No tax dollars to exhibit contemporary art. Let a generation or two of attrition sort out the worthy from the worthless. And if I’m a “nyekulturni,” a philistine, because I don’t feel obliged to watch a film of a “breakthrough artist” having sex with his poodle, so be it.

That brings me to the third and most-important point: The best test of art over time is the marketplace. Living artists in any creative sphere should never be subsidized by government (although they’re damned well convinced that they’re entitled to that, and more). The marketplace will have distortions in the short term: In the literary world, Tom Clancy may take home more royalties than James Joyce ever did, and the hilarious sums paid to the likes of Koons and Hirst simply illustrate that we do, indeed, have fellow human beings so wealthy that they truly do not know what to do with their money. But a hundred years from now, Joyce will still be read (well, maybe not Finnegan’s Wake), but I’m not convinced that the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe will endure beside the paintings of Edward Hopper. Time doesn’t rescue all great art, but it does a better job of sorting it out than government bureaucrats or inbred critics.

Faced with this argument, historically illiterate artsy types cite the Renaissance princes and popes who commissioned works from the artists of their era as proof that government needs to subsidize the arts. There are two vital differences, though: First, Pope Julius II did not hire Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel because he thought the guy deserved a hand-out, but because Michelangelo was a proven craftsman who over-delivered—old Mikey busted his butt when he went to work. Second, the Medicis and Borgias did not relegate the commissioning of works of art to bureaucratic committees deep within the labyrinth of government. Popes, Milanese dukes and Venetian doges made decisions about art based upon their personal judgment and tastes, not upon some cockamamie notions of social justice and entitlements.

I don’t believe in the myth of the starving artist, but I do believe that real artists would be willing to starve for their calling. And this leads me to a final point that may be of direct relevance to readers with young (or not-so-young) relatives who declare that they’re going to be artists of some ilk: For most of these unfortunates, their chosen pursuits are about lifestyle and posturing, about hooking up, not about an overwhelming and irresistible desire to wrestle with profound issues of beauty, humanity and faith in the course of a miserable creative process.  In this age of university-credentialed artists who can’t draw, writers with advanced degrees who can’t form a clean sentence, and theory-deafened composers who write for each other, most of us have acquaintances who consider themselves to be artists, but who rarely get around to producing anything.

Yet, that’s the true test for the artist, whether his talent is great or minor: Does he create? Or does he just fake it? Does he talk the talk and walk the walk, but never apply the chalk? Human beings destined to be creators will write, or paint, or compose, no matter the obstacles. They’ll pursue their calling even if they’re working double shifts, saddled with families, rejected and ignored, physically ill or even put in jail—and never get taxpayer funding. They won’t be able to help themselves.

If you’re meant to write, you won’t be able to stop yourself. If you’re meant to work in the visual arts, they’ll consume your life. If you’re meant to compose, you won’t be able to get through a traffic jam without hearing a new possibility. The romantic idea of being an artist founders on the requirement to work at it: Many are called, but few are chosen.

Universities have done young people a tremendous disservice by offering degrees in creative this-or-that. How many serious works of art of any kind have faculties produced? Neither Matisse, nor Mozart, nor Christopher Marlowe had tenure. The best you can become on your own is a skilled craftsman. Others will decide whether you’re an artist. But our campuses don’t even turn out skilled craftsmen.

In the heyday decades of the European welfare state, various countries subsidized their citizens who decided they were artists. The money was squandered. Subsidies didn’t spark a renaissance, but just spurred human wastage. Young men who might have made competent plumbers did not make interesting painters. In the Netherlands, where pretty much anyone who declared himself to be an artist got state funding, the result was government-leased warehouses filled with tens of thousands of paintings that Dutch citizens wouldn’t take even when they were offered for free.

A fundamental problem is that all of us have allowed ourselves to be conned into the notion that artists are special people who shouldn’t have to work, pay their bills or act responsibly, since they have sacred talents the rest of us lack. That’s nonsense. First, true artists are incredibly disciplined and hardworking (Van Gogh might have been a whacko, but he was a workaholic, too). Second, if a person has been blessed with a special talent, that does not entitle him to special privileges and the right to engage in shabby behavior; rather, that gift of talent obligates the fortunate person to contribute more to society than the rest of us and—dare I say it?—to be grateful, whether to God or just to genetics.

I do not want government censorship of the arts. I just don’t want tax dollars to fund offensive nonsense. Nor am I a prude. On one shelf of my library you can find The Confessions of St. Augustine, on another the confessions of Henry Miller (both somewhat fictionalized, one suspects). I don’t think it’s a good idea to cover the breasts of classical statues in the Supreme Court building, or to delete offensive language from Huckleberry Finn. I simply don’t believe that “artists” who intend to offend the average citizen have a right to demand subsidies from the average citizen. If they can get some other sucker to fund them, more power to them. That’s the marketplace.

Meanwhile, I’ll be watching for one of those brave, brave artists to display a painting of Mohammed eating a pork chop.