Art Lessons: Learning From The Rise And Fall Of Public Arts Funding - Hardcover

Marquis, Alice Goldfarb

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0465004377 ISBN 13: 9780465004379

Publisher: Basic Books, 1995

Synopsis

After forty years of subsidy and billions of dollars spent, American arts institutions are no more secure financially than before. Behind the headlines about controversial grants to the arts abides a realm of conservatism, bureaucracy, and jostling special interests, Alice Goldfarb Marquis maintains. With well-established, mainstream institutions capturing the bulk of government subsidies, artistic repertoires are reaching ever further into the past while truly innovative artists languish on the sidelines.
Art Lessons is a fresh look at how Americans fund the arts - and why - by a major cultural historian. Packed with anecdotes about the creation of such leading cultural institutions as Lincoln Center, the National Endowment of the Arts, and the American Film Institute, and filled with stories about politicians, artists, philanthropists, and NEA chairs, the book offers a behind-the-scenes look at our cultural elite: the early battles over whether to allow affluent Jews to be part of the fund-raising establishment ... the controversies over the influence of popular artists such as Leonard Bernstein ("Nobody liked him except the public," carped one critic) ... the monumental mistakes made in the building of Washington's Kennedy Center, which have necessitated repeated federal bailouts ... and much more. From John Kennedy's determination to bolster America's arts as part of his Cold War strategy against the Soviets, to Richard Nixon's support of the NEA's greatest expansion, to Ronald Reagan's abortive efforts to slash arts funding when Republican arts patrons and corporate funders objected, the book is filled with surprises.

About this title

About the Author

Alice Goldfarb Marquis is a visiting scholar in history at the University of California, San Diego.

Reviews

Marquis characterizes the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) as a cultural bureaucracy dominated by powerful interests?corporate arts patrons, state and local arts councils, unions, advocates for various disciplines. In a lively, slashing history of public arts funding in the U.S. from the end of WWII to the present, she finds that "Americans venerate the arts... even though they seldom attend or participate." Highbrow arts institutions, knowing they can depend on NEA grants and wealthy donors, cling timidly to tradition, in her analysis. Meanwhile, the relatively small amounts spent on the "cutting edge" support a vested "avant-garde mainstream" of generally baffling, boring or repellent works, according to Marquis (The Art Biz). She spells out a revolutionary blueprint for democratizing public support for the arts, whereby professional arts managers in every locality or neighborhood would fill public spaces?schools, auditoriums, community centers, parks, plazas?with cultural presentations. In her plan, Congress would get out of the culture business, and a 5% tax on movie tickets, video rentals and sports would create a new, nonelitist endowment for the arts.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The National Endowment for the Arts has been controversial since its inception, perhaps because, ultimately, government and art mix about as well as oil and water. Art historian Marquis, a forceful and articulate critic of public arts funding, has written a timely and provocative assessment of the triumphs and failures of the NEA. If art is so noble and wonderful, why, she muses, are art bureaucracies so acrimonious, political, pompous, and inept? Marquis proceeds to answer this distressing query with some scandalous anecdotes about the rise and entrenchment of the art Mafia and its fiefdoms. Other touchy topics include the very messy economics of the performing and visual arts and the infuriating proliferation of bureaucratic red tape. Marquis' fluid narrative encompasses profiles of the NEA's beleaguered leaders and her perspectives on such debacles as disastrous public sculpture projects and NEA-supported art deemed obscene. Although Marquis advocates public arts funding, she believes there is something inherently absurd about asking the government to judge creative endeavors. Donna Seaman

While so much journalism concerning public funding of the arts amounts to little more than polemics and personal vendetta, this is instead an absorbing account of the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA). Like any good history book, it is well researched, clearly written, loaded with factual information?and somehow a pleasure to read. Goldfarb-Marquis (history, Univ. of California; Hope and Ashes, LJ 12/86) is honest about who are friends, enemies, and in between. But, more importantly, she offers detailed backgrounds of the board members and political power brokers who actually helped shape the NEA from its inception. She places equal focus on social factors such as the Cold War, television, and corporate philanthropy that have affected the agency. At times, the degree of bureaucratic error is devastatingly humorous. Though Goldfarb-Marquis makes her thoughts clear on the the direction the agency should take, her book is most useful as a source for a much-needed social history of arts funding in the United States since World War II. It will help to balance all collections.?Susan M. Olcott, Columbus Metropolitan Lib., Ohio
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0465004377
• ISBN 13: 9780465004379
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320