REVIEWS

...After all, it is the arts market, more than Washington, that has promoted the worst excesses of avant-garde art—and yet the art market is capitalism in one of its purest (and silliest) modes...

...Some contemporary art, he suggests, may be so subversive of "moral and political values" as to justify a public interest in suppressing it...

...Banfield's polemical, at times tiresomely contentious book is aimed at chic culture establishment types—museum administrators, managers of the arts, endowment officials—the powers that be of the art world in Washington and New York...

...What he has to relate of the selfjustifying and fuzzy-headed statements of purpose put out by the culture-bureaucrats helps to explain the extraordinary animus he bears them and their programs...

...He argues that the endowments cannot properly justify their subsidies by referring to the value of art, since that resides entirely in its "engendering aesthetic experience...

...He has some fine satiric things to say about the invasion of traditional crafts by university-trained "craftspeople...

...Most of his fellow appointees merely accepted the president's inevitable budget cuts...

...The private subsidies Banfield calls for are now very much in existence...

...In The Democratic Muse he provides a conservative analysis of the situation of the visual arts in America, arguing that arts spending does not fall within the "proper sphere of government" specified by the Founding Fathers, and advocating the abolition of government funding for the arts...

...The protests in The Democratic Muse against subsidizing inferior art created merely for its power to shock are not unfounded...

...supporting the arts for no ulterior motive other than the cultural and, yes, the aesthetic enrichment of citizens is not the least significant or precious of these...

...It also dramatizes how oddly assorted Banfield's definition of art is when we consider the large and various satisfactions granted by the art museum to its visitors...

...Since widespread government support of the arts is part of the legacy of the New Deal, the observation is hardly sufficient...

...Banfield's book is bumptious and wrong-headed, but it does force a number of questions on the reader...

...Democratic governments today are alone in the world in many things...

...Like the legacy beyond price in our museums, that self-knowledge is an affirmation of our humanity, which the public is and will continue to be grateful for, respect—and support...

...art museums, certainly by comparison with their counterparts in Europe, are notoriously underfunded by the state...

...These considerations provide both cause for some satisfaction and grounds to reject Banfield's arguments...

...Banfield's definition manages somehow to be at once too constricting and too elastic...

...We go for a sense of the past, denied us by the aggressive pastlessness of modern American life...

...Like most of human history, it includes mainly non- or antidemocratic states or rulers, but also Periclean Atliens, a democracy that sponsored the plays of Sophocles and the statues of Phidias...

...Now as a definition this is singularly unhelpful...

...But it is Banfield's position that is historically novel...

...THE BOOK LAYS CLAIM to the Madisonian democratic way and attacks all proponents of arts spending as innovators, even enemies of democracy...

...Neither by the Communist governments, which use the arts as a weapon, nor in many of the new Third World regimes, which use the arts to enforce or invent attractive national identities, is the idea of a discriminating individual consciousness respected or even recognized...

...Because it has so long been the principal intermediary between visual art and the public, the art museum must bear much responsibility for widespread confusion about the nature of art...

...In 1981, while serving on Reagan's Task Force on the Arts and Humanities, Banfield urged "the liquidation of the endowments and the complete withdrawal of the federal government from the cultural scene...

...One cannot fault Banfield for feeling this way...

...Still, Banfield is both knowing and funny about the political dealing and back-stabbing that have gone on in Washington since the passage of the National Foundation for the Arts and Humanities Act of 1965...

...The basic charge, which follows from Banfield's definition of art, is that art muse139 urns are perversely engaged in "extra-aesthetic pursuits": If the proper function of an art museum is to collect and display works of art and, beyond that, to make the experience of art more widely and intensely felt, then the art museum has failed...

...Edward Banfield, a political scientist at Harvard, is best known for his acerbic treatment of liberal hopes for urban renewal...

...My wife's face has this capacity for me as viewer, but it is not a work of art...

...The oddly titled chapter on museums, "Art versus the Museum," displays an unseemly combination of ignorance and suspiciousness...

...There can be little doubt that many not very elevating things can be said on this score...

...Predictably, he scants the period of the New Deal...

...He is partisan, but what he relates is of interest...

...He notes that the mission undertaken by the WPA to provide relief sat uneasily with the aim of raising the level of national taste...

...While he pulls back from recommending such a Platonic measure, it's clear that he doesn't like a lot of what passes for art these days...

...But Banfield does pause long enough to envision an entirely nonsubsidized museum, the result of "private decentralized choice," the "use of the market as a means of using resources efficiently, including of course those related to art" and to extol the benefits of commercial art copying businesses, such as Nelson Rockefeller's...

...We learn a good deal more about the failures and inconsistencies of federal arts administration than about specific features of this approach...

...Nor do I fault him, as no doubt sophisticates of the art world have, for daring to oppose the prevailing standardlessness with the investigation into aesthetics and the proper definition of art that he undertakes in a chapter entitled "But Is It Art...

...And if his aim is to 138 democratize the arts, one can think of many more effective ways to bring large numbers of people to the experience of art than by charging fancy prices for photographic reproductions...

...Not without evidence, he considers many of the projects funded by the NEA to be nihilist in tendency or actually nihilist...

...A lot of what passes for art these days is rubbish...

...it leaves out the many things art also is, and perhaps is most powerfully—art as argument, as "equipment for living," to quote Kenneth Burke...

...neither are many other beautiful things...

...we go, in our status-obsessed, selfish, classconscious, and culturally undernourished society, to get out of ourselves, to transcend our time-bound standards of taste...

...Banfield accuses the art museum of displaying "things that belong together from a historical standpoint even when that has entailed putting them where what is artistically best is hard to find and perhaps even harder to experience as art...

...This simply defies common sense...

...The possibility that one could derive aesthetic pleasure from Egyptian art seems not to have occurred to him...

...Banfield is more impressive as a historian of political and administrative histories of arts funding in the U.S...

...We love the work of first-rate living artists in part because, as Harold Rosenberg once remarked, talented artists know themselves, and we are hungry for that self-knowledge...

...My satisfaction in these works of (fine) art may be of a different order from the pleasure I derive from the (applied) art or artistry that went into fashioning my table, but I am baffled as to why one of these satisfactions should conflict with or reduce the other...

...I fail to see, however, how simply eliminating the arts bureaucracies will help matters...

...Probably no serious cultural criticism can be conducted without some attempt to arrive at definitions and standards...

...we go for insight into other ways of life and thought...

...That purpose is primarily not to display isolated masterpieces, the "best" painting, but to provide an encyclopedic context for understanding the traditions that have contributed to making great paintings great...

...The conclusion reached by the critic Richard Hoggart in an eloquent essay, "Culture and Its Ministers," that public support of the arts in the West at its optimum is based on the "effort to arrive at an open, discriminating individual consciousness, whether in the artist or in those who admire his work" should cheer all true democrats...

...140...

...The prosecutorial illogicality here—if the art museum has "afforded countless moments of aesthetic enjoyment to countless viewers," then how has it "failed" so completely?—is typical of the chapter, indeed of the book...

...Why do they admire contemporary art...

...is no, unless it "has the capacity to engender in a receptive viewer an aesthetic experience...

...If I eat at a traditional, hand-made mahogany table, which I find both practical and pleasing, will the Van Dongen canvas or Dufy watercolors hanging on the walls be thereby of any less value to me...

...But it should not be forgotten that Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock were also among the beneficiaries, as all of us are now of their genius...

...Many, perhaps most, of the unemployed artists assisted by the WPA were not greatly gifted people...

...Although it has afforded countless moments of aesthetic enjoyment to countless viewers, it has mainly misrepresented the nature of art, put obstacles in the way of experiencing it, and encouraged the substitution of pecuniary and curiosity values for aesthetic ones...

...Thus when the NEH funds the Tutankhamen show, it is really, according to Banfield's single notion of aesthetics, funding the "extraaesthetic" activity of the art historians and curators who brought the exhibition to the public, activity that cannot be justified by an appeal to art or aesthetic experience...

...Banfield's use of his definition is intentionally narrowing...

...Against the advocacy of continued or increased public subsidy for art by this group—Banfield is not above calling them "special interests"—he recommends a laissez-faire approach...

...Why do people go to museums, after all...

...BUT DOES BANFIELD REALLY FAVOR democratizing the arts...

...In the chapter entitled " 'Fine' versus 'Applied' Art," he tries to further the cause of applied art, which he supports with the names of such early crusaders as John Ruskin and, despite the political incongruity, William Morris...

...we hope to share and learn from it...

...Despite the populist tinge of his conservatism, on the whole I would say he takes a dim view of making contemporary art more widely available...

...There is little cause for complacency, however...

...Also of interest are Banfield's remarks on the state of arts education in the schools—which, like much else about the schools, is undeniably a sorry one...

...for example, the presentation of art works via mass media, such as film and video...

...This statement betrays a studied incomprehension of the purpose of collections of art in museums such as New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art...

...Banfield tends to exaggerate: "Objects that are at once useful and pleasing to the eye may for all we know help to give meaning to everyday activities, and, in this way, to life itself, and by so doing make fine art of less value...

...The history of state support of the arts is as old as human civilization...

...But it can also be said, without undue piety, that we go to museums for a variety of urgent and important reasons, all unspecified by Banfield's "aesthetic experience...

...but much of what they support has nothing to do with aesthetic experience...

...Neither Banfield's economic arguments, at least as they relate to museums, nor his art copy scheme are very convincing or innovative...

...Banfield says some of them, in my view wrongly and ungenerously...

...The answer Banfield returns to the favorite philistine question, "But is it art...

...than on aesthetic questions, where he exhibits all the ill-considered bumptiousness of an outsider impatient with nuance...