Gutting the arts
Mooney, Michael M.
Gutting the arts THE MINISTRY OF CULTURE by Michael M. Mooney Wyndam Books. 427 pp. $14.95. Metaphors are double-edged swords, capable of honing large ideas into sharp images, or stabbing them to...
...But one comes away from this book convinced that these bureaucrats couldn't organize a square dance, much less a pervasive conspiracy simultaneously to foster both total corporate-Governmental control of culture and what Mooney calls the state religion of humanism...
...Patronage, secret meetings, and conflicts of interest to warm the cockles of awardheeler'sheart...
...In both content and form, Big Editor should have been watching...
...In The Ministry of Culture Michael Macdonald Mooney commits literary hara-kiri by putting all his weight on identifying the Government's role in the arts and humanities with George Orwell's totalitarian 7954...
...It is this...
...Moreover, it's difficult to tell what Mooney believes our cultural policies should be, or whether we should even have any...
...Abe Peck (Abe Peck, a contributing editor for Rolling Stone, is on a working leave from the Chicago Sun-Times...
...The change in administrations—a possibility he never addresses—makes Mooney's critique even harder to decipher...
...Compounding this murkiness is the problem that, in this book at least, Mooney's style defeats his substance...
...But such clearly written sections are rare oases in a desert of acronyms, arch statements, and Capitalized Mini-Concepts about Accessible Art and Where The People Are...
...Power is not a means, it is an end...
...Orwell and London and Lewis make him too apocalyptic for that...
...Mooney's three years of research revealed a long train of abuses...
...The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake...
...The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives...
...We are not interested in the good of others...
...Mooney's material neither proves that we are in a fascist environment nor gives the slightest hint of What Is To Be Done...
...He punctures the hot air balloons of "Joan of Arts" Mondale and other culture caretakers, and his arguments can be extrapolated to imply that he danced for joy when the Reagan budgeteers announced plans to trim the NEA's funding to $85 million a year...
...we are interested solely in power...
...Inefficient and corrupt as these programs are, NEA generates five non-Federal dollars for each one that the Government assigns it...
...The result is that this disorganized screed is often instant Sominex...
...Elitism, and an institutional approach that makes working artists afterthoughts instead of centerpieces...
...Censorship, as when the Smithsonian Institution banned Erica Jong and her poetry...
...Metaphors are double-edged swords, capable of honing large ideas into sharp images, or stabbing them to death...
...But his spirited defense of Frank Snepp's unauthorized, officially pilloried book on the CIA and The Progressive'?, decision to publish Howard Morland's article on the H-bomb suggest that Mooney is far from your run-of-the-mill Republicrat...
...Throwing out the cultural baby with the bureaucratic bathwater won't help artists or let a hundred flowers bloom...
...Now I will tell you the answer to my question," Mooney quotes from Orwell while speaking for himself...
...Are all those dance troupes and symphony orchestras really enemies of the people...
...Mooney, a Washington editor of Harper's magazine, codifies his case in a series of italic chapter precedes that excerpt Orwell's 1984, Jack London's The Iron Heel, and Sinclair Lewis's // Can't Happen Here...
...Unfortunately for this argument, Mooney is superimposing fiction onto a reality far more worthy of muckraking than of conspiracy theories...
...Does he advocate staunching the tide of waste and mismanagement, or does he want the Government to withdraw totally...
...Since President Lyndon Johnson put the Government fully into the culture business in 1965, the apparatus has grown until the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities each control $150 million a year—only a drop, Mooney claims, in an administrative budget that includes 300 "alphabet agencies" and spends $20 billion a year...
...Ironically, Mooney provides the most lucid explanation I have seen of Howard Morland's article on the non-secret H-bomb secrets and the Government's attempt to pre-censor and harass The Progressive's publication of them...
Vol. 45 • May 1981 • No. 5
