W.C. Fields was Wrong

...Instead the NEA decided to defend Mapplethorpe, Serrano, & Co., not quite in and for themselves-a tough case to make-but through what I would call the old avant-garde blackmail ploy...

...I have a small and perhaps parochial dream, and it is about the Republican party, for whose candidates I have been voting with increasing frequency in recent years...

...Undernourished, no doubt ill-clad...

...Fields then closed his eyes...

...IV And yet I wonder if being a Fieldsian is the only possible view...

...The government's answer is a courteous but firm denial...

...Behind this amusing aphorism is the notion that the avant-garde lives in a perpetual state of agitated discontent with the status quo in all of its forms, that its very existence is coterminous with change, that change is its only genuine reason for being...

...I have for the most part been talking about "the arts...

...Both the creation and the intelligent love of art are based on discipline, the cultivation of curiosity and sensibility, and the belief that men and women are capable of spiritual exaltation...

...I spent some extraordinary days sitting in the Old Post Office Building on Pennsylvania Avenue, the smell of cookies and fast food wafting into the room, listening to talk of the arts for three days running...

...Think about that before you condemn Mapplethorpe, Serrano, & Co...

...On another occasion, an endowment staff member reported on plans for an art-in-prisons program then in the works...

...Of course," she replied, my monstrous insensitivity confirmed by my very need to ask such a question...

...and it is these panels who are to choose who among the artists still under 40 are to be saved from the all-too-distinct possibility of death on the battlefield...

...During these years, the best attended museum in America was P. T. Barnum's American Museum, with its famous sign for getting people out of the building: "This Way to the Egress...

...In one of those caring-sharing, touchy-feely voices dripping with self-virtue, she laid out how useful art would be in raising the quality of prison life...

...Fields Was Wrong Why, Despite Everything, Republicans Should Not Abandon the Arts By Joseph Epstein Do the arts, with all their oddity and intricacy, have a peculiar resistance to being discussed in the frame of reference known as policy...

...As each side viewed the other, it was the philistine rednecks versus the deviant monsters...

...Stock Market Prices Fall...

...that art ought to be judged and supported in a democratic, which in their view means a multicultural, way...

...It's art, dummy, and you are out of your water, so just take it and shut up...

...Dancers, if they are lucky, work a 26-week year and have to find other work for the remainder of the year...

...There is nothing in the support of any of this that ought to make any earnest Republican blanch...

...Most troubling, Berenson thinks that classical music "could be an endangered species...

...Instead most artists and the NEA itself decided to defend it on the grounds that this was art in the great tradition of the avant-garde-even though the NEA also insisted that such grants represented only a minuscule portion of the grants it gave out...

...But it was the Cold War, interestingly, that gave government support for the arts a considerable push...

...Alone among all developed nations, America has never had a ministry of culture, or of the arts, or even of the national heritage...

...The answer, it seems to me, is that the discrepancy between appearance and reality, between pretension and performance, grew grotesquely large...

...This was accomplished largely through the efforts of an extraordinarily energetic woman named Nancy Hanks, who could play congressmen no less well than Pablo Casals could play Bach...

...They have been supported mainly by individuals and local businesses, though they are under the strain of ever-rising union prices for stagehands, lighting people, and other technical workers...

...From its beginning with a relatively small but always gradually increasing budget, reaching a high point of roughly $176 million in the late 1980s, it is now reduced to $99.5 million, a decrease of more than 40 percent...

...It was what I have come to think of as in-your-face art, the very art that earned infamy for the NEA and set it on the course to possible oblivion...

...It draws good crowds, has been enlivened by new work, is supported locally by wealthy patrons, and is dominated by superstar performers in a way that hasn't yet shown itself to be inimical...

...I happened that afternoon to be sitting next to the late Samuel Lipman, the pianist and music critic, who must have seen my eyebrows fly up four or five inches above my hairline as I listened to this astounding proposal to intrude rather alien and doubtless third-rate art into the lives of very ill people...

...An impressive number of foolish and virtuecratic statements were made in that often overheated but usually intellectually undernourished room...

...At that time, the United States government will be without any arts policy at all...

...But will it...

...It is much easier, of course, to walk away from it all...

...The way the avant-garde ploy works is as follows: People (rather stodgy and stupid people, of course) have always been upset by great avant-garde art...

...This is just the spot to go into a tirade about the younger generation, about the ravaging effects of television on the minds of people now in their twenties, thirties, and forties, about the MTV-icization of American culture...

...The NEA came to stand for the exhibit of the sadomasochistic photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe and the "Piss Christ" photograph (of a crucifix in a bottle of urine) of Andres Serrano...

...Wuxtry...

...But with the Depression, really with the New Deal, government went into the arts in a big-time way...

...Unlike the New York City Ballet, most companies-the Alvin Ailey, the Dance Theater of Harlem, the American Ballet Theater-do not have permanent homes and thus do not qualify for local and state support...

...This was a fatal mistake...

...They represent elitism detached from social class and privilege...

...The Capitol building was among the first of the structures paid for with public money...

...They ought at least to be renamed the Benevolent Robber Barons, for their gifts were the making of many crucial cultural institutions...

...The Kennedy administration-Camelot and all that-gave an added push to the notion that a great country is a country with great art...

...And so differently, too, have they been affected by the diminution of federal funds...

...I'm thinking of such advanced banalities as performance art, mixed-media art, and other avant-garde ventures that have been increasingly political in their tendency...

...they represent democratic elitism...

...The plan is to have recognized authorities then go over these names, subtracting some, adding others, and then present the list to the British war office for approval...

...So the plan to save the artists was not only a practical failure but a practical irrelevancy into the bargain...

...None of these justifications would seem altogether foolish...

...In both of these anecdotes, one senses that art is being asked to do what religion was once supposed to do: raise the tone of daily life, reform character, bring consolation as death approaches...

...Yet as Lionel Esher, the son of Lord Esher and the author of "The Plot to Save the Artists," says at the close of his article: "Whatever one may think of the arguments from principle, in practice the plot would have failed even if it had succeeded...

...The only two major institutions supported by public funds in the United States before the Civil War were the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution, the latter established by the legacy of an Englishman impressed by American society...

...A few months ago I read in the New York Times that a good many talented theatrical directors have begun searching for-and finding- work in television, because they discover themselves, in their mid-forties or early fifties, making no more than $20,000 a year working at small theaters off-Broadway or outside New York, and one simply cannot hope to raise a family on so low a salary...

...The question is ultimately whether government has the subtlety to make such distinctions in the first place...

...The decision on this point is finally to exclude these categories of non-artistic intelligentsia...

...History will probably judge you quite as foolish...

...Suddenly artists and intellectuals were sent by their government to perform and participate in conferences overseas-and in doing so to show the vibrancy of art and intellect under democracy and free enterprise...

...As things get underway in earnest, Betjeman reports to Lord Esher that Geoffrey Grigson, the anthologist and literary critic, "suggests extending the scheme to good young economists, scientists, town planners, etc...

...Conservatives who support the killing of the endowment assume that the free hand of the market will shake things out and take care of everything...

...But otherwise even public libraries were still rare, and the prospect of using public money to support individual artists quite unthinkable...

...Opera, Berenson finds, is not in peril...

...How many University of Chicago economists does it take to change a light bulb...

...Large private foundations had begun to support the arts in a serious way as well, and this rather softened up people for the notion that governments ought to do likewise...

...But whereas the avant-garde of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-the avant-garde of Diaghilev and Igor Stravinsky, of James Joyce and T. S. Eliot, of Picasso and Matisse-was dedicated to changing the way people viewed the world through changes in artistic technique, the avant-garde of our day is dedicated to changing the way people view the world through imposing its own politics on them...

...Berenson cites the ways in which these theaters might be constrained without federal money: Having to raise their ticket prices might force them into dumbing down their fare to attract the kind of crowds that higher prices may entail-more Neil Simon, less Chekhov...

...Harris mentions but does not overemphasize the traditional explanation of the Puritan mistrust of visual art, music, theater, and elaborate architecture that was part of the nation's founding...

...Still another holds that, as a great superpower, our government has an obligation to support our arts, at least to the extent that such lesser powers as England, France, and Germany support theirs...

...Art and high culture in America were thought to be the responsibility of the rich, if not always the refined...

...There are other arts-literature chief among them-where public support has always been unsteady and maybe dubious to begin with, and where such support has had no powerful effect in any case...

...Non-profit theaters, which underwent considerable growth in number over the past 30 years, are also in fairly decent shape...

...With the Second World War imminent, the talk turns to the terrible loss of artists, especially of a generation of English poets, in the First World War...

...In the movies, it is almost an axiom that the more money is spent on a film, the less good it is likely to be, the infusion of vast sums all but requiring a cautiousness that leads to leaden mediocrity...

...In my happy role at the NEA as self-appointed opposition, I felt I had to ask whether the plan included bringing art to death row...

...Dancing is the most arduous of the arts, dancers the most injury-prone of performers, yet very few dance companies can afford health insurance for their dancers...

...If "'em" are the kind of people who set policy for the NEA, perhaps we do indeed want to say it...

...So suppress your instincts, listen to your betters...

...The WPA employed thousands of artists: architects, painters, sculptors, writers...

...In recognition of this fact, and given the rather squalid behavior of the NEA, this may well come as jolly good news to many people...

...And there is reason to believe that the audience of the more serious performing arts-chamber and symphonic music, legitimate theater, ballet-is changing in a way that threatens their ability to find the private patronage on which they have long depended...

...Harris notes that at the time of the New Deal the United States was spending 10 times more than France in support of artists and art...

...Then there was the need to decorate them with paintings and sculptures of such historical events as the signing of the Declaration of Independence and of military and political heroes, and federal money was found for this, too...

...But what if "'em" are the arts themselves-the highbrow, serious, yes, all but eternal arts...

...Secretary Stanley writes that not only would the claims of science and medicine and scholarship be hard to deny as of equal importance to the nation as those of art but that "the principle of such a form of protection from the dangers of military service is difficult to accept...

...they have badly misunderstood the arts and have vastly overstated their claims on the arts' behalf...

...and in their minds it may well be that most Republicans in positions of power have already done so, having said, in effect, about devising a policy for the arts, On first thought, screw 'em...

...Joseph Epstein is editor of the American Scholar and a frequent contributor to Commentary and the New Criterion...

...Later, under NEA sponsorship, a man in Minneapolis would send driblets of his own HIV-positive blood on paper towels on a wire out over an audience...

...Literature has almost no support from the private sector apart from the buying of books, yet it has often thrived under even the most difficult circumstances: One thinks of the great efflorescence of the novel in nineteenth-century Russia...

...Why, then, has the country become so divided on this question of public support for art...

...of the three men on the list who did die during this period, all met their ends through accidents...

...Very tiresome and frustrating weekends they were...

...Some art can do such things, but the kind of NEA-sponsored art that got the most publicity was far from likely to fill the bill...

...The culture wars, in fact, have all the over-heated feel of a religious war, and, at bottom, it turns out that something fairly close to religion- and not fundamentalist Christian religion alone-is at stake...

...The avant-garde of our day tends to be pro-sexual liberationist, anti-religious (in the conventional sense), and often directed against high art itself...

...The entering wedge for public support for art in the nineteenth century was architecture...

...Musical performers are included as are composers, but dancers and actors are excluded...

...The role of art in the rehabilitation of prisoners was not mentioned but of course implied...

...Fields was in a hospital bed, his physician, agent, and mistress seated on chairs nearby, when he heard newsboys calling out on the street: "Wuxtry...

...But when it comes to dance, Berenson notes simply, "big trouble...

...In support of this cause, the various arts organizations and lobbyists, the NEA, and the so-called arts community all shut down any discriminatory powers they might have had on behalf of what they thought the greater cause...

...The official justifications for the NEA, as for public support of the arts generally, have been of various kinds...

...One holds that public support protects art from the vulgarizing corruption of the marketplace...

...But 20 or so seconds later, he reopened them and again signaled his physician, agent, and mistress to his bedside...

...I used to liken those three-day weekends on the National Council of the NEA to attending strictly chaperoned sexological conferences in which one does nothing but talk about sex for three days and two nights but is not permitted at any time to engage in any...

...And who is "'em" anyway...

...My own sense is that, in their own dull-witted, self-congratulatory way, the officials and staff of the NEA were asking for it-and, when the time came, the Republican congressional tumbrel came out to collect them...

...The poet John Betjeman and his wife Penelope are there, and so are Lord and Lady Esher...

...And yet ought it to be allowed to supply the final word on so complicated a matter...

...It is worth attending to...

...today...

...Lord Esher's plan to save the artists is squelched...

...Jazz, for one, she found in healthy condition, with festivals thriving and lots of young performers coming to the fore...

...Such institutions became central to the development of large and even middling cities...

...The NEA would have done better if it had acknowledged that, given the way federal money was handed out, it had less than perfect control over occasional outbreaks of aberrant art-just as farm and Small Business Administration and other programs were not absolutely free of the corruption of brilliant hustlers...

...artists above all ought to have been enraged by such junky stuff being passed off as serious art...

...Once, a group of visual artists came by to outline a project they had in the works, and which would soon be coming up for funding, for bringing contemporary painting to patients in terminal cancer wards...

...In chorus, they all announced that art, no matter how crappy, was still art, and anyone who is against art in any form-no matter how mediocre, offensive, even loathsome it might be-is a philistine and a creep...

...Architects are also eliminated...

...But the impulse to protect art, and to protect its creators, is not only understandable, it speaks to a deep human need to play a part in the transmission of culture...

...Many of these arts are well off without federal support or even the support, in my view, of the parents of the artists working away at them...

...Most conservatives, forced to choose, came down on the side of the philistines, most liberals on the side of the monsters...

...But if government could support art for export, why not also support it at home...

...I think the arts themselves do, the country probably does, and maybe, just maybe, conservatives do, too...

...Survivors play things close to the chest, sticking to the old repertoire: Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky...

...If they wish to be cutting-edge, then let them pay for their own scissors...

...But if we are seeking an answer to the question, "Who Needs An Arts Policy...

...The first step toward doing so is to recognize that the arts represent elitism of a kind that America ought to find useful if it is to continue to have a sense of its own progress as a superior country...

...A group of civic-minded English men and women are lunching at the home of Sir Ralph Glyn, at Ardington under the northern slopes of the Berkshire Downs...

...The present arrangement, if I understand it correctly, is that this $99.5 million will be appropriated for the next two years in anticipation of the endowment's subsequent liquidation in 1998...

...who are unprotected by schedules of reserved occupations...

...III In Living in Paris, a cultural history of opera, James H. Johnson writes: "Ever since romanticism made a religion of art and raised worship to a social virtue, it's not always been possible to tell true belief from mere fascination with the sacraments...

...The ground was set for the establishment of the National Endowment for the Arts, which was brought into legal being in 1965, during the Johnson administration...

...More than the bourgeoisie ought to have felt itself ?pat...

...Some might regard the decision to let the English artists face the war unprotected as typically English in its unimaginative bluntness, but behind the decision was the view that no exceptions to the obligation of military service in wartime ought to be made on the basis of any man's putative intrinsic importance to the state...

...And how even the most well-intentioned government arts policy-which is what Esher's plot would have been- might not contribute a thing to art itself...

...In the past few decades, the arts have been greatly puffed up by their professional supporters' own sense of importance...

...Another holds that some arts- modern musical composition, poetry, experimental theater, dance, and new avant-garde forms generally- simply cannot withstand the pressures of the market...

...None, the answer is, the bulb will change itself when the market directs it to do so...

...Meanwhile, privately financed art museums and symphonic groups in America tended to be economic flops...

...Poor little urchins out there," he announced...

...My trepidation derives from my awareness that it is difficult in the extreme for government to put its thick-fingered hands on anything so delicate as art without badly mishandling it...

...Something's got to be done about them, something's got to be done...

...The spirit of such art and its dependence on public support was nicely caught by a New Yorker cartoon last year in which one scraggly bohemian modern painter says to another: "I wish I had the funding to really say something...

...Of course, why wouldn't we...

...The arts that seem most in danger are those that are most directly in the winds of the market...

...God," said Lipman, who did not use profanity often, "I loathe this shit...

...The commerce between culture and capitalism is an exceedingly complex one...

...Who needs another NEA, giving way to every passing artistic fashion and political influence, so that in the end it is supporting good things and junk alike with a fine indifference to the distinctions between the two...

...The point is how difficult it is to predict the course of art ten or even five years away...

...What do you think...

...Over the long haul, neither government nor the market has ever been alone in supporting the arts...

...On second thought," he said, "screw 'em...

...Second, not a single one of those named on the list was killed in the war...

...private donors began the work, though often with the aid of local governments, which provided the gift of land, the promise of maintenance budgets, and sometimes help with construction to house these institutions...

...Conservatives believe the effort to have been a fiscal, constitutional, ethical, and moral disaster, and they are right...

...First, none of the artists who would make the greatest contributions to English culture after World War II-from the novelists Kingsley Amis and Anthony Powell to the poet Philip Larkin, the painter Lucien Freud, and the sculptor Lynn Chadwick-were on the list composed by Lord Esher and his friends...

...After the war and up through the New Deal, the government, as Harris points out, now felt it incumbent on itself to pay for American exhibits-some of them strongly artistic in character-in world's fairs and exhibitions...

...Please assume I have just finished doing so, and allow me to go on to cite the recent work of demographers that holds that younger generations of Americans have lesser interest in those arts usually described as "highbrow," and the wealthy among them are giving less to cultural institutions, than their elders have...

...The debate about federal policy in the arts, then, was confrontational in a particularly destructive way...

...Art for the Millions" became its slogan...

...The market and the arts have never had all that tranquil a relationship...

...But she then goes on to say that behind "classical music's decline is that music teaching in the public schools has become as obsolete as McGuffey Readers...

...Many people, I think, take some pleasure at the whacking good "downsizing" this federal agency has received at the hands of a Republican Congress...

...In fact, "the hell with the arts" seems to be a sentiment of longer standing than the NEA, for in the United States public support for the arts has never been enshrined in quite the way it has been in Europe, first by extensive private patronage and later by governments...

...by all this...

...The hell with the arts" is a sentiment many sensible people have felt over the past 10 or 15 years when witnessing the great shambles that many artists and the NEA, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, have made of public money and the arts...

...My own reaction is to reply, with some trepidation, I don't think so...

...World War I internationalized America and Americans, and the arts began to make a federal showing...

...It is that Republicans cease to be identified as the party of ungenerous solutions to complex problems, that they not be happy with their reputation as the party of the philistines, that Republicans become known as the party to take culture at its best with the seriousness that it deserves...

...Yet another holds that there exists, artistically, a geographical inequity in the country, and that the federal government can aid enormously in bringing live art to those places where it would otherwise be inaccessible, rural areas and backwaters chief among them...

...There were those ignorant dolts who broke the chairs at the premi?re of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, those poor wretches who attempted to scratch the paint off the paintings of Matisse at their first public exhibition, those insensate idiots who wished to censor Ulysses...

...In an interesting and useful paper on the subject of public support for art in America, the University of Chicago historian Neil Harris has traced the development of such support and speculates on the reasons for its relative paucity...

...Some of the arts Berenson found in quite good fettle...

...He avers that our country was born "in a fit of reaction against concentrations of power and consumption" such as the great patrons of the arts-the crowned heads of post-Renaissance Europe and the Catholic and Anglican churches-had laid on whenever it suited their purposes to do so...

...The expenses of running a dance company-hiring dancers, sometimes employing an orchestra, stage, and technical crew-are very high...

...V On second thought, screw 'em...

...Feelings ran very high-as they tend to do in all the skirmishes attendant upon our culture wars-and on both sides...

...Chief among these claims is that there is no such thing, really, as bad art...

...A sense of government as small, decentralized, non-interfering, non-controlling, deliberately avoiding the traditional props of wealth and artistic greatness," Harris writes in summarizing the early years of the Republic, "this was part of the republicanism that dominated America in the age of Jefferson and Jackson...

...The establishment of the NEA was the crucial event in institutionalizing federal support for art...

...All of this, according to the sociologist Judith Cobb, who has been studying arts audiences, "reflects a decline in the notion of stewardship, of civic culture itself...

...As the author of a letter to Phi Beta Kappa's newsletter, the Key Reporter, wrote in response to a platitude-swapping exchange on federal funding in the arts, "The problem with the NEA and its supporters is that they fail to realize the extent of the visceral disgust and anger most Americans feel as a result of a very few examples of NEA funding...

...That is a collective plural which doesn't bear much scrutiny, so different are the arts individually and so different is their contemporary condition one from the other...

...Everything changes," said Paul Val?ry, "but the avant-garde...

...A version of this essay was delivered as a Bradley Lecture at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C...

...and for the most part so do serious audiences for art...

...He called his physician, agent, and mistress to his bedside...

...Yet, according to Harris, these institutions were still primarily and preponderantly private at their core and in their character...

...Having one's own company-as Balanchine, Martha Graham, and others have had-is immensely useful in helping a manager-choreographer work out his or her ideas...

...Those of us not taken in by the avant-garde blackmail ploy, and tired of the prattle about art's importance in challenging everyone's values but those of the arts community itself, began to feel about the NEA the way W. C. Fields, in what are reported to be his deathbed words, felt about the newsboys in the streets of New York in winter...

...Would it not be possible to have people of informed opinion put together a list of those writers, painters, and musicians of military age who ought to be saved and place them, unbeknownst to themselves, in safe military jobs away from the killing fields...

...World War II put an end to the WPA and with it, temporarily, to support for artists...

...it has tended for the most part to submerge them...

...The NEA, some might say, has decisively proven that it hasn't...

...Finally, a list of three panels- one for literature, one for visual art, and a smaller one for music-is assembled...

...The patronage of the wealthy has always been a crucial element...

...The next, what must have seemed natural, step was that a great country was responsible for doing all it could actually to help produce such art...

...The poor behavior of the NEA under pressure-after its pathetic public pronouncements about art being good for us, good for the economy, good for tourism, good for everything, really, but in and of itself-not only turned most of us off public support for the arts but also, on the subject of the NEA, turned us into positive W. C. Field-sians...

...We all know the effect that so-called blockbuster book publishing, aimed at creating vast bestsellers, has had on publishing merely good books...

...She reports that chamber-music groups are attaching themselves to universities where possible, and with some success...

...A bewildering variety of financial arrangements underwrote arts organizations," Harris tells us, "but what they had in common was that almost no public monies were invested in them...

...II If any arts policy may be said to exist in the United States at the moment it is that represented by what remains of the National Endowment for the Arts, and it isn't much...

...Harris says that "more than any other single experience," the Cold War "propelled forward federal support" for art...

...Artists only rarely come from the upper-classes, after all...

...During the war, firms such as Walt Disney, Inc., applied their art for perfectly sound propaganda purposes...

...that art is best when it challenges one's values...

...Performance artists covered themselves in chocolate and mocked middle-class life to the titillation of their audiences...

...Do we, I wonder, really want to say that about public support for the arts...

...Many of the great museums, symphony orchestras, and private universities were founded in the 1870s through the 1890s by, among others, the badly misnamed Robber Barons...

...Not only did this make for fairly low-level discussion, but when the Republicans won the Congress, it was fated that the NEA would be quite brutally dealt with...

...In recent decades, strange market forces have sent the prices of quite junky visual art through the ceiling...

...American actors and singers were called in to sell bonds and, with their art, help fight the beastly Hun...

...Ruth Berenson, a former NEA official and one of the endowment's few impressive staffers, recently did a survey to determine which of the arts were most likely to be endangered by the cutback, or cut-off, of federal funds...

...Many smaller cities that began symphony orchestras in the 1950s and 60s are having to pack it in owing to high expenses...

...Commissioned to look further into the matter by his friends on that afternoon, John Betjeman begins by inviting a small number of people to send him names of artists worthy, in effect, of being saved...

...And some quite talentless poet would write a poem justifying the rape and vicious beating of a young woman jogging in Central Park...

...Ought we to stand by and let the institutions and custodians and purveyors of these arts go down the tubes if they cannot survive under free-market conditions and private patrons are not there to take up the increased- and increasing-slack...

...The arts are nothing if not an elitist enterprise, but they are elitist in the best American sense...

...When the list of approved artists, which numbers 61, is finally drawn up, Lord Esher sends it along to Oliver Stanley, secretary of state for war...

...Even the most famous dance companies have been on the edge of bankruptcy for years, and some have gone over that edge...

...According to a Treasury Department study, while America has produced a record number of millionaires-64,500 households reported pre-tax income of more than $1 million in 1990 against 18,700 in 1979-the newly wealthy are proving far less philanthropic than their predecessors...

...Did this have to be repeated in the war about to begin, Lord Esher wonders aloud...

...Consider a September afternoon in 1939 on which was hatched what the Times Literary Supplement of January 2, 1987, dubbed "The Plot to Save the Artists...

...That sums up my own six-year experience as a member of the National Council of the National Endowment for the Arts...

...The final days of disease-shortened lives, we were to understand, would be made both lighter and more profound by their engagement with contemporary painting...

...They were all shown to be fools, as we now know, fools well behind their times and now fools for eternity...

...A high degree of personal insult has been in the air when it comes to this subject...

...The loss of federal funds will hurt dance quite badly...