Context & Continuity:
Philistines, Pharisees & Art in English Culture

Harry Hillman Chartrand ®
Journal of Arts Management and Law
Volume 21, Number 2, Summer 1991

Introduction

Some Canadians look out to the world: hearing two official languages; living under two distinct 'codes' of civil law; perched on an ever-widening multicultural and regional mosaic; underpinned by a deepening Amerindian new world oneness of people and biosphere; and, working in a welfare state market economy in which all persons and property are subject to the Crown; what Robertson Davies calls a socialist monarchy like Sweden.

Canadian Robert MacNeil's The Story of English records the linguistic root of English-speaking culture including Australia, Canada, the Indian sub-continent, New Zealand; the United Kingdom, the United States;  the West Indies and much of Africa.  It is the British Commonwealth plus the United States and South Africa. As McNeil shows, English has become the lingua franca of world business, science, technology and tourism.

As a Canadian cultural economist, I am concerned with another English cultural commonality - one not shared with other societies: continuing debate concerning the role of publicly-funded arts councils operating at arm's length from political interference.  The arm's length arts council is a unique English cultural artifact.  Over the last decade, it has also become increasingly controversial.

The Arts Council of Great Britain, the oldest national arts council, was created in 1945.  It has been recently regionalized. The Australia Council has been displaced by direct government grants to the Sydney Opera.  The Canada Council is financially frozen in a 15 year battle with government over political and administrative differences.  The National Endowment for the Arts, born in controversy, continually hovers on the eve of destruction.

At the provincial or state level, the Saskatchewan Arts Board barely survived premature public announcement of its demise.  Lucrative lottery funding for the Manitoba and Ontario Arts Councils have effectively been capped.  The Massachusetts Arts Council has been slashed and savaged.  The California Arts Council survives in spite of years of controversy.  At the local level, the story is similar, with some notable exceptions.

But Canada is also a member of Francophonie, the French equivalent of the British Commonwealth.  In French culture conflict between Art and the State appears resolved.  The State pays very well.  Culture (including language and Art) is part of an integrated national defence.  There is no arm's length between Art and the State. Cultural life of a nation is too important to be left to artists.

It should not be surprising, therefore, that Quebec has given English Canada a new policy lexicon including terms such as "cultural sovereignty", "cultural industries" and "the language police".  It is also not surprising that the best cultural statistics come from France and Quebec.  This "dirigist" attitude, however, has eroded artistic support for a separatist government in Quebec.  Another factor has been the Canada Council's refusal to enforce a federal government `blacklist' of Quebec separatists during the 1970s.

Multicultural experience does not help.  In Japan, for example, department stores and insurance companies define the relationship of Art and the State as a private yet national honour.  In Balinese tradition, there is no word for Art. Judaic and Islamic tradition prohibits graven images.  Communism requires public ownership of all artistic means of production.

Amerindian culture also offers limited insight.  Concepts like native copyright have not been embodied in statutes and they are based on an alien collectivist understanding of creation.  To tribal peoples, a song, story or icon does not belong to an individual but to the collective.  Rights may be exercised by one individual in each generation often through matrilineal descent.  There is, however, a proposal before the American Congress to convert Amerindian Art into `inalienable communal property'.

To understand the English debate about Art and the State, consider:

• What are the voices in debate?

• What bias fuels it?

• What has been lost or obscured?

Voices
Past Present Future

To some, Art is the secular church of creativity.  Within, the Mysteries are still performed: creativity flowers into expression.  Given this contemporary backdrop, it is not surprising that traditional English debate about the proper relationship between Art and the State is contested by Philistines and Pharisees, each claiming to be `Realists'.  It is also not surprising the debate transcends traditional categories of Left and Right.

The Philistine 

It is the religious fundamentalist who has traditionally been typecast as the Philistine Protestant, charismatic Catholic or Orthodox. Religious Realists object to Art demeaning deeply felt religious values.  Thus at the beginning of the Piss Christ and Maplethorpe controversy, Pat Buchanan on CNN's Crossfire asked: "What would be the response if a Star of David, not a Crucifix, was in that urine jar? As a Catholic, should I expect less?"  The Rushdie Affair has demonstrated, however, that Christianity has no monopoly on self-righteous indignation.  Further, Religious Realists are only one Philistine clan.

A second is the Capitalist Realists who preach: If it don't pay, kill it!  They believe alleged psycho-socio-spiritual benefits of public support to money-losing Art is welfare for the elite, something deficit-ridden government and tax-burdened citizens cannot afford.

Capitalist Realists do, however, appreciate the potential of Art as investment.  They know Art provided the highest rate of return of any capital asset in the USA between 1969 and 1989.  They have faith in capital cost allowances and special tax treatment for the entertainment industry which is, after defence, the largest US exporter.

The third Philistine clan is the Socialist Realists who believe: Artistic excellence is code for oppression. For Socialist Realists, public support should counter sexual, racial, ethnic and other stereotyping propagated by capitalist, white, Western European, heterosexual males through their control of the commercial media

Two examples illustrate the power of Socialist Realism.  First, the largest free trade agreement in history, that between Canada and the United States, almost collapsed due to the efforts of ultra-nationalists within the Canadian arts community.  They cast passage of the agreement into an issue of survival for Canadian cultural sovereignty.

Second, Actors Equity insisted an Asian American play the Eurasian leading role in the Broadway production of the West End London smash hit, Miss Saigon.  Under pressure from its membership and threatened with cancellation of the most expensive Broadway musical production in history, Equity recanted its arbitrary affirmative action.

Collectively Philistines share a common belief: Art is to be subsumed in pursuit of other values such as profit, godliness and affirmative action.  Art-for-art's-sake becomes either a liberal-left plot to promote sin, or right-wing code for exploitation of the underclass.

The Pharisee 

Opposing the Philistine is the Pharisee who believes: Truth is beauty, that is all you need to know, give us the money and go away!  With the best of intentions, Pharisees have adopted attitudes and taken actions that now threaten public support for Art in English culture.

There are three clans of Pharisees.  The first is the Hermetic Realists who create the nearly perfect worlds of artistic experience.  They are the artists and their artificers.  Many belong to craft guilds deeply rooted in English cultural history.  While only some are admitted to the Inner Sanctum, all know of the Green Room and its rituals.  Generally speaking, Hermetics just want to get on with Art.

The second clan is the Egalitarian Realists.  For more than 100 years, the imago of the alienated artist has engaged and enraged the populist mind.  But the 'Garrett and Gulag' theory that economic and political oppression fuels production of great Art is a romantic myth of our time, Michelangelo did not starve nor was he tortured.  Some cynics have gone so far, however, as to suggest that the modern middle class wants its artists poor as paupers and mad as bedbugs.

In the process of alienation, a new aesthetic was born; an aesthetic of political protest - Art as social comment.  In keeping with this aesthetic, Art does not want corporate patronage because it corrupts.  Big `P' political interference is rejected as fascist.  Since the Vietnam War, cum George Gilder's Wealth and Poverty, another set of sympathizers joined the chorus: middle-class, university-trained arts administrators, culturcrats and lobbyists.

Egalitarian Realists accept as natural, the expression of `protest art'.  To the extreme Left, this becomes the aesthetic version of urban terrorism of the 1960s.  Acts of terrorism, e.g. Piss Christ, are intended to force the police to crack down demonstrating that the system is fascist, followed by revolution.  In Australia, paintings have in fact been stolen and held for political ransom.  Egalitarian Realism is, nonetheless, an authentic aesthetic.  It articulates principles of good taste and beauty: Egalitarian is Beautiful!

Unfortunately, Egalitarians (including most officers of arts councils) seldom if ever, appear on popular media like Canada AM or Good Morning America.  No effort is made to educate the ignorant, to enlighten the lumpen proletariat or to inform citizens about the full spectrum of contemporary aesthetics - from concrete and free form poetry to minimalist and impressionist painting to all the myriad schools, styles and forms of contemporary art.

No effort is made to explain that `bent metal sculpture' is an aesthetic statement: We live in a construction site society.  The public is not informed that conceptual painting has become, in the words of Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word.  Without education or information, it is not surprising that the general public views much contemporary Art as shameful, shocking or trash.

The third Pharisee clan is the Illuminated Realists, the true patrons and ultimate consumers of High Art.  They are privileged to serve Art including pressing for more public support.  Through cultivated sensitivity, they appreciate the subtle sophistication of Art.  They know; they become cognoscenti.

On arts boards, they exercise temporary suspension of disbelief about tasks such as budgeting, evaluation and planning that, in daily, business life, would consume their attention.  They go `gag-gag' for Art and quickly develop turfitis.  Even hard-nosed political appointees to arts councils quickly place Art before past. political obligation: We don't take orders from government, we are the arts council!

In politics, when Illuminated Realists win public office, they develop an Edifice Complex and a passion for good sightlines, acoustics and all the amenities that make great Art.  This fixation often fails, however, to account for increased operating costs of new venues.

Sins of the Pharisee

While much public attention has focused on the intolerance and insensitivity of Philistines, Pharisees are also guilty of sin.  Beyond failure to educate the public, two problems make arm's length arts councils easy targets for Philistine attack: internal warfare and refusal to admit empirical evidence.

Anyone who has suffered through the budget process of an arts council knows: They eat their own.  Declining budgets have fostered increasing inter-disciplinary warfare. In the performing arts, music has suffered near collapse because of a subscription audience which is aging and dying off:  Audience growth for dance, soaring in the early 80s, has faltered.  Theatre maintains box office and audience growth, while the literary, media and visual arts grow dramatically in form and venue.  But they all must fight for a larger slice of an arts council pie that is not growing.  In a sector in which the expression of raw emotion is encouraged, battle is passionate, and too often self-serving

An outcome of inter-disciplinary war is fear of facts.  Former NEA Chairperson, Nancy Hanks selected computer systems that would not work to ensure Congress would learn no facts about NEA grants and ask no embarrassing questions.  The Arts Council of Great Britain refused for years to release statistical breakdowns of support to Art in London versus the provinces.  In Canada, a minister of the Trudeau government said to the press that it was easier to find out national defence secrets than how many Canada Council grants were awarded in his riding.

Before Piss Christ and homoerotica caught the attention of Capitol Hill, former Chairmen of the NEA, Frank Hodsoll was savaged by an arts community trying to avoid public accountability. Mr Hodsoll, to his credit, implemented an information system (partially in response to Congressional demand for an annual State of the Arts report) permitting empirical testing of the relationship between peer-assessed excellence and NEA funding.

The Pharisees believed Hodsoll was trying to replace peer review by formula funding. He was not. In effect, he argued: We agree the NEA supports excellence. We agree financial support, as a percent of client expenditure, should reflect assessed excellence. But the numbers contradict our principles.  Why?  Is there an explanation?  Should something be done?

Nonetheless, Congress, at the behest of the Pharisees, ordered Hodsoll to cease and desist. He subsequently left office. Since that time, Congress has learned that it had been hoodwinked.  The credibility of an arts community that cries wolf too often has accordingly suffered.

During my term at the Canada Council, the grant application for government funding was an exhaustive collection, compilation and analysis of empirical evidence concerning Art in Canada.  It served as an initial model for American efforts to develop an effective annual State of the Arts report.

On only one occasion in eight years was this budget document submitted to the Board. When it was, all hell broke loose.  Data wars exploded between disciplines.  The intensity of battle partially reflected the traditional revolving door between arts councils and disciplinary communities.

Within an arts council, the loyalty of disciplinary heads or directors (nick-named Member of Parliament for Dance, Theatre, etc. at the Canada Council) is generally to the disciplinary communities from which they come, and to which they return.  The English test of Throneworthiness operates: deliver the spoils to one's own tribe.  To my knowledge, arts councils are the only publicly-funded institution which still actively encourages unimpeded rotation of senior personnel between public and private practice.

In such an environment, data permitting inter-disciplinary comparison are often ruled inadmissible, irrelevant or false.  In fact, the Canada Council has publicly stated that statistical evidence is not helpful in assessment, budget or evaluation activities. After conducting a 'comprehensive' or ualue-for-money audit in 1985, the Auditor General of Canada (equivalent to the US General Accounting Office) responded by saying: "This statement does not reflect reality."

Empirical evidence is necessary but not sufficient for arts council accountability and decision-making.  For example, more spectators are supported - dollar-for-dollar through grants to classical than to modern electronic music.  This is necessary and essential information. It is not, however, sufficient.  Given the need to invest in modern forms if future generations are to benefit, a judgment about the present and the future must be made.  However, it should be made in light of the facts - informed intuition, not seat-of-the-pants logic.

Art is not, of course, the only sector fearing facts. What we don't know, won't hurt us is firmly entrenched in all bureaucracies - private and public.  No one wants to admit that every bureaucracy, from time to time, buys a $500 toilet seat.

But we live in a society in which "If you aren't counted, you don't count".  Controversy concerning the 1990 US Census highlights how being counted can be directly related to dollars.  Failure, for political or other reasons, to develop statistical and other empirical evidence means Art is seen as a "frill".

If public funds are to be distributed at arm's length from political influence (as I believe they should), then the price must be transparency to public scrutiny.  This requires, however, a new corporate culture for arts councils including exhaustive, publicly available financial management profiles of the jury system documenting: who, how often, how much, where and when; cost per jury and juror by sex, region and language; and correlations between serving as a juror and receiving grants.  Peer evaluation is the shield of credibility for arts councils. Justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done, by everyone. But, as William Safire suggests, the arts community seems to prefer fiery Viking funerals to the compromises necessary for public funding.

Bias
Politics & Education  

Two deep-rooted biases in English-speaking culture contribute to the heated debate about the proper relationship between Art and the State. The first concerns politics; the second, education.

Politics

From the beginning of Western civilization, the relationship between Art and the State has occupied the minds of philosophers, statesmen and dictators.  Plato and Aristotle were convinced that Art, unguided by censorship and control, would destroy the State. Fear of the potential of art-for-art's sake continued through the Middle Ages.  In Umberto Eco's medieval tale, The Name of the Rose, it was Brother Jorge's fear of the power of comedy to endanger the authority of the Church that feeds a tale of murder and causes the destruction of a great library - the collected enlightenment of an age - by the fires of censorship.

Through to the modern age, the State has generally exercised careful, considered control over Art. Louis XIV used Art to glorify himself and his alter ego, the French State.  In Nazi Germany, all modern means of artistic expression - from radio and television to the motion picture - were harnessed in the service of a cause so evil that colour film of the Nuremburg Rallies has never been released to the public by the American Government, which holds negatives and positives in protective custody.   What in scratchy black and white is ancient history is, to the modern eye, a symbol of the power of Art to serve evil in living colour.  Art is not summum bonum, any more than physics.

In Western Europe today, the State is still the architect of cultural life, treating art like other social responsibilities of government such as health, education and welfare.  In Eastern Europe and the Communist Bloc, until recently Socialist Realism defined the relationship between Art and the State socialist in content and realist in form - all else was counter-revolutionary and offending artists were class criminals.  In fact, only English-speaking countries separate Art from the influence of the State. Why?

It was because of Cromwell and the Puritans who excised art and music, laughter and gaiety during the English Civil War of the mid-1600s. Black and white was all that God would tolerate in His Commonwealth - this land England.  With restoration of the Monarchy, however,. Art took savage revenge with a hedonism and pleasure-seeking unparalleled in the history of English Art Tom Jones, Fanny Hill and Restoration plays are but examples.

The scar left by the power of Art, first controlled and then unleashed, helps explain English ambivalence towards Art.  Furthermore, until the Republican Revolutions of the late 18th century, English-speaking countries were the only ones in which the Commons controlled public spending.  And the Commons were simply unwilling to support `aristocratic indulgences such as Art.

The only exception was art lotteries.  The first collections of the British Museum were funded through a lottery approved by Parliament in 1753.   Modern use of lotteries to support Art, beginning in the 1970s, is not therefore without precedent.

Thus between the 1640s and the Second World War, the official policy of public support to Art in all English countries, including the United States, was no support.  At the end of World War II, the English world was faced with clear evidence of the power of Art in the hands of Hitler and Stalin.  This led to modification of the traditional hands-off policy by creating a unique English compromise: the arm's length arts council - funded by, but independent of, the State.

The United States exercised this compromise in two ways.  First, in response to cultural penetration of Latin America by the Nazi propaganda machine, the United States Information Agency was created during World War II to propagate American culture abroad, but not at home.  Second, in 1965 the NEA was created.  Nonetheless, public funding of Art at arm's length from political influence is a very fragile flower with unique and very recent English cultural roots.

Education 

With the exception of music and literature, Art was never part of the ancient or medieval liberal arts curriculum.  It was only in the Renaissance that the Fine Arts Academy emerged as a centre for visual arts education. In theatre and dance, there was no formal university training in the English-speaking world until the 20th century.  The independent status of the music conservatory also serves as evidence of the separate institutional pattern of learning pursued by Art. Unlike Science, the role of the university in Art is historically recent and small.

English culture has in fact never been comfortable with art education.  The importance of Art was only recognized in the United Kingdom in 1836 with establishment of the first school of design at South Kensington.  Until 1814, the Statute of Artificers regulated training and employment in the craft guild tradition.  In that year, responding to the deregulatory or laissez-faire temper of the time, Parliament abolished the Statute. In short order, the guild system collapsed; the labour market became flooded with unskilled workers.  By 1835 the quality of British production, particularly textiles, had declined to the point that the British Board of Trade appointed a Select Committee to investigate.  The Committee called for the marriage of Art and Industry to maintain British competitiveness with European rivals.

Similarly, in 1870, Massachusetts became the first American state to make art education a requirement in the public schools through passage of the Drawing Act.  The Act resulted from pressure from Boston manufacturers who argued that European students were trained in design and drawing and therefore American manufacturers suffered a competitive disadvantage.  Within two decades, the same argument served to introduce art education in Canadian schools.

During this period, the most eminent economist, Alfred Lord Marshall, explicitly recognized the importance of Art to economic life when he wrote: "it is every day more true that it is the pattern which sells the thing".  But even Marshall questioned the moral effects of art education. In the next generation, economist Lord Keynes was instrumental in founding the first arm's length national arts council - the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1945.  To Keynes, however, it was aesthetic, not utilitarian value that made Art important.

Since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the contribution of art education to national income has, in effect, been forgotten in English culture.  Amnesia resulted partially from the triumph of the Pestolozzian tradition in arts education - creativity and expression - which displaced the economic rationale.  Success of this upper class concept also reflected the impact of the arts for art's sake movement which in the mid-19th century began to withdraw Art from the de-humanizing impact of the Industrial Revolution.

Internal warfare so characteristic of arts councils is also visible in arts education.  There is a legitimacy hierarchy in which the arts community looks down on the universities which look down on high schools which look down on public schools.  There does exists, however, a gap between graduation from university fine arts programs and professionalism in Art.  University programs are high in theory but low in practical experience.  Art is an experiential form of learning, i.e. one learns by doing.  It is for this reason that special professional schools have been erected in virtually all disciplines, even at the high school level.

Similarly, a Philistine/Pharisee debate also exists in the schools.  Graphic and `applied' art programs are considered Philistine by fine art Pharisees who envy the resources of the applied programs.  In turn, a conflict exists between appreciation, in the widest sense including general education or culture, and the practice of Art.  It is here that the question of artists-in-the-schools also arises: Are artists the best teachers, or are professional art teachers the best educators?