by

Dr. Joseph S. Salemi

Department of Classics, Hunter College, CUNY 

Imagine a chef who disliked food. Suppose that he had the task of preparing dishes professionally, but that he did so with an unspoken resentment against the entire idea of culinary pleasure and fine dining. Would you want to eat his meals?

Or conceive of a musician who hated notes and chords and harmonics. He would compose ^"music," but would do everything in his power to make his compositions grating and discordant. Or think of an architect who had an animus against symmetry and square angles and regular lines, and who insisted on designing structures that were completely out of kilter.

Well, the fact is you don't have to imagine such people. They already exist, and are deeply influential in their respective fields. There are prestigious nouvelle cuisine chefs whose horrid dishes can only be explained by a rage against normal dining. There are prominent music theorists in the Schönberg and Cage mode who produce nothing that any real human being wants to hear. And there are deconstructivist architects who have concocted eyesores like the Pompidou Center and the postmodernist horrors that are currently being discussed for the World Trade Center site—things so willfully stupid and ugly that they make you cringe in distaste.

If you think all this is just reactionary exaggeration on my part, consider the following. Trendy chefs often speak disparagingly of "comfort food." By this they mean anything that people might find pleasant and appetizing, as opposed to the bizarre and off-putting slop that is supposed to challenge a diner's tastes. Avant-garde musicians loathe "merely pretty" or "melodic" music—which can be translated as music that actually appeals to people's ears. And cutting-edge architects refer contemptuously to "boxes," by which they mean any building with a symmetrically gratifying design that someone might want to live in. If you like boxes, pretty music, and comfort food, a large and influential section of modern society despises you and your preferences.

Consider the production of Shakespearean plays. Under the influence of idiots like the late Joseph Papp, there now exists a violent prejudice against "heritage" Shakespeare—that is, Shakespeare staged and performed in consonance with the original text. "Heritage" Shakespeare is hated, and we only get productions that debase and trivialize our greatest playwright with anachronistic absurdities and vulgar costuming, making it no better than punk-rock garbage. Papp was a jackass, and his jackasininity survives him.

The same perverse phenomenon can be observed in a number of different fields. If you are what is called a serious painter, you hate "painterly" (i.e. beautiful) paintings. Instead you want some minimalist absurdity, or childish dribble, or some theory-driven "installation." If you are an au courant fashion designer, you hate "pattern" garments (i.e. ones that are graceful and comely to the body). Instead you want something shocking or outré or vulgar that makes the woman wearing it look like a lunatic or a cheap whore. If you are a trendy choreographer, you hate "classic" dance (i.e. dance that shows exquisite human movement). Instead you want hideous on-stage cavorting by cripples or even persons in wheelchairs. If you are a modern academic, you hate "scholarly" work (i.e. work informed by love of a text and intelligent scrutiny of it). Instead you want impenetrable jargon and politically correct posturing and fatuous misreading.

I could go on and on with such examples, but I have a penchant for rhetorical copia that I must curb. So let's just sum it all up in a sentence. One of the major blights of modern culture is the willful production of garbage in place of genuine, substantial work.

In fact, as I grow older I have come to realize that this tendency is a characteristic sign of the arts in the modern world. Many soi-disant artists are in secret rebellion against the arts which they profess. They hate what they are supposed to love. And their hatred comes out in deliberate ugliness. It's a base and cowardly attitude, for instead of honestly abandoning the art and doing something else, they have decided to stay and wreck it from within.

What is the root of this sick attitude? You would have to be both a social pathologist and an exorcist to answer that question fully. But the problem is very real, and constitutes a major stumbling-block to anyone who works in the arts today. I will venture, however, the beginning of an answer. A great deal of contemporary artistic work is driven by ideological imperatives rather than aesthetic ones. There is no other explanation as to why otherwise talented people persist in producing garbage. If you have training and some innate skill, there is no reason to produce ugly art unless some idea-system is dictating to you that you ought to produce ugly art. And doing something destructive or stupid out of a sense that one is obliged to do it is the essence of what I have called ethopathy.

To those of us who are fighting this trend, I propose the following. From now on, whenever we allude to a manifestation of this tendency, we should identify it specifically as "garbage art." Thus, when someone puts up a building like the Pompidou Center, we should pointedly refer to it as "garbage architecture." When a fashion designer comes out with a sluttish, half-ripped gown that looks like a child's temper tantrum, we should deliberately speak of it as "garbage fashion." It will be a major rhetorical coup if we can get people to start saying garbage instead of mealy-mouthed euphemisms like postmodern, alternative, experimental, or trend-setting.

In the case of poetry, we already have a head start in this rhetorical turnaround. Many New Formalist critics, despite a tendency to pull their punches have said enough trenchant things about free-verse garbage to bring about a real sea-change in contemporary poetry. Although Let-It-All-Hang-Out drivel in the 1960s mode is still being written, one gets the distinct impression it isn't being touted and defended with gusto any more. Someone has shouted that the emperor ha' no clothes, and no one seems inclined to get up and shout back "He does have clothes!" In that sense, the free-verse spell has been broken.

A major sign of this sea-change is the appointment of Dana Gioia to head the NEA. This appointment—inconceivable a mere ten years ago—shows that even in government circles the idea is spreading that garbage art is no longer acceptable and fundable. Just suggesting Gioia for nomination would have caused a savage catfight back in 1993, when garbage art (along with the politically correct infrastructure within academia that fuels it) was the smugly regnant ideology. Times have changed. Gioia is in, and Piss Christ is out. Thank God for the Republicans!

OK—so the NEA has a good man at the helm. But I have a divided mind on the larger question of government funding for the arts. I know that some people have argued strongly against any kind of state-sanctioned subsidy for the arts, and I respect that position. There are three solid reasons to oppose such subsidies.

First, government money inevitably leads to government control and regulation, and every artist's being should rebel against that. Government meddling in education has been an unmitigated disaster, and there's no reason to assume that the same thing won't be true for the arts.

Second, government money means that taxpayers have a legitimate right to question and object to art that they find offensive—and then we are plagued with all sorts of arguments and controversies. As a Roman Catholic, I was infuriated by the sleazy anti-Catholic garbage that tax money was funding as "art" at the Brooklyn Museum a few years back; and I think Jewish residents of New Jersey have every right to resent the fact that their tax dollars are now supporting Baraka and his garbage.

As my Sicilian grandfather used to say, Nun c'e bisognu di chistu maliditt strappazzu. That means: "There's no need for this damned turmoil." Let artists do their work on their own initiative and at their own expense. In that way, the artist doesn't have to answer to government bureaucrats or enraged citizens for anything that he creates, and the government washes its hands of potential trouble. It's simpler and saner that way.

Incidentally, the liberal position on this issue is completely dishonest and intellectually bankrupt. In effect liberals say "The government should subsidize the arts, but the people whom the government represents should have no say in what specifically is subsidized." This is one of those elitist stances that shows how utterly out of touch with reality liberals have become. In a capitalistic democracy, people have a lot to say about what they pay for. But then again, liberals haven't been especially enthusiastic about democracy since 1980, when it was brought home to them with great force that the electorate can actually vote them out of power. They have never quite gotten over the shock of that realization.

But the third and weightiest reason against government funding of the art' is the following: We no longer live in a society where good aesthetic sense is a common patrimony. Or to put it bluntly, most people (including the educated) don't have any trustworthy taste.

Since this is so, government funding for the arts is very likely to be without informed aesthetic control. It was different in fifteenth-century Italy where you could be pretty damned sure that Lorenzo de' Medici and other princes were intelligent connoisseurs of the arts on which they bestowed patronage. But do you honestly believe that today, in 2003, some stupid civil-service bureaucrat or D.C. policy wonk is going to make sound aesthetic judgments?

It's the old managerial maxim: Personnel is policy. I would trust a Pope Julius or a Pericles or an Emperor Augustus, because all of them (to judge from the art that they subsidized) were men of exquisite taste. But I don't trust some little governmental schmuck with a degree in Diversity and Multicultural Awareness. And it's these nonentities who do a lot of the nuts-and-bolts work in a government agency, no matter who's at the agency's helm. I wish Dana Gioia all the luck in the world, but he's still going to have to deal with a more or less permanent staff of political hacks and philistines, most of whom want to dole out money according to a quota system, or in line with what academic "experts" think is best.

Consider the recent brouhaha over the First Lady's cancelled poetry symposium at the White House. Who exactly was responsible for that guest list of reflexively anti-American left-wing jerks? Anyone could have told Mrs. Bush that inviting a bunch of poets-cum-academics to a public function run by Republicans was just asking for trouble. Five will get you ten that the list was compiled by mid-level permanent staffers at the NEA with personal and ideological links to the network of tenure-track careerists who make up most of the poetry world. Remember: Personnel is policy. If Dana Gioia is true to his Sicilian heritage, one of his first tasks at the NEA will be to break some legs—metaphorically speaking, of course.

Having said all this, I still believe that government funding for the arts can be defended in the abstract. It's possible to imagine a reborn Emperor Constantine or Abbot Suger adorning our public spaces with great works, and encouraging artists of ability. This would be especially desirable in the areas of architecture and large-scale painting and sculpture—that is, areas where massive expenditures and questions of space are beyond the means of an individual artist. And it is also desirable—in the abstract—for funding to go to writers who cannot live by their pens, but whose work is excellent.

Nevertheless, three questions persist: Who decides what is excellent? Who determines merit? Whose aesthetic judgment is final? Unfortunately, in a world where garbage art is the norm, and where standards of taste have collapsed, there are no answers to any of those questions.

                                                                    Joseph S. Salemi  

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