The Chronicle of Artistic Failure in America

“[Galleries and art firms] are in the clutches of fellows who intercept all the money,.. [and only] one-tenth of all the business that is transacted… is really done out of belief in art.”

–Vincent Van Gogh, after his failure as an art dealer, in a letter to his sister Wilhelmina Van Gogh 

Things are really beginning to get bad for the arts these days. So bad, that even our enlightened and genteel northern neighbor, Canada, has undertaken an American-style slash-and-burn approach to spending on the arts in its current budget. According to the Globe and Mail online edition:

In short, yesterday’s budget, in the name of maintaining what Finance Minister Jim Flaherty called “strong fiscal management,” seemed to duck virtually every concern that the Canadian cultural community has been voicing in the past five years.

According to this story on the CBC’s website, arts groups are bitterly disappointed in the budget’s disregard for spending on arts and culture. “Cultural investment generates economic activity,” said one artist representative, “provides opportunities for performers and other creators and generates high-quality Canadian programming and films audiences want to watch… In tough times, that’s exactly the kind of investment government should be making, but they’ve failed to act.”

Meanwhile, not to be outdone by Canada’s new-found “Americanness” in regards to the arts, it appears our very own lame-duck president’s parting policy shot will be to eviscerate an arts community already deeply struggling to survive. According to a story called “National Endowment for the Arts budget cuts should be met with outrage, not complacency,” from the Louisville Courier-Journal, Bush is attempting an arts funding end-around in the last budget that he’ll ever sign off on:

Tucked away in the thousands of pages covering $3 trillion worth of proposed expenditures was a $16.3 million cut in support for the National Endowment for the Arts. That would reduce its operating budget from $144.7 million during fiscal 2008 to $128.4 million in 2009.

You heard right. Barely two months after signing off on a $20 million increase in the NEA’s budget — the largest in the endowment’s history — our nation’s chief executive quickly shifted into fiscal reverse. In budget-speak, this is called a “rescission.” In plain-speak, it’s an outrage.

“No more bread.” –Said by a baker to Vincent van Gogh; the painter had been exchanging paintings to the baker for food. (I wrote this in my notebook during my visit to Dean Fleming at the Libre Commune; I think I saw it in a book I had pulled from his bookshelf to read in bed while sleeping in the extra room at Fleming’s geodesic studio/home, but I can’t recall for certain.)

“I feel—a failure.” –Vincent van Gogh in a letter to his brother written after visiting Docter Gachet in Auvers. While in Auvers, van Gogh completed dozens of paintings and drawing, including a portrait of the doctor that later, in 1990, would sell for $82.5 million (the highest price ever for a painting sold in auction—proving “failure” is a relative term). At the end of his two-month stay in Auvers on July 27, 1890, at age 37, the painter would shoot himself in the stomach, and he would die two days later.

England has got it going on these days, at least in terms of national dialogue about art.

Here in America it’s been 18 months’ worth of presidential elections, punctuated by the occasional reference to whatever Britney, Paris, Lindsay or the latest (sh)it girls are doing out on the free range. Of art and other cultural subjects, these days we hear f*ck-all (so to speak).

But an alert FoF (Friend of Failure), Rich Barlow, who’s just back from a long holiday on the Isle of Crumpet, notes that there’s a major national discussion going on currently in England regarding how to foster and support “excellence” in that country’s art (as opposed to merely subsidizing art target levels).

A report called “Supporting Excellence in the Arts,” that was written by Sir Brian McMaster, a former director of the Edinburgh International Festival, and commissioned by the culture secretary, James Purnell, asserts that the arts “have never been so needed to understand the deep complexities of Britain today.” McMaster argues for a new “appreciation of the profound value of the arts and culture,” and a “reclamation of excellence from its historic elitist undertones.”

I can’t even imagine such a debate happening in America, where one of the most burning questions in recent years is whether or not the average Joe Schmoe is as smart as the average ten-year-old. No, here, in our great Democratic nation, all you have to do is suggest that maybe—just maybe—we could be doing a little bit more to foster our smarts and raise our cultural discourse and you suddenly have every Tom, Dick, and Harry Arse who knows how to write his own name screaming “elitism” and “pomposity” at the top of his lungs.

One good reason no one will probably ever write a song called “English Idiot.”

Somebody get me a Snakebite & Black, stat.

Ever tried.
Ever failed.
No matter.
Try again.
Fail again.
Fail better.

–Samuel Beckett

Sir Richard Eyre has weighed in again about his notions of “cultural apartheid” in Britain. This time it’s in response to an announcement from the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, James Purnell, that the British government “will work towards a position where no matter where they live, or what their background, all children and young people have the opportunities to get involved in top-quality cultural activities in and out of school.”

While Eyre admits to some skepticism over the idea that government can effectively address the problem of decreasingly public interest and involvement in the arts, he also welcomes the effort, any effort, to deal with the increasingly cultural antipathy of the masses. He is particularly concerned with creating a culturally classist society:

All things being equal, the choice of going to the opera or ballet or theatre or gallery or bookshop is a free one, open to everyone. But all things aren’t equal: the “choice” of going to the theatre or the opera or an art gallery doesn’t exist for vast numbers of people in this country, who, if they feel anything at all about art, feel disenfranchised. This distinction - between those who enjoy the arts and those who feel excluded from them - amounts to an absolute divide. It seems like apartheid to me.

No one can be blamed for such “apartheid,” of course. The government of Britain, like the U.S. government, is not at fault. No one is plotting, as a matter of policy, the decline of art. The problem is individual choice. The public has too many choices for how it can spend its time. There are too many competing cultural factions, and now that the Internet has put access to all of these factions within reach of every 6th grader, people gravitate more and more toward lowest-common-denominator bread-and-circuses, and less and less toward difficult or challenging culture and art. (Note: This is not a new phenomenon, as Eyre points out; after all, T.S. Eliot spoke fifty years ago of the decline of cultural discourse: “I see no reason why the decay of culture should not proceed much further, and why we may not even anticipate a period of some duration, of which it is possible to say that it will have no culture.” The problem now is that such decline has only been accelerated by tools of media and Internet we have shackled ourselves with.)

In the face of the diminishing returns of widening cultural self-choice, a solution seems unlikely. If no one is at fault, then no one can affect a change. Or rather, if everyone is at fault—everyone is responsible for their own cultural backwardness—then everyone equally has to affect the change. In the end, says Eyre:

Any government has a hard job justifying expenditure on the arts - it is easier to subsidise weapons of destruction than weapons of happiness. The benefits are hard to quantify and it is awkward but necessary to recognise that failure is an essential part of artistic creation; bad art will always exist beside the good. But it seems no more than logic to acknowledge - as James Purnell has - that the corollary of investing taxpayers’ money in the arts must be to evolve a strategy that embraces the departments of both culture and education to invest in the performers and the audiences of the future. It will enfranchise the victims of apartheid.

According to a recent story in The Observer, British theatre director Sir Richard Eyre says schools in Britain are failing to inspire the next generation of arts appreciators. Sound familiar?

Eyre, who led the National Theatre in England for 10 years, has warned that a condition of cultural apartheid has been “denying millions of people access to high culture.” Such a chasm, said Eyre, and the resulting lack of appreciation among schoolchildren for theatre, art, and classical music means a deterioration of support for the arts.

Eyre explained: “My fears are that you enlarge the divisions in society between those for whom the arts are a part of life and people who think it is impossibly obscure and incomprehensible…”Part of the job of education must be to enfranchise those people who feel disbarred from the arts.”

Should this blog instead be the International Chronicle of Artistic Failure?