I think there is some ambivalence in our perception about individual quality and individual artists. On the one hand, we can identify it because it is rare and limited in its appeal to a few. We know how difficult it is to execute excellence in art (although I am convinced that for the true genius the things that look difficult to us are easy and effortless for him). But while we recognize quality by its rareness, on the other hand we consistently moan about the absence of quality from the hearts and minds of the masses. We talk about a crisis in literacy; we are upset and disquieted about pop art; we talk about airport sculpture; we are unnerved, and legitimately so, about the sensational play as opposed to the sensitive one. Each of us has a group of phrases that identify for us the mediocre in an art form.
I sometimes wonder if we really and truly mean it. Do we really mean that the world is the poorer because too few appreciate the finer things? Suppose we did live in a world in which people chatted about Descartes and Kant and Lichtenstein in McDonald’s. Suppose Twelfth Night was on the best-seller list. Would we be happy? Or would we decide that since everybody appreciated it, maybe it wasn’t any good? Or maybe if the artist himself had not begged for his life—begged and struggled through poverty, perhaps on into death—perhaps his art wasn’t any good. There seems to have been an enormous amount of comfort taken in some quarters (in print and in conversation) that when thousands and thousands of people stood in line to see the Picasso show, only 4 or 5 percent of the people who saw it really knew what they were seeing.
First novels shouldn’t be successes—they are supposed to be read by a few. They are not supposed to be profitable—they must be limited. If a first novel “makes it,” then there is some suspicion about its quality. A minority artist in this game and in this climate of ambivalence is required either to abandon his minorityhood and join the prevailing criteria, or he has to defend and defend and defend ad nauseam his right to hear and love a different drummer. That’s part of the romanticism that clings to the idea of the individual artist—the artist as beggar. It keeps him begging, and when he is successful, he should feel guilty—even apologetic.
There is danger inherent in being an artist, always—the danger of failure, the danger of being misunderstood. But there are some dangers now that are not inherent; some new dangers are being imposed. Be patient with me for a moment while I describe one that is of particular interest to me in the field of literature. There is a most exciting feud and public battle going on at Cambridge University at the moment—a fight between the traditional critics and the postmodernists, or the structuralists. It is a pyrotechnic delight in issues of The Times Literary Supplement, and scholarly debates are continuing in full force. I will not go into the details of the nature of the fight, but in oversimplified terms, there is a core group of traditional critics who believe that “literature and life” practical criticism is the way in which to teach people how to read the great works of literature, and then there is a newer, younger group, sometimes called “pluralists” by the British, that attacks and ignores traditional British criticism. This newer group is accused of being obscure and difficult and limiting in their perception of criticism.
What’s interesting about the feud to me is that in it the writer has no place at all. Structuralists and proponents of semiotics and proponents of deconstruction perceive the written work as a phenomenon—but not central to the act of criticism or “reading.” It’s interesting that this fight goes on in literature studies, as opposed to theology and philosophy and other areas in which it belongs, but I think there is a reason for that. In the contemporary world of art and scholarship, literature is, I think, the only discipline in which the scholars do not produce what they criticize. The chemists, the social scientists, the historians, the philosophers—all of those people produce what they teach, they produce what they question, they produce what they change. In literary criticism, the critic now produces the criticism that he teaches; he produces the discipline, and the subject of the discipline—which is the text—is peripheral to the discussion. Perhaps it is true, as someone suggested, that English teachers have always envied the mathematicians—all those little formulas they put on the wall—and that they now would like to have a group of formulae they could also put on the blackboard. But where the criticism is itself the art form—that doesn’t mean it isn’t an art form—but when it denigrates the sources, there is a genuine threat to the preeminence of the creative artists. And that is significant, and it is filtering down to the artists themselves, some of whom are totally isolated from the critics in a way they never were before. There was a time in fourteenth-century Germany, in eleventh-century Italy, when the great translators were the poets, when the great critics were the writers; they did both. Now it is separate; the creative artist goes one route and the critic goes another.
Because the individual artist does not manage or control, at least in literature, what is taught—not even what is produced and what is decided to be taught—the endowment plays an incomparable role in his life. With an agency like the endowment there is a place and a means for creative artists to come together and make decisions about what ought to be nurtured, and what ought to be of value, and what ought to be supported. He may not have that right in universities; he certainly has not that right in publishing institutions; he probably does not have it in the media that exist and surround him. But he does have it in a confederacy and a brotherhood and a sisterhood—in the structure as provided by the panels and the programs of the National Endowment for the Arts. The endowment assuages the guilt of a gifted person who has the “misfortune” to do something extraordinarily well the first time. The endowment says out loud and in cash, “Your needs can be met. Your early work may be worth attention, even though it is early, even though you have not hit your stride, even though this may not be the ‘breakthrough’ work.” The endowment says, “We will give you some help now. Your problems of audience, your problems of distribution, your problems of rent and time and space and data are not fixed stars; they are not immutable. They can be solved—and if not totally solved, they can be ameliorated.”
The endowment, through its panels and its programs, says, out loud and in cash, that your ethnic aesthetics are not to be questioned by people who don’t know anything about them. It says your cultural differences are not to be denigrated, especially by people outside the culture. It says your working-class background will not keep you from the full expression of your art. For, among other reasons, this is a country founded by laborers and farmers and small businessmen and convicts and clerks and pirates—so we know about your working-class background because we are your background.
Half of all of the funding categories have a place for the express aid and guidance for support of this beleaguered, guilt-ridden, frustrated species—the individual artist whom we have perhaps inadvertently relegated to the necessity of pain and struggle.
The individual artist is by nature a questioner and a critic; that’s what she does. Her questions and criticisms are her work, and she is frequently in conflict with the status quo. But the artist can’t help that; if she is to have any integrity at all in her art, she can’t help it. The endowment does not penalize her for the controversy her art may engender because it is, or ought to be, axiomatic with the endowment that the last things we wish to encourage are safe art and safe artists. So the endowment takes risks—takes them itself and thereby underlies and legitimatizes the necessity for risk, the necessity for innovation and criticism. And it is in that climate that individual artists develop.
I remember a time, years ago, when I sat on a literature panel; the big problem was trying to get the writers to apply. They didn’t want it; they thought they were going to be censored; they thought the government was meddling in their books; they thought they couldn’t say certain things. There was a taint attached to the acceptance of the fellowship grants and the direct grants, and only with persistence were the panels able to overcome it. With persistence, the panels of t
he endowment have become Brother Theo to little Vinnie van Gogh. They have become a friend to little Jimmy Joyce. They are a platform for that outrageous, shocking, controversial George Bernard Shaw. But, in addition, we are food, we are rent and we are medical care for that arrogant and feisty Zora Neale Hurston—who didn’t have any of that at the end. We have a chance to be the audience in the performance hall for Scott Joplin—who didn’t have it at the end. What we do is no small thing; it is the first of the four or, I guess, five legs upon which the endowment stands. And any kick to that leg, any break in it, is insupportable because the endowment cannot stand without it.
Now for a very personal note. I do not want to go into my old age without Social Security, but I can; I do not want to go into my old age without Medicare, but I can, I’ll face it; I do not like the notion of not having a grand army to defend me, but I can face that. What I cannot face is living without my art. Like many of you here, with your own particular backgrounds, I come from a group of people who have always refused to live that way. In the fields we would not live without it. In chains we would not live without it—and we lived historically in the country without everything, but not without our music, not without our art. And we produced giants. We, the National Council on the Arts, the endowment, are the bastions; we will make it possible to keep individuals and artists alive and flourishing in this country.
Arts Advocacy
Whenever anyone begins to think about arts advocacy, a complex obstacle presents itself at once: artists have a very bad habit of being resilient, and it is that resilience that deceives us into believing that the best of it sort of gets done anyhow—and the “great” of that “best” sort of lasts anyhow. The public and even academic perception is that nothing, neither social nor personal devastation, stops the march and production of powerful and beautiful artworks.
Chaucer wrote in the middle of the plague.
James Joyce and Edvard Munch carried on with a blind eye and a weak one respectively.
French writers excelled in and defined an age writing in the forties under Nazi occupation.
The greatest of composers was able to continue while deaf.
Artists have fought madness, ill-health, penury, and humiliating exile—political, cultural, religious—in order to do their work.
Accustomed to their grief, their single-minded capacity for it and their astonishing perseverance in spite of it, we sometimes forget that what they do is in spite of distress—not because of it.
Last year I spoke to an extremely gifted and well-established artist who told me he vetoed a living for a fellow artist because he thought having so much money would undermine the recipient—hurt his work—and that the applicant was “too good to receive such a financial windfall.” To me the shock of that revelation is that, in some quarters, it is not shocking at all. For even when there is attention turned to an artist’s plight in the form of a modest living, there is at the same time a problem of perception: What constitutes a hospitable environment and what principles inform whether we provide or deny it?
It brings us, as always, to the question of how haphazard should art support be. Should it take its text from the hazard of being an artist and become itself erratic, risky? Should it examine artists’ lives, note the pain in so much of them, and imitate that pain by enfranchising it—even producing it, as in the anecdote above, for the good of the artist? Should grief and penury be built into art patronage, so the marketable wares created under those limiting circumstances are folded into the equation of the work’s value in the marketplace in years and eras to come?fn1
When all attention is withdrawn from artists, they have always been mad enough to do it anyway, so what’s the fuss? Can’t they depend on enlightened philanthropy when available—and look elsewhere when it isn’t? Or can’t they depend on the marketplace—which is to say design the art itself for the marketplace—and hope the target will not move before their work is completed? Or can’t they rely on government support and trust to chance or the law of averages that their work will prove at least equal to the dollar value of the support?
Such are a few of the questions art advocacy raises. But they are critical questions, made more critical by economic decay if not catastrophe and political cunning. And they are questions begging for answers, strategies in state art organizations, educational institutions, museums, foundations, community and neighborhood groups, and so on. What all of us know, you and I, is that the situation is more than dire—it is dangerous.
All of the art of all of the past can be destroyed in a few minutes by oafish politics and/or war games. It is also true that a good deal of the art of the future can be aborted by carelessness, whimsy, and disdain among art providers and consumers. National prerequisites can sweep clean or waver; crystallize or flow. There have been times when support for new and emerging art was at floodtide, matching the support for traditional institutions; other times such support, as now, is in drought. The uncertainty can devastate whole generations of artists and deprive a nation irrevocably. There already are such nations. It will take real intelligence and foresight not to become one of them. One of the nations that rests on the passion of the artists long dead—appropriating that passion, that engagement as their own, and meanwhile daring contemporary artists to work their own way. Or one of the nations that can be defined by the number of its artists who have fled the country. If one judges a civilization, as I believe it should be judged, not by the high-mindedness with which it regards art but by the seriousness with which art regards the civilization, then it is high time we begin to address anew and with vigor certain problems that continue to signify alarm.
The public perception of the artist is frequently so at variance with the art world’s perception, they can hardly speak to each other. But the effort to do so, to have unpatronizing exchanges between arts professionals and the public, between artists and audiences cannot be overemphasized. It is also possible and necessary to encourage dialogues in which the artist is not a supplicant and the art supporter is not an enforcer. It is possible to have a forum in which the citizen, the student feels he or she is welcome for more than the ticket purchased or the applause. It is important to include, even to work the student-citizen into these projects; to insist upon discussion of the problems that seem to be gripping the art world in general and that are plaguing all of us—providers, grantors, artists, teachers, organizers.
Sarah Lawrence Commencement Address
I am extremely pleased to have this opportunity to speak to so very special a gathering. To pay compliments to a community of teacher-scholars, teacher-administrators, parents, board members, and students in an extraordinary institution. I commend you. These last few years could not have been easy. To the parents and relatives of the graduates I extend my congratulations. That your son or daughter or relative has been graduated is cause for a splendid celebration. Quietly or with fireworks, relish it today, for in just a little while you will again feel the anxiety of her or his next step—some further penetration into the adult world you are yourselves familiar with, and, being familiar with that world, you certainly feel some apprehension. I cannot reassure you but I can remind you that youth is indelicate—managing generation after generation not only to survive and replace us, but to triumph over us.
But to you, the graduates, I would like to do more than commend and congratulate. I would like to provoke. By the reputation of your faculty and the alumni of this college, I would guess that your education here has not been idle or irrelevant; it has been serious. I would like what I say to approach the seriousness of your tenure here.
So what shall I say to the Sarah Lawrence Class of ’88? The last time I did this, I believe, was 1984—a year fraught with symbolism and the tension Mr. Owell had projected onto it. I honestly don’t know what might be of value to any graduating class four years after 1984.
Obviously I must make some reference to the future—how sparkling it can be … provided it exists; if only the
possibility of actually “killing” time was not a real one, real because, if we want it that way, we can arrange things so that there will be no one left to imagine or remember that human invention: time. Its absence (the absence of time) has been thinkable during the whole of your lives. I would talk about the future if only it were a rolled carpet you had only to kick to see it unfurl limitlessly before your feet.
Surely there must be some talk of responsibility. I am addressing, after all, bright, industrious, accomplished people who are about to shoulder the very considerable weight of educated adulthood. So there should be some mention of responsibility: the need for and the risk of assuming the burden of one’s own life and, in the course of that, assuming the care of the life of another (a child, a friend, a mate, a parent, an acquaintance, even, perhaps, a stranger).
And shouldn’t I also touch upon goodness? Ethical choices? I ought to, since goodness is not only better and good for you, but it is also more interesting, more complicated, more demanding, less predictable, more adventuresome than its opposite. Evil really is boring. Sensational, perhaps, but not interesting. A low-level activity that needs masses or singularity or screams or screeching headlines to even get attention for itself, while goodness needs nothing.
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