Posted on 10/13/2013 8:58:21 AM PDT by Conservative Beacon
In 1989 Jesse Helms, the contentious and controversial conservative senator from North Carolina, launched an attack on the National Endowment for the Arts for its support of shows that included work which he deemed offensive. Ten years later as Mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani engaged in a similar attack, threatening to cut off the city’s support of the Brooklyn Museum because of its show “Sensation” which featured Chris Offili’s painting “The Holy Virgin Mary”, a depiction of of the Blessed Mother emblazoned with elephant dung.
These two controversies have come to frame the perception of conservative opposition to public funding for the arts. It is viewed as a battle between liberals who value free speech and broad access to the arts and conservatives who want to censor art and cut funding to those institutions that bring art to the people. It is a battle that conservatives have been soundly losing. It is the wrong battle. The better argument against the current model of federal arts spending is much more simple, and much closer to the heart of the conservative movement. What conservatives should be saying is that the NEA and the tax exempt status of many arts organizations are hurting the very art forms they purport to support. They are in fact making American art less relevant to American’s lives.
(Excerpt) Read more at thefederalist.com ...
Time for the arts to support themselves. They’re workers...just like anyone else.
“They’re workers...just like anyone else.”
Except nobody really needs a fifty foot tall bat or a photo of a bullet in an anus. They call them “starving artists” because so few people actually want to buy their product. Churches and kings were patrons of the arts for good reasons, they made propaganda (or, educational materials, if you will) for the church or the “state.” Propaganda is exactly what NPR is and all the other state sponsored “art.” The problem is, unlike “Why We Fight” it is not propaganda for anything conservative. This is why there’s such a fight about it.
It’s time to take government out of the propaganda business and let the “arts” struggle on their own. If nobody buys the product then the artists need to get real jobs.
(Uhm...bah, humbug.)
Well said.
I have a “friend” who is as extreme left loonie as can be.
She makes tons of money as an art professor, and gets her stupid political opinion cartoons reliably printed by loonie left publications.
She lives in a posh gated community with her (sort of) husband who sells his crappy “art” to wealthy trust fund punks who want to show they have culture. Oh yeah he is a professor too. It’s his way of “giving back.”
They ought to preach what they practice.
Its not just about the money. Its about the actual art no matter how its funded.
Art is part of the fabric of culture and the communists name taking control of artistic expression as a stated goal and they’ve been very successful.
A while back I read an article about how photographers become successful. Basically it said to hang around gay people, photograph them doing gay things, be gay yourself, and push a message.
Political art has always existed and will always have a place but its extremely damaging when it infects all. Its kind of like politicized science. Imagine where we would be today if Jonas Salk had been outspoken against abortion or gay marriage in today’s world.
Wow, that brings back some satisfying memories. Back when we had politicians in the GOP that used to forcefully stand up to the abject waste and utter cultural deviancy that the libs were constantly shoving down our throats. One of the reasons I used to actually support and identify with the Republican Party.
Now we have a Party that tends to cower before any issues regarding the cultural decay and degeneration of the country, from fag-marriage to dope to the poison that comes from the cretins in Hollywood. Which have turned the country into such a grotesque sewer that I even seriously question whether it’s worth trying to save at this point.
Good ideas in this article — that government funding shuts out the free marketplace and only encourages “progressivism” in the arts (duh!); but he needed an editor. Too many words before you get to the point.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to “eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms.”
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. “Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art.”
http://www.uhuh.com/nwo/communism/comgoals.htm
You make a very important observation regarding how art is part of the fabric of any culture. It has a profound impact the creators and consumers of culture.
We always use the phrase “Is it art imitating life, or life imitating art?” It should be broaden and rephrased to “Does culture imitate life, or life imitate culture?”
Our culture in general, along with the education system, where conservatives must refocus our energy going forward. That is how the left has taken over this country.
While we were winning elections off-and-on in the 60s and 70s, and during the Reagan Revolution, the left were laying the foundations for future success in the media, education system, arts, Hollywood, etc.
America has been brainwashed now into a center-left country. That’s how it was done.
I’m gonna tell you one thing, kid...Antonio Gramsci
Make socio-political statements thru “art” all you desire.
As long the message suits the liberal agenda it is worthy
of support and protection. But criticize the liberal ortho-
doxy and you are not an artist but, rather, a racist, homophobe,
female hating, climate change denier. The concept that your
opponent has the right to express an opinion has no place
in today’s liberal theology.
Just look at Hollywood....Talk about mind control...Filth and perversion and violence. Humpback mountain is a perfect example of fags at work.
Show me the place in the Constitution where it says that the federal government should spend millions of dollars on art and artists. I greatly value art, but this is not something the government should pay for.
Amusing theory with much more than a grain of truth, especially as regards fashion, mainstream media or pop culture. But it wasn't always so. I'm thinking of the history of photography here:
• Matthew Brady chronicled the Civil War when photography was a fairly new medium; and photographers were central to news and documentation of the World Wars and other pre-satellite political events;As one very important individual example of critically important photographic documentation, General Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered that the horrors of the Holocaust be photographed so that a genocide of that depravity would not be forgotten and could not reasonably be denied. (Not that the Middle East isn't trying...)• Photographers have always documented individuals, family members, schoolchildren, organizational activities and social events, in addition to their crucial role in news stories, crimes and other forensic reporting;
• Artists like Ansel Adams (nature), and photojournalists like Dorothea Lange (the dustbowl) and Alfred Steiglitz (city life in mid-20th century) have added important insight about our nation;
• National Geographic photographers and those who photograph architecture and antiquities for publication have added immeasurably to cultural understanding worldwide.
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