Between Avant-Garde and Kitsch: Pragmatic Liberalism, Public Arts Funding, and the Cold War in the United States

It is among the hopeful signs in the midst of the decay of our present society that we—some of us—have been unwilling to accept this last phase of our own culture. In seeking to go beyond Alexandrianism, a part of Western bourgeois society has produced something unheard of heretofore—avant-garde culture.

Clement Greenberg, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" 6–7

Kitsch has not been confined to the cities in which it was born, but has flowed out over the countryside, wiping out folk culture. Nor has it shown any regard for geographical and national–cultural boundaries. Another mass product of Western industrialism, it has gone on a triumphal tour of the world, crowding out and defacing native cultures in one colonial country after another, so that it is now by way of becoming a universal culture, the first universal culture ever beheld.

Clement Greenberg, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" 13–4

On 4 October 1957, a stunned American society reeled at the news of the successful launch of a Soviet earth-orbiting satellite, Sputnik 1. The launch of this satellite, officially baptized as the "Artificial Traveler around the Earth," recalled the nightmarish period of national insecurity that followed the successful Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. A period of intense national self-examination queried both the domestic and the foreign policy of the Eisenhower administration, under the alarmist twin banners of the "missile gap" and the "culture gap," accurately reflecting the intertwining of cultural and Cold-War politics in the political discourse of the period. This internal debate and self-analysis was to have tremendous implications on the moribund status of public funding for the arts in the United States, moving the debate over public arts funding from its peripheral status in the House of Representatives to the centre and leading eventually to the establishment of a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), on 29 September 1965, under President Lyndon B. Johnson.

The apparent impotence of the Eisenhower administration in the political fall-out from Sputnik reinvigorated a moribund debate about the role of the federal government in arts funding, a debate stultified by the red-baiting of the early 1950s, by aligning the debate over culture with the overarching debate over the national purpose and will of the American people in the Cold War. In effect, a revamped, and more conservative, American liberalism exacerbated the rents and fissures within the public discourse over the "missile gap" following Sputnik, to create the impression that only radical and dramatic surgery could "suture" these gaps and save the United States both militarily and culturally. This paper will examine the ways in which pragmatic liberal politicians and intellectuals in the United States ironically exploited what the postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhahba (extrapolating from the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan) has labelled "the process of the gap," in order to promote both their military and cultural agendas.¹

For Bhabha, it is within this "process of the gap" that "the relationship of the subject to the Other is produced." The intention is to destabilize or unsettle the binary or symmetrical logic by which identities are produced. This process therefore enables the articulation of new partial identities that can exploit these gaps through forms of political and cultural resistance. While Bhabha draws upon this process as the basis for fomenting a politics of postcolonial resistance, this paper examines a different application of Bhahba's concept, considering the exploitation of "gaps" by American pragmatic liberals, who also wished to destabilize established identities. However, unlike that of Bhahba, their intention was not to critique the hegemony of liberal capitalism but to entrench more effectively their vision of American hegemony , through an astute and flexible application of pragmatic liberalism. On the political battleground of American politics between 1957 and 1960, the Democratic pragmatic liberals and their moderate Republican allies re-conceptualized the role of culture and public arts funding in order to exploit the gaps in American society that the Eisenhower administration seemed unwilling, or unable, to close or ameliorate...