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  • Federalizing the Muse: United States Arts Policy and the National Endowment for the Arts, 1965–1980
  • Karal Ann Marling
Donna M. Binkiewicz, Federalizing the Muse: United States Arts Policy and the National Endowment for the Arts, 1965–1980. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. 295 pp.

The New Deal era was an exception to Americans' often gingerly attitude toward federal government patronage of the visual arts. Overcoming fears that the country might find itself stuck with art that would be deemed morally suspect or just plain hideous, Franklin Roosevelt's team of practical idealists created a far-reaching series of programs designed primarily to preserve what they called the "usable skills" of unemployed artists. The best known of these agencies was the Federal Art Project (FAP) of [End Page 156] the Works Progress Administration. Today, this make-work operation is often confused with the Section of Fine Arts, another Roosevelt-era bureau that commissioned murals for public buildings from artists who won anonymous competitions. Unlike the FAP, the Section of Fine Arts (which operated under the Treasury Department) did not inquire into the financial status of potential muralists. Instead, it brought culture to the provinces.

Soon after the United States entered World War II, however, both programs ended, having fallen victim not only to wartime stringency but also to a changing climate of opinion. With the advent of prosperity after the war, the notion of taxpayer support for any professional group quickly eroded. Moreover, the controversy that had frequently arisen over the style and subject matter of murals sponsored by the Section of Fine Arts gave lawmakers ample reason to take a cautious, hands-off approach. In the art world itself, the readable, pictorial art of the 1930s and 1940s was steadily losing ground to what would soon be called Abstract Expressionism. The art critics who championed this trend, including the influential Clement Greenberg, argued that the new breed of artists were living American heroes and paint-stained embodiments of freedom and democracy. The new artists displayed an innovative style—the first kind of art that bested the Europeans at their own game of avant-garde superiority. Abstract Expressionism proved that the United States was number one not only in the production of tanks, Coca-Cola, and kitchen appliances, but also in culture.

Donna Binkiewicz makes an excellent case for a tight relationship between the international triumph of Abstract Expressionism, the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and Cold War policies that valued support of the arts as a way of projecting a refined, serious image of the United States. The story really begins in the 1950s, with exhibits sponsored by the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) intended to highlight cultural products created in the absence of official policy or coercion. This art, the USIA implied, was at the farthest remove possible from the pieties of Soviet Social Realism. The advent of the Kennedy administration (and the considerable influence of Jacqueline Kennedy) made the arts a kind of trademark of a new sophistication in American life. The Eisenhowers had mostly preferred art of the common man—paint-by-numbers, Grandma Moses—whereas the Kennedys entertained Pablo Casals, Igor Stravinsky, and Robert Frost. When the NEA came into being in 1965 during the Johnson administration, it was part of the Kennedy legacy. The idea was to demonstrate the value Americans placed on high culture, despite their affinity for Cadillacs and rock-and-roll.

Binkiewicz convincingly argues that whatever the framers of the NEA legislation may have had in mind, one important function of the new body was to serve as a kind of buffer against the explosive and multifaceted popular culture of the period that had caused alarm among cultural mavens ranging from Dwight Macdonald and Henry Seidel Canby to Adlai Stevenson and Steve Allen. This distaste for popular art—the conviction that the old standards are always the best—rears its hoary head every few years in calls for the use of traditional texts in public schools and in proposals to ban Hollywood's latest excesses. The NEA, according to Binkiewicz, institutionalized cultural conservatism by favoring the aging heroes (and, more rarely, heroines...

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