Open Letter to Americans for the Arts

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Open Letter to Americans for the Arts
Indirectly, I received your urgent email, “Breaking News,” regarding the approval of the “egregious amendment offered by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK)” to the economic recovery bill, which stipulated, as noted in that email: "None of the amounts appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used for any casino or other gambling establishment, aquarium, zoo, golf course, swimming pool, stadium, community park, museum, theater, art center, and highway beautification project."

You, of course, were disappointed: “Unfortunately, the amendment passed by a wide vote margin of 73-24, and surprisingly included support from many high profile Senators including Chuck Schumer of New York, Dianne Feinstein of California, Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, and several other Democratic and Republican Senators.”

However, I was delighted! Indeed, why should DISSIDENT poets, writers, artists, and editors be at all upset by what seemed to have upset you so much? After all, we did not receive funding. We did not receive awards. We did not receive lucrative fellowships. We did not receive grants. We did not receive NPR invitations to jabber on the air with PC-bourgeois tonality. The easy public monies were simply not for us!

The Boston Globe ran an article rightfully against the push by multimillionaire Quincy Jones to get Obama to establish a Ministry of the Fine Arts. What it failed to realize, however, was that the nation already had such a Ministry. The NEA served that function, while NPR acted as its voice. Former director Dana Gioia served the role of arts tsar, a good term for it, since the arts tsar served as dictator of aesthetics and taste, inevitably favoring the bourgeois over the dissident. Indeed, the art the NEA tended to push was ineluctably of the established-order variety. What the Boston Globe needed to do was examine the Massachusetts Cultural Council, which acted as the state Ministry of the Arts. Why did it not do that?

As long as all political artistic persuasions were not treated equally by state cultural apparatchiks, public money should not be spent on the arts. The nation did not need more NPR smiley-faced multimillionaire artists with effete sounding voices a la Quincy Jones or Herbie Hancock! What it needed was more artists daring to “go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways” (Emerson) and who let their lives “be a counterfriction to stop the machine” (Thoreau). Of course, such artists would not make successful careerists, let alone cultural apparatchiks like Charles Coe and Mina Wright of the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

Money, like it or not, determined which art would be promoted and end up in the nation’s museums. Lack of money, connections, and networking prowess would likely relegate the artist (or writer), no matter how good, into the oubliettes.

Indeed, why would dissidents wish to see more public taxpayer monies flow into the hands of cultural agencies and projects? Why would they wish to see such monies flow into the hands of the Concord Cultural Council, for example, which recently adopted a rule eliminating from funding any project it decided to deem of a “political nature.” This year it gave public money to Friends of the Performing Arts of Concord, for its “Concord Messiah Sing.” Yet how could one possibly conceive according public monies to religious song events as apolitical? In fact, it was perhaps unconstitutional! The new “political nature” rule was adopted, by the way, to keep me from obtaining public funding. The Concord Journal refused to publish my criticism of the Council.

Why would dissidents wish to see more public monies flow into the hands of the National Endowment for the Arts, which made autocratic determinations? Indeed, it deemed The American Dissident “low” and “poor” and refused to provide any specific information with that regard, despite my citizen requests. Why would dissidents wish to see more public monies flow into the hands of the Academy of American Poets, which acted as bourgeois censor and held bourgeois panels of "distinguished" bourgeois poetasters on bourgeois aesthetics? As for the Massachusetts Cultural Council, its hack-appointed apparatchiks simply refused to respond to my citizen questions:

1. Why did taxpayers fund Agni and Harvard University Museums, for example, when both organizations were connected to private billion-dollar corporate-educational institutions? Did that not indicate something rotten in the very hearts and minds of grant-according panelists and in the MCC in general? SIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIILENCE!

2. Why did the MCC only fund literary journals that didn’t really need the funding? In other words, why did a journal with a budget under the necessary $10K minimum not even merit consideration for funding? As editor of The American Dissident, a highly unique literary journal devoted to unusual vigorous debate, cornerstone of democracy, I could not even get funding from the local Concord Cultural Council. Nothing! And I’d been trying for over a decade! SIIIIIIILENCE!

3. Why did the MCC rarely, or perhaps never, have as panelists individuals whose very creation was focused on hardcore criticism of the academic/literary established-order milieu and canon itself? If a project highly dissident in nature with such a focus were to be presented before established-order type panelists, evidently it would immediately be deemed not of “artistic excellence.” After all, it would take a rare panelist who could look at criticism of the panelist him or herself… and actually proceed objectively. How could I become a rare dissident panelist for the MCC? SIIIIIIIIIIIILENCE!

4. Dan Blask, MCC Program Coordinator, stated: “Since we rely on panelists solely for their artistic opinions, when selecting them we focus on their artistic expertise and accomplishments…” Since “accomplishments,” however, inevitably translated as popularity in the established-order milieu, didn’t that rule for obtaining panelists exclude someone with a dissident outlook and focus (i.e., someone not popular in the milieu, thus not “accomplished”)? SIIIIIIIIIIILENCE!

5. Since the MCC was a public organization, should it not make a special effort to open its doors not simply to multicultural viewpoints, but to dissident-political viewpoints as well? Would that not benefit democracy, as opposed to literature as usual in the status-quo oligarchy? SIIIIIIIILLENCE!

Clearly, those were tough questions without simple answers. For democracy, however, they demanded answers.

Finally, funding the projects Americans for the Arts wanted funded would likely not produce jobs in a time where jobs were desperately needed. As an unemployed professor, I was perhaps unemployable in my profession because I had spoken out against the likes of Americans for the Arts, NEA, MCC, etc. Indeed, until your group spoke for all artists, poets, and writers, how could one not perceive it as just another hissing snake head of the established-order GORGON, enemy of democracy?

Herd poets, writers, artists, professors, cultural council apparatchiks and others in the “Arts” seemed to harbor a clear preference for bourgeois tone and etiquette over vigorous debate, cornerstone of democracy. Because of that egregious preference, it would be surprising if you responded to this open-letter blog entry. Miracles, however, did happen… though quite rarely.