Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

PORK AND PORCELAIN
for the distinction from commercial forms of culture basic to the idea of fine art.
This made possible what Paul DiMaggio describes as “the erection of strong and
clearly defined boundaries between art and entertainment, the definition of a
high art that elites and segments of the middle class could appropriate as their
own cultural property, and the acknowledgement of that classification’s legitimacy
by other classes and the state.” 8 The nonprofit philanthropic corporation
thus played a key role in providing the institutional framework for high art in the
United States.
The system I have described belonged to a specific period in American history
and has changed radically with the times. The most visible agent of change, perhaps,
has been tax law. In former Boston museum director Perry Rathbone’s view,
the federal income tax imposed in 1913 “drove the great patron from the scene;
the local benefactor could no longer afford the role of a Maecenas.” 9 On the other
hand, the development of the charitable deduction stimulated cultural philanthropy
to a degree clearly appreciable in the decline in giving when Congress cut
the tax break for gifts to museums between 1987 and 1990. Similarly, the coming
of the corporate income tax in 1935, with its deduction for philanthropy, opened
a path to large-scale corporate support for the arts. Nonetheless, such giving has a
different character than the philanthropy of yesteryear.
As every arts administrator is aware, individual givers still play an essential
role in arts philanthropy, as they do in hospital and educational giving. But “the
entry of large institutional donors, specifically private foundations, government,
and corporations,” as DiMaggio has observed, has “substantially altered the arts
marketplace.” 10 To put the situation like this, however, is to understate the systemic
nature of the change within which philanthropy has its place. To begin
with, as Stephen Weil explains, the effect of the charitable tax deduction has
been “to make the federal government, in essence, a cocontributor” in a system
in which “a relatively small handful of affluent taxpayers” is “able to spend the
public’s money.” 11 Private giving is therefore not as distinct as it might seem from
direct governmental expenditure on the arts such as that of the National Endowment
for the Arts. More important, these features of the current system are
related to changes in the nature of capitalist society as a whole. The acceptance
8 Paul DiMaggio, “Cultural entrepreneurship in nineteenth-century Boston: the creation of an
organizational base for high culture in America,” in Richard Collins, James Curran, Nicholas
Garnham, Paddy Scannell, Philip Schlesinger, and Colin Sparks (eds), Media, Culture and Society:
A Critical Reader (London: Sage, 1986), p. 196.
9 Perry T. Rathbone, “Influences of private patrons: the art museum as example,” in W. McNeil
Lowry (ed.), The Arts and Public Policy in the United States (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1984),
p. 45.
10 P. DiMaggio, “The nonprofit instrument and the influence of the marketplace on policies in the
arts,” in Lowry, The Arts, p. 69.
11 Stephen E. Weil, “Tax policy and private giving,” in Stephen Benedict (ed.), Public Money and the
Muse (New York: Norton, 1991), pp. 167, 173.
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