Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

PORK AND PORCELAIN
of the principle of the income tax by the dominant classes of the United States
signaled their recognition of the necessity for governmental regulation of social
relations in a country in which the forces of economic exploitation had been
allowed to run quite free. As the turn-of-the-century Progressives were the first to
articulate in programmatic terms, such regulation was even in the interest of a
developing corporate capitalism. The New Deal, and its extension into the war
economy, further applied this principle by increasing the participation of the
state in economic affairs. Tax deductions and corporate giving are aspects of a
general transformation of the economic system in which the leading role once
played by individual barons of industry, commerce, and finance has been taken
over by corporations, foundations, and the state.
The patron state
An important element in the way in which this transformation made itself felt in
the domain of culture was the movement of modernism, particularly in the
visual arts, to the center of the aesthetic stage. This was due to more than the
gradual disappearance of Old Masters from the market. While earlier in this
century the promotion of modern art served to differentiate certain scions of
wealthy families from their conservative elders, the later engagement with modernism
undertaken by social agents ranging from the federal government to the
mass media not only proclaimed the glory of bourgeois society but specifically
celebrated the political and economic triumph of the United States after the
Second World War. Art came to be seen not so much as an incarnation of
higher values than those of the marketplace but as a distillation of those characteristics—daring,
innovation, attunement to (often previously unarticulated)
social desires—that make an individual, company, or nation successful. 12 It was
in these terms that calls were issued for cultural competition with World Communism;
that John Kennedy, asserting the existence of “a connection, hard to
explain logically but easy to feel, between achievement in public life and
progress in the arts,” linked a “New Frontier in the Arts” to the “surge in economic
growth” and “openness to what is new” he promised; 13 and that Lyndon
Johnson established the National Endowment for the Arts, together with the
National Endowment for the Humanities, as facets of the Great Society. 14
Beyond issues of international political prestige and the aristocratic pretensions
12 For an interesting discussion, see S. J. Allen, The Romance of Culture and Commerce (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1983), passim.
13 “Nixon, Kennedy view music and the arts,” Musical America 80:8 (1960), p. 11, cit. Gary O.
Larson, The Reluctant Patron: The United States Government and the Arts, 1941–1963 (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), p. 150.
14 For a survey of American government involvement in the arts, see my “Arts and the state: the
NEA debate in perspective,” in Peter G. Meyer (ed.), Brushes With History: Writings on Art from
The Nation, 1861–2001 (New York: Thunder Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2001), pp. 441–61.
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