Arts: Public Policy: Professor Zuidervaart's new book reviewed by Duke U's Taylor

Comment magazine (Sep12,2k11)

a book review by David Taylor

Art as a Public Responsibility
September 12, 2011 - David Taylor

Art in Public: Politics, Economics, and a Democratic Culture by Lambert Zuidervaart. Cambridge University Press, 2011. 352pp.

Is government funding beneficial to artists and their publics, or would it be better for artists to compete in the economic marketplace without government support? Should government funding come "with no strings attached" or should it uphold standards of decency and social order? Are contemporary artists progressive agents of social change or are they a decadent menace to society? These are the questions that motivate the argument of Zuidervaart's latest contribution to philosophy, Art in Public: Politics, Economics, and a Democratic Culture.

In it he tells the tale of two groups who find themselves frequently at odds with each other. On the one side stand the "prophetic and transgressive artists," defenders of "freedom of expression." On the other side stand "ordinary people" and "decent citizens," vigorously seeking to preserve "traditional values." It is the tale of Andres Serrano against Jesse Helms, of the NEA against the AFA. It is the tale of those who support government funding of the arts and those who oppose it. According to Zuidervaart, both groups get it badly wrong; specifically, both fail to perceive the faulty assumptions that support their respective convictions. Those assumptions are:

That government funding will prime the pump for an art world dominated by corporate business interests.

That the artist and the audience's experience of artwork should be viewed on individualist terms.

That art's role in society is to press the vanguard forward.

Against these three assumptions, Zuidervaart offers three counter proposals. First, we need to recover the idea of a Civil Society as a distinct macrostructure that stands in dialectical, as well as fruitful, relationship to the State and the Market. Second, we need to allow for a dynamic tension between artistic authenticity and social responsibility — for without social responsibility, artistic authenticity devolves to aesthetic solipsism, and without artistic authenticity, social responsibility is reduced to uncritical collectivism. Third, instead of viewing art as something isolated at the margins of society and good for only a few, he suggests that art provides a common good, or three to be precise: the occasion for imaginative disclosure, for cultural orientation, and for critical and creative dialogue.

refWrite recommended — intro to Taylor's reposted here by Owlb