National Endowment for the Arts: Fasionable Fascists

It was inevitable of course...as the Obama campaign and presidency seems to be more about image than anything else...that the ever-loyal regions of the artsy-fartsy community would eventually be drafted to serve in the battle over thought.

In the last few weeks, the National Endowment for the Arts, the NEA, has been putting out emails and having phone conferences for the so-called "cool" community (their words...not mine) and others who are fashionably "with-it". In these conferences, speakers put forth that the "duty" of the artistic community is to support the Obama administration and its goals. Listeners are urged "to show care" in allowing this agenda to be known as the legal ramifications are unclear.

Now keep in mind these folks, and this organization, is paid for by our tax dollars...and Obama's cozy little crew decides how much money they will receive.

No conflict of interest there...

But isn't art supposed to be about art? Isn't it supposed to challenge? To be rebellious? To cause viewers and listeners to think? In other words...to be creative?

Apparently not anymore. This isn't the first time however. Anyone who has studied the history of propaganda knows that governments throughout time have manipulated the art community to push their agendas. Art becomes propaganda when used by government...and the U.S. is almost as guilty as some others.

We really started to use the art community just prior to the first world war. Most of us have seen the posters and recruitment art of that war...showing the "Hun" as a slobbering, mindless, animal bent only on rape and murder? How about some of the posters of the next war...with caricatures of the "Jap" as a slanty-eyed devil wearing massive bi-focals and sporting an incredible overbite? Might one believe that such caricatures made it just a bit easier to ignore the constitution and put Americans of Japanese descent into concentration camps?

The difference, of course, is that our government did not normally jail or execute dissenting artists. In other cultures, such pressure and outright violence was part of the norm.

In Germany, the government began steering the vision of art in the early 1930's and controlled more and more output until the end of the war. They did not usually execute or imprison artists who did not fall into line...but those persons did find themselves unable to practice their art, or to sell art, or even to be allowed to take part in conferences or events. Every so often one would suffer "an unfortunate accident" and be seriously injured or killed.

In the Soviet Union, painting the wrong picture didn't just mean you lost your government stipend...it usually led to a Siberian gulag and eventual death...if not immediate execution. During the cultural revolution in China; artists, musicians, actors, and most anyone involved in those areas, were humiliated, imprisoned, sometimes beaten...sometimes to death, by the crowds.

In the U.S. today, artists scream "censorship" if their funds are not increased as much as they'd like them to be. The personal cost of such "dissent" is normally to have the artist laughed at by the rest of the society.

The military recruitment posters the U.S. produced during the second world war held some level of justification...we were in a battle for our lives against monstrous men and regimes. I'm sure there will be NEA folks today crying out similar justification due to the "planetary emergency" or the importance of "remaking America" into a third-world nation. How those goals can be compared to defeating the National Socialists in Germany and the Japanese Imperial war machine I'll never figure out...perhaps I'm not creative enough to see the similarities.

Here's a thought...now that the NEA has taken this fateful step...let's just require them outright to create art on behalf of every administration that comes into office in the foreseeable future.

They can create anti-abortion art when the Republicans are in the majority, pro-union posters when it's the Democrats, and paintings of drowning Polar Bears when the Progressives have the chair. Abandon the pretext of art for art's sake, and keep the grant money coming.