May Soundings

Good news has arrived from an organization supporting anti-Modernist values in art: "The Art Renewal Center (ARC) is proud to announce success beyond our wildest dreams. Only three and a half years ago we launched the ARC Web site. . . . At our current rate of growth, it is estimated that this year our Web site will receive more than twice as many visitors as the National Gallery in Washington. ARC is tracking at the unbelievable pace of 334,000,000 hits per year from over 5,200,000 visitors. Consider this: That's the same number of visitors as came to the Metropolitan Museum in all of 2003. And that's if we don't have any more growth. If we factor in our current growth rate, we project 9,460,000 visitors in 2004 with more than 584,000,000 hits. . . .

"Thousands of letters have poured in, clearly proving that most people support the ARC Philosophy, the single most popular part of our Web site. Attracting over 10,000 readers each and every month . . . it has become required reading in art and humanities courses around the world." www.artrenewal.org

On the other hand: Some years back, one of Great Britain's leading playwrights, David Hare, wrote a drama about a Church of England clergyman who was suffering a crisis of faith because he could not resolve the problem of evil: Why does an all-knowing, all-powerful, benevolent God allow evil to exist? The focus of the clergyman's angst was not the Nazi Holocaust, the Soviet Gulag, Mao's Cultural Revolution, or Pol Pot's Killing Fields. It was the election of Mrs. Thatcher. Seriously.

Now, Hare has returned to stage, unleashing his talents and moral indignation against another blight on the record of humanity. Genocide in Rwanda? War crimes in Serbia? Islamist terrorism? No, this time his cri de coeur is prompted by four train crashes that may (or may not) have resulted from the privatization of railroads. "At a theater in London a new play by David Hare, called The Permanent Way, tells the story of the four crashes from Southall in 1997 to Potters Bar in 2002 as an angry tirade against the government's decision in the 1990s to sell off the once state-owned railways to private companies—a 'painful parable,' Mr. Hare said, of bad government. . . . The Permanent Way [is] a production full of rail rage and sorrow, borne along by outrage that profit-driven privatization of the railways should have led to so much death and suffering. . . . The atmosphere on stage in London's Cottesloe Theater is acrid with anger at the way the government, then run by the Conservatives, sliced up the once monolithic British Rail into a series of privately owned operating franchises separate both from one another and from the company responsible for the tracks and stations. Where engineers once held sway, the show asserts, expediency and greed fused together at the expense of basic maintenance that might have averted the four crashes." The New York Times, February 25, 2004.

This just in: Attending David Hare's screed against railway privatization is a human right. "Tessa Jowell, [Britain's] Secretary of State for Culture, will pledge tomorrow to roll back decades of Whitehall antipathy [to funding the arts] by asserting that culture and the arts are fundamental human rights. In a reversal of the post-war obsession with using culture as a tool of social policy—in tackling crime, boosting educational standards, and regenerating rundown cities—[Jowell] will make a surpising plea for art for art's sake.

"And she will lay claim to the ideals of Sir William Beveridge, architect of the postwar welfare state, later expounded by Jennie Lee, the minister for the arts, who argued in the 1960s that culture is as important to the full development of human beings as health and wealth. …

"The arts are not just a 'pleasurable hinterland' for the public to fall back on after the 'important things—work and paying taxes'—are done, she argues in a nineteen-page pamphlet. It is at the heart of what it means to be a fully developed human being. Government should be concerned that so few aspire to it, and has a responsibility to do what it reasonably can to raise the quantity and quality of that aspiration. . . .'

" Her pamphlet begins with a tribute to William Beveridge and his challenge to the country to 'slay the give giants of physical poverty—want, disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness.' As Britain is the fourth largest economy in the world, [Jowell] says it is time to slay a sixth giant—'the poverty of aspiration which compromises our attempts to lift people out of physical poverty. Engagement with culture can help alleviate this poverty of aspiration.'"

So, the citizens of Great Britain are to learn aspiration by being told that the government will provide them, free of charge, with all they need to meet their physical, intellectual, and spiritual needs? Whatever became of ad astra per aspera? The Independent, May 3, 2004.

Fortunately, a few people in the arts are still asking that question: "British museums are still pondering the net effect of eliminating entry fees at the 50 government-funded national museums and galleries, most of which are in London. Announced with great civic pride and pomp back in December 2001, the elimination of entry fees was an attempt to make great art and culture available to all. . . . Museums that previously charged entrance fees have seen a 72 percent boost in attendance; some museums have seen attendance jump 120 percent. . . . Said a spokesman for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), the original sponsor of the initiative: 'It is a key part of the government's cultural policy that obstacles to admission should be tackled. . . . Clearly admission fees are the greatest obstacle.'

"What about education? What about apathy? What about the relevance of museum programming to the lives of their communities? What about a general drift in leisure time toward mass media and commercial entertainment? What about seismic demographic changes in the surrounding population—from immigration to ex-migration to average age?

"And what about the non-governmental museums in the UK that continue to work on all the issues above, now struggling against 'free' competitors, and a population encouraged to believe that preserving and presenting great cultural works actually has no cost? If cultural institutions aren't valued by their communities, that's a much deeper problem than price-sensitive consumers." Andrew Taylor, "The High Cost of Being 'Free'," www.artsjournal.com, May 4, 2004. Taylor is director of the Bolz Center for Arts Administration, a graduate teaching and research center in the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business.