In the Crossfire of the Culture Wars: The Art Museum in Crisis

James Cuno, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director

Text of a paper delivered before the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Overseers Committee to Visit the Art Museums, 1 May 1995

Once again American art museums are in crisis; only this time the crisis is not about money—or not only about money—but about power, about who should decide the fate of art museums, about what and for whom art museums should be.

As I write this, the U.S. Congress is debating whether or not to reauthorize the National Endowments for the Arts and for the Humanities. Those opposing reauthorization argue that subsidizing the arts and humanities is not a proper sphere for government involvement; those favoring reauthorization argue that federal subsidies for the arts are an investment in the production, presentation, and preservation of our common artistic and cultural legacy. But the real issue is neither of these: it is instead the larger, more complicated one of our national identity and the role our cultural institutions are said to play in defining it.

In recent testimony before a House Appropriations Subcommittee, former N.E.H. Chairmen William J. Bennett and Lynne V. Cheney, opponents of reauthorization, focused on the alleged politicization of the Endowments and their failure to improve the quality of the arts and humanities in America. "Often," Bennett complained, "they seem less interested in creating art or fostering knowledge and more interested in ridiculing, provoking, and antagonizing mainstream American values"; while Cheney agreed, declaring that "[m]any academics and artists now see their purpose not as revealing truth or beauty, but as achieving social and political transformation."

There it is: artists and academics are hell-bent on destroying our national identity, and museums and universities are guilty of providing them the means and shelter for doing so.

But that’s not the only complaint against museums and universities. We are equally criticized for sheltering the social and political elite and providing them the means of imposing a minority agenda—and a minority identity—on the majority of Americans; an agenda that is no longer appropriate for an increasingly pluralistic society and that is intended instead, although certainly doomed to fail, to perpetuate the white male hegemony over our national culture.

In both cases, from both sides of the culture wars, art museums are declared to be "elitist." Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Newt Gingrich, for example, recently railed against the N.E.A., and by implication art museums, as "arts patronage for an elite group," and characterized its granting process as "self-selected elites using tax money to pay off their friends." On the other hand, Jane Alexander, as chairman of the N.E.A., has declared the arts to be for everyone and has stated her intentions to use the agency to democratize the arts by leveling the playing field between small and large museums, and between those in the country and those in the city. One person’s "elite" is obviously not another’s. And our art museums are somehow home to both, simultaneously. Gingrich and Alexander are professed egalitarians, and each sees the other as representing an elite point of view.

Critics from both the left and the right are calling on art museums to adopt an "anti-elitist" agenda, although each has a different view of just what that agenda should be. The right believes in a monocultural society and universal values and calls for museums to make available to everyone works of art of the highest quality; while the left sees a multicultural society, rich in individual identities and values, and demands of museums that we show works of art that affirm the noble identities of individual groups or that expose the exploitation of one by another. For the right, art museums are spiritual places; for the left, we are therapeutic agents of social change; and for both we are a battlefield in the culture wars raging across our country.

There are many issues to discuss in this respect, but let me focus briefly on one, the one I raised a moment ago: the charge that art museums are elitist institutions.

It seems to me patently obvious that, like institutions of higher learning, art museums are by their very nature elitist—and I don’t mean catering to the socially privileged, but rather elitist in the sense of being of interest to only a relative few (perhaps 20 percent of our population), of being centers of rigorous inquiry and debate, and of engaging in subtle and sophisticated explanations of meaning. This is not a popular position to take, as you can imagine. It is, as has been said of modern literature recently, "the Achilles’ heel of every serious defense of art—an invitation to the poisoned arrows of populist rhetoric." But the elitism of literature, or indeed of art, is very different from that of the art museum.

One can say of art what has been said of literature: "The paradox of literature’s elitism is that it’s purely self-selecting. Anyone who can read is free to be a part of it." But this cannot be said of art museums. Or rather, while anyone who can enter an art museum is free to be a part of the elite experience it offers, the issue is not about access but rather about institutionalization, about who decides what art will comprise the elite experience.

Part of the problem lies with the very word itself: elite. It comes from the Latin, eligere, to pick out, choose, or select, such that the elite are literally the chosen and the set apart. This is not to suggest that the elite are better than all others, only that they are different, that they are grouped together because they fit the terms of a particular classifying set: human beings are elite among all animals precisely because we are human; but then dogs are elite, too, and so are cats, each on their own terms. Somehow, over the years, the word elite has come to mean not only set apart from, but also placed higher than all others. The same is true with the word distinguished, which comes from the Latin, distinguere, to divide or separate, but which has come not only to mean the individually distinct, but also that which is marked by conspicuous excellence and to be of high standing.

How did it happen that to sort out came also to mean to rank? In his recent book, In Defense of Elitism, William Henry begins with that premise. He states in his opening pages that the current "wrath directed at elitism" is associated with the

egalitarian scorn for the very kinds of intellectual distinction-making I hold most dear: respect and even deference toward leadership and position; esteem for accomplishment, especially when achieved through long labor and rigorous education; reverence for heritage, particularly in history, philosophy, and culture; commitment to rationalism and scientific investigation; upholding of objective standards; most important, the willingness to assert unyieldingly that one idea, contribution or attainment is better than another. The worst aspect of what gets called "political correctness" these days is the erosion of the intellectual confidence needed to sort out, and rank, competing values.1

To sort out and rank —there it is.

But it’s not just ranking that is the issue, it is the slippage that seems to occur between the act of ranking, or discriminating between, works of art and the act of discriminating against groups of people over the issue of standards, standards by which one discriminates amongst works of art. Who, after all, is going to discriminate between works of art and for whom? Who is entitled to set the standards for such discrimination? And are standards universal or culturally determined? And if culturally determined, are they exclusively so? This is where politics raises its arrogant head and this is the issue we find ourselves debating today, over and over and over again.

Forty-three years ago, a curator of the Fogg Art Museum went to Oberlin’s Allen Memorial Art Museum to give a lecture on the occasion of the opening of an exhibition of master drawings of the eighteenth century. Speaking on "The Problem of Quality in Old Master Drawings: On Value Judgment in the Fine Arts," Jakob Rosenberg began by saying that

It is by now an almost common experience of college teachers that students in the field of the Humanities are not satisfied with survey courses which convey only facts and data. The intelligent student, while grateful for every opportunity to extend his knowledge (an opportunity which survey courses offer) will also want to develop his power of discrimination, his sense of values. Indeed, in the Humanities mere facts remain colorless without a proper evaluation, whether it is an intellectual, a moral or an aesthetic one. It has often been said that the standard of a civilization depends to a large degree on the power of discrimination of its leading individuals and, in a democracy like ours, of the average citizen.2

Rosenberg, an emigrant from Nazi Germany, found the very act of intellectual and aesthetic discrimination fundamental to modern democracy. Today, ironically, we accuse that act of being undemocratic, even antidemocratic and totalitarian.

It is true that discriminating judgments tend to lead to ranking, to placing one thing above another. Those works, and those artists, whose greatness has been sustained over the years become part of what we call "the canon." But is the canon necessarily fixed, a constraining legacy of cultural values? Or is it perpetually changing, challenged by new works of art and by new critics looking afresh at works of art, old and new alike?

Most recently, Harold Bloom has written a book provocatively titled The Western Canon. Much has been made of the book’s appendices, in which Bloom lists his "canon," but less has been made of his defense of canon formation itself. "Nothing," Bloom insists, "is so essential to the Western Canon as its principles of selectivity, which are elitist only to the extent that they are founded upon severely artistic criteria. Those who oppose the Canon insist that there is always an ideology involved in canon formation; indeed, they go farther and speak of the ideology of canon formation, suggesting that to make a canon (or to perpetuate one) is an ideological act in itself."3

And, of course, ideology is at work on both sides of the issue. William Bennett, our former Secretary of Education and, as I mentioned at the beginning of my remarks, former chairman of the N.E.H., has traded on this by publishing his own canon, his Book of Virtues, which comprises literary texts that he understands to encourage the virtues on which our civilization should be based. Of this kind of effort, Bloom writes that

The silliest way to defend the Western Canon is to insist that it incarnates all of the seven deadly moral virtues that make up our supposed range of normative values and democratic principles. This is palpably untrue.… The West’s greatest writers are subversive of all values, both ours and their own.… If we read the Western Canon in order to form our social, political, or personal moral values, I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishness and exploitation. To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all.4

For Bloom, the "reception of aesthetic power" does not provide us with a way to live our lives out in any social sense, but rather it "enables us to learn how to talk to ourselves and how to endure ourselves.… All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one’s own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one’s confrontation with one’s own mortality." This is contrary to most critiques—and even most defenses—of canon formation, which boastfully justify themselves on ideological grounds (whether they be those of the left or the right). And about this, Bloom is forcefully clear: "The defense of the Western Canon is in no way a defense of the West or a nationalist enterprise.… The greatest enemies of aesthetic and cognitive standards are purported defenders who blather to us about moral and political values in literature."5 Criticized by the left for upholding standards and the value of canon formation, Bloom reveals himself to be a critic of the right.

Opponents of canon formation consider all of its proponents to be elitists, by which they mean on the right, working to impose their own, personal standards on others in order to maintain their own position above all others. Henry Giroux, a critic on the left with the title of Professor and Renowned Scholar in Residence at Miami University—a title which implies that he has been set apart and ranked above most others—has argued recently that a liberal education is meant to encourage students to engage and examine knowledge and that the "notion of the canon undermines the possibility for dialogue, argument, and critical thinking; it treats knowledge as a form of cultural inheritance that is beyond considerations regarding how it might be implicated in social practices that exploit, infantilize, and oppress."6 To this way of thinking, Harold Bloom writes quite simply, "All canons, including our currently fashionable counter-canons, are elitist, and as no secular canon is ever closed, what is now acclaimed as ‘opening up the canon’ is a strictly redundant operation."7 To form a canon is to question and question again why some works are included and others not. "Without the Canon," Bloom insists, "we cease to think."

Bloom wants to stake out a position between the rightist claim that the canon comprises works of intrinsic, unquestionable value, and the leftist claim that canons are perforce culturally derived and as such are intended to impose one culture’s values on all others. Bloom wants to disentangle the act of canon formation from the idea that art necessarily determines social values.

Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is wrestling with canon formation right now, as he and a few colleagues are editing the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature. In this respect, he writes:

I am not unaware of the politics and ironies of canon formation. The canon that we define will be "our" canon, one possible set of selections among several possible sets of selections … my pursuit of this project has required me to negotiate a position between, on the one hand, William Bennett, who claims that black people can have no canon, no masterpieces, and, on the other hand, those on the critical left who wonder why we want to establish the existence of a canon, any canon, in the first place.8

Like Bloom, Gates is critical of those on both the right and the left who argue for a fixed canon or against all canons—arguments which of course amount to much the same thing—as both are in favor of the status quo: it’s either the canon or no canon. Gates argues for historicizing canon formation: "Once we understand how they arose, we no longer see literary canons as objets trouvés washed up on the beach of history. And we can begin to appreciate their ever-changing configuration in relation to a distinctive institutional history." 9

This is a position also taken by John Guillory, professor of English at Johns Hopkins, in his recent book, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Guillory points to the problems inherent in canon formation when, as he puts it, "the politics of canon formation has been understood as a politics of representation—the representation or lack of representation of certain social groups in the canon.…" He argues persuasively, I think, and much as Gates does, for an understanding of the institution within which and for which canons are formed.

The first assumption of canonical revision operates in concert with a second, which posits a homology between the process of exclusion, by which socially defined minorities are excluded from the exercise of power or from political representation, and the process of selection, by which certain works are designated canonical, others noncanonical. The second assumption clearly requires the first … in order to make the claim that the process of canonical selection is always also a process of social exclusion, specifically the exclusion of female, black, ethnic, or working-class authors from the literary canon.… The difficulty of describing this relation [the representation of minorities in positions of power and the representations of minorities in the canon] is in part a consequence of the fact that a particular social institution—the university—intervenes between these two sites of representation … those members of social minorities who enter the university do not "represent" the social groups to which they belong in the same way in which minority legislators can be said to represent their constituencies.… What the project of canon-critique still lacks is an analysis of how the institutional site of canonical revision mediates its political effects in the social domain.10

And this I think is true as well of the art museum. Like the university, it seems clear that "members of social minorities who enter the [art museum] do not ‘represent’ the social groups to which they belong in the same way in which minority legislators can be said to represent their constituencies.…" As we continue to examine and critique the canon and canon formation itself as it pertains to the art museum, we need to keep in mind what is special about the art museum, what distinguishes it from all other institutions, cultural and otherwise. We must not assume an easy slippage between our business and the complicated task of social engineering. While very different, ours is no less complicated and no less deserving of close scrutiny and thoughtful consideration, than, for example, politics, economics, or sociology.

In his lecture of some forty-two years ago, Jakob Rosenberg put it this way: "… we should never cease to practice [discrimination in judgment] as long as we carry on our profession. Otherwise our ‘muscles of perception’ will become feeble and ineffectual. Constant effort alone can bring progress toward an ever-increasing validity of discrimination, and the limitations which the prejudices and predilections of our own period force upon us can thus be counteracted most effectively."

This I think is the business of art museums, and is what art museums can teach us: institutions like ours are set apart as places to encourage the exercise and defense of one’s judgment on visual matters and on those attendant to the visual (that is, on those pressures that bear on the selection and presentation of the visual as constituted in a particular museum’s collection or a particular exhibition). No other kind of institution can do this, and doing this is crucial to the development of the individual as well as of the social self of our nation.

Now this is not to say that art museums are free of politics. They are not. It is only to put the matter the other way around: it makes politics the hostage of art, rather than, as today, making art the hostage of politics.

James Cuno
Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director

NOTES

1. William A. Henry III, In Defense of Elitism (New York, 1994), p. 3.

2. Jakob Rosenberg, "The Problem of Quality in Old Master Drawings: On Value Judgment in the Fine Arts," Bulletin of the Allen Memorial Art Museum 8, no. 2 (1951): 32.

3. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York, 1994), p. 22.

4. Ibid., p. 29.

5. Ibid., p. 40.

6. Henry Giroux, "Liberal Arts Education and the Struggle for Public life: Dreaming About Democracy," in The Politics of Liberal Education, eds. Darryl J. Gless and Barbara Herrnstein Smith (Durham, N.C., 1992), p. 127.

7. Bloom, The Western Canon, p. 37.

8. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "The Master’s Pieces: On Canon Formation and the African-American Tradition," in The Politics of Liberal Education, eds. Gless and Smith, p. 107.

9. Ibid., p. 110.

10. John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago, 1993), pp. 6–7.