WHERE THE ELITE MEET TO BE AESTHETES

By BRUCE HANDY

Sitcom writers know it as the oh-no-here-we-go-again ending. It is a tired device, but it appears to be the one with which Jane Alexander has chosen to finish her tenure as chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Three weeks ago, with the agency's budgetary survival ensured for another year, and with the dust from the culture wars thus temporarily settled, Alexander announced her pending retirement from the endowment. This was quickly followed by the release of a new study that accuses the nonprofit arts world, and by implication the NEA, of elitism and a disregard for key American values. In other words, Oh, no! Here we go again! The zany twist is that the report isn't the work of Newt Gingrich or Jesse Helms; it's the loving handiwork of the NEA itself. Luuu-cy!

American Canvas, as the work is titled, is based on "a nationwide initiative of regional and community forums" that were conducted in cities across the country last year; participants included many arts administrators and community activists and surprisingly few actual artists. The resulting study is every bit as morbidly fascinating, as unintentionally comic and, in the end, as dreary and depressing as a fan of government reports could hope. Attempting nothing less than to "measure the health of American art," it first came to light when leaked to the New York Times, which ran a front-page story highlighting the most provocative of its conclusions with the headline STUDY LINKS DROP IN SUPPORT TO ELITIST ATTITUDE IN THE ARTS. The presumption among many outraged artists was that a self-loathing NEA had somehow found common ground with right-wing bullies.

In fact, American Canvas takes a more Mapplethorp-friendly but no less aesthetically reductive view: "[T]he arts community has long labored under a stubbornly persistent class system of its own, one that continues to haunt the field...a demographic profile that tends to be older, wealthier, better educated, and whiter than a typical cross-section of the American public." One prescription: "No longer restricted solely to the sanctioned arenas of culture, the arts would be literally suffused throughout the civic structure...from youth programs and crime prevention to job training and race relations--far afield from the traditional aesthetic functions of the arts."

Poor arts! No one ever suggests that dogs range far afield from the traditional canine function. The catch is, when you take money from the government, you subject yourself to the mercies of the political process--which is also open, as the recent history of the NEA (not to mention history, period) proves, to philistines and worse. American Canvas reminds us that they are not all on the right. Critic Edward Rothstein put it tartly in the Times: "Washington liberals took a similarly vulgar view [to conservatives], focusing on their own versions of 'values' and treating art as a form of social therapy doled out to interest groups." We must be grateful for the rude health and increasing diversity of popular culture, which is both more accountable to the public and less so to social engineers of any stripe. American Canvas repeatedly points out the obvious, that pop is slave instead to "the marketplace." A smart aleck could point out that "the marketplace" here seems to be a pejorative for "an audience."

Much in American Canvas is duly worthy, including calls for more arts education and for arts groups to make better use of the Net. But the study is probably most useful in a meta kind of way, as a particularly stark example of the bureaucratic mind-set. It is the Super Bowl of government studies, a Final Jeopardy for group-think, as it tries making quantitative sense of something as defiantly idiosyncratic as "the arts." "Our cultural climate receives nowhere near the attention the meteorological climate does," the study complains, but it also has a solution: "Just as environmental impact studies trace the effects of our actions on the natural surroundings, so might cultural [italics theirs] impact studies assess the state of the aesthetic environment." Now, there's an idea! That it's casually tossed off makes it no less scary, although the prospect of folklorists crippled by red tape is a kind of balm.

Personally, as someone who likes to spend his leisure time in nonprofit institutional cinemas watching old Lillian Gish movies and whose wife is a novelist who has received public monies, I will continue struggling with my feelings about government support for the arts. But on the "with friends like these..." principle, American Canvas may be the most persuasive argument yet for chucking the whole idea. Like Ricky Ricardo, artists can't say they haven't been warned, and warned and warned.