President Obama delivering last night’s State of the Union address
White House photo: Peter Souza
Given the ruffle-no-feathers tone of President Obama‘s long, tedious “State of the Union” last night, It’s not surprising that art and culture never enlivened the speech. In the least substantive such address in recent memory, one of the few moments when the orator-in-chief ventured to take a forceful, potentially controversial stand on any issue was when he declared that “no American will be forbidden from serving the country they love because of who they love.” (His stated intention to eliminate “the billions in taxpayer dollars we currently give to oil companies” was another rare, hot-button moment.)
Obama seasoned his talk with repeated references to the service and sacrifice of our nation’s troops—a surefire bipartisan applause line. (We bagels-and-lox fans did greatly appreciate the smoked-salmon reference, but he should have cited the New York deli tradition of slicing it thin, so a little goes a long way.) He gave us a lot of generalized objectives, like reducing the deficit. But he provided no detailed roadmap on how we’re going to get there.
Given recent developments on the Mall, it’s hardly surprising that the importance of our nation’s commitment to the arts was omitted from a propitiatory, let’s-work-together speech. And the arts are usually considered too peripheral for inclusion in a rumination on the nation’s most pressing concerns.
But there are compelling arguments why, in these politically contentious times, the arts are needed by our country for more than their intrinsic value (which should be argument enough for support). I’m not talking about their value in stimulating the economy and jobs—the quantifiable rewards that are always trotted out (scroll to bottom) to appeal to politicians.
At a time when the President has been stressing our nation’s need to “out-innovate…the rest of the world,” the role of art in stimulating creative thought—both in those who create it and those who experience it—should not be discounted by the budgetary number-crunchers. And at a time of alarmingly (some say, lethally) uncivil discourse, the role of art as a force for civilization and civility should makes it more worthy than ever of public funding for the public good (notwithstanding occasional eruptions of controversy—a healthy symptom of a free society).
Speaking of controversy, Michael Kimmelman of the NY Times is wrong if he believes that Great Britain, unlike the U.S., has a “Separation of Art and State,” as the headline for his Wojnarovicz-related article today suggests. It’s surprising that when Kimmelman consulted Nicholas Serota for some British perspective, the director of the Tate had to go all the way back to the 1997 “Sensation” show at the Royal Academy to come up with a political firestorm over art.
Serota conveniently forgot to mention the 2009 visit to the Tate Modern by the obscene publications unit of the Metropolitan police, which resulted in the temporary closure of the museum’s “Pop Life” exhibition and removal of the show’s catalogue. Deleted from the show, as a result of the police visit, was Richard Prince‘s “Spiritual America”—his appropriation of Gary Gross‘ photograph of the nude, pre-pubescent Brooke Shields. The police action was taken “to pre-empt any breach of the law,” according to Adrian Searle’s report in the Guardian. (The same work had been shown in the Prince retrospective at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, without incident.)
And who can forget the 2007 fracas over the exhibition of Elton John‘s photographs by Nan Goldin at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, England? One of the images was seized by police as possible child pornography, prompting the rock star-collector to close down the entire show. Perhaps the flashpoints are different, but it’s wrong to regard the British as more broad-minded about controversial art than we are.
While we’re on the subject of budgetary number-crunching, my warm thanks go out to CultureGrrl Donor 154 from Manhattan, who writes me:
Your perceptive, intelligent and brave coverage is a real stand out. If you ever need any help, let me know.
How about a little help from the rest of CultureGrrl‘s classy readership!