{"id":3042,"date":"2024-04-23T01:41:41","date_gmt":"2024-04-23T05:41:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=3042"},"modified":"2024-04-23T01:41:44","modified_gmt":"2024-04-23T05:41:44","slug":"are-the-arts-inimical-to-our-democratic-ethos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2024\/04\/are-the-arts-inimical-to-our-democratic-ethos.html","title":{"rendered":"Are the Arts Inimical to our Democratic Ethos?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The starting point of my new book The Propaganda of Freedom<\/em><\/strong> <\/a>is the core tenet of the cultural Cold War as prosecuted by the CIA and the Kennedy White House: that only \u201cfree artists\u201d in \u201cfree societies\u201d can produce great art. And yet this is a risible claim, self-evidently counter-empirical; I\u2019ve dubbed it the \u201cpropaganda of freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An exceptionally thoughtful review<\/a> has just materialized in the online magazine Fusion<\/em>. The author is Robert Bellafiore, who writes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn The Propaganda of Freedom<\/em>, Joseph Horowitz considers the history and influence of Kennedy\u2019s argument and finds it harmful to freedom and culture alike, revealing an uneasy relationship between art and politics that any free society must grapple with. . . .<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThrough his musical analysis and a broader history of the [Congress for Cultural Freedom] and cultural exchange during the Cold War, Horowitz seeks to protect both art and freedom from their cheapening . . .<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe tensions between artist and audience, and between artist and government, didn\u2019t resolve themselves when the Cold War ended. What makes The Propaganda of Freedom <\/em>more than just a compelling history is its illustration that these tensions will mark every free society, including ours today. For any American who is discouraged by the vulgarity and frivolity of contemporary culture and wishes for something better, the book raises difficult questions.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is our ethos of democracy and freedom somehow inimical to the life of the arts? Arts skeptics will argue that certain impediments are deeply rooted in the American experience. Certainly there is an impressive lineage of writings analyzing an American aversion to artists and intellectuals. Alexis de Tocqueville, nearly two centuries ago, observed among the citizens of the United States \u201ca distaste for all that is old.\u201d Assessing an expanded \u201ccircle of readers,\u201d he discerned \u201ca taste for the useful over the love of the beautiful,\u201d for the \u201cmass produced and mediocre.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

No less than ascetic Calvinism, Republican rationalism could spurn creative achievement. If popular government demanded a virtuous and pious citizenry, monarchies linked to sensuality and decadence. Were the arts an aristocratic luxury? Even the likes of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson \u2013 cosmopolites of humbling intellectual attainment \u2013 expressed ambivalence toward the cultivation of painting and sculpture. \u201cToo expensive for the state of wealth among us,\u201d opined Jefferson. Conducive to \u201cluxury, effeminacy, corruption, prostitution,\u201d wrote Adams. Both men well knew pre-revolutionary Paris.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many decades later, American politicians of note included no Adamses or Jeffersons. Edward Shils, a widely influential sociologist, in 1964 regretted that in the US \u201cthe political elite gives a preponderant impression of indifference toward works of superior culture.\u201d Two years before that, the historian Richard Hofstadter produced a Pulitzer-Prize winning study of Anti-Intellectualism in<\/em> American Life. <\/em>He adduced <\/em>an enduring New World stereotype of the effete intellectual: impractical, artificial, arrogant, seduced by European manners. A related American stereotype, Hofstadter reported, holds the \u201cgenius\u201d to be lazy, undisciplined, neurotic, imprudent, and awkward. He blamed democratization, utilitarianism, and evangelical Protestantism. These critiques registered aversion to the Red Scare and also to the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, who once told Leonard Bernstein \u201cI like music with a theme, not all them arias and barcarolles.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

An enduring philosophical argument against the American arts was launched by Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School. This was a tirade against the \u201catomized\u201d premises of Anglo-American empiricists who in separating the individual from society spurned a vigorously  \u201cholistic\u201d dialectic. \u201cAffirmative\u201d American culture was bland and homogenized \u2013 rather than bristling with \u201cnegative\u201d attributes igniting an engaged interactive response. Packaged and merchandized for mass consumption, affirmative culture was a feature of twentieth century capitalism. Concomitantly, capitalist society embraced a mistaken notion of the artist as a distant actor, unfettered and autonomous. The very DNA of American democracy \u2013 its notion of \u201cfreedom\u201d \u2013 was in the Frankfurt view a na\u00efve myth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The contemporary pertinence of all this philosophizing is everywhere around us: increasingly, our democratic world of social media and mounting, ever multiplying gadgetry swims in bits and pieces, in disconnected dots, in superficia and ephemera \u2013 an ontology of fragmentation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For more of the same, see my current \u201cAmerican Scholar\u201d essay \u201cRipeness Is All.<\/a>\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For more on the Frankfurt School with reference to American classical music, see my notorious “Understanding Toscanini<\/a>: <\/strong>How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music” (1987)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The starting point of my new book The Propaganda of Freedom is the core tenet of the cultural Cold War as prosecuted by the CIA and the Kennedy White House: that only \u201cfree artists\u201d in \u201cfree societies\u201d can produce great art. And yet this is a risible claim, self-evidently counter-empirical; I\u2019ve dubbed it the \u201cpropaganda of freedom.\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3042","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry","8":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-N4","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3042"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3042\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3047,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3042\/revisions\/3047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}