The postmodernist problem

George Will advocates turning the NEA into the Ministry of Politprop; the "South Park" duo agrees to excise the Bush twins from a new program. Plus: Free to be you and me except on Nike iD.

By Carina Chocano

Feb 8, 2001 | "There are facets of contemporary culture that not even a Jonathan Swift could satirize," George Will writes in a recent Newsweek column -- blithely overlooking the fact that there are facets of his columns that even an Erma Bombeck could satirize.

In fact, a government-funded pasquinade by the deceased Bombeck might be just the sort of thing Will could get behind, since it is his thesis that "government should subsidize nothing contemporary -- no art or artist of the moment, only canonical works."

While this is certainly a novel approach to arts funding, we wonder: Do we really want our hard-earned change spent on coaxing dead artists out of the grave and back into the museums and art schools that Will believes are currently dedicated to disparaging "what used to be their raison d'être, the cultivation of connoisseurship"? Wouldn't it be, well, creepy?

But even assuming there were even one self-respecting artist on the planet -- living or dead -- who would not sooner put blade to scrawny wrist than willingly participate in "the cultivation of connoisseurship" in the likes of Will (or anyone else for that matter), it would still seem unlikely that the roughly 64 cents per person per annum that the federal government allocates to the National Endowment for the Arts would be sufficient inducement to tempt anyone out of permanent retirement.

In any case, says David Raskin, assistant professor of art history, theory and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, "connoisseurship" is still very much cultivated in art schools. The difference lies in the use to which it is put.

"Originally," Raskin says, "museums were the private collections of noblemen. They were designed to protect and ensure the value of the art these collectors acquired. They were not open to the public, and histories were written around promoting the value of the specific art within them. Nowadays museums understand the value of art not in terms of dollars, but in the furthering of a shared tradition. They are concerned with building a shared culture, not one built on nostalgia for a long-dead past."

But trifling matters such as these will not keep Will from his crusade against those pesky, subversive "postmodernists" who are intent on ruining our culture.

"If you care about the condition of our culture," Will writes, "read Lynne Munson's mesmerizing book, 'Exhibitionism: Art in an Era of Intolerance.'" Munson, who worked under Lynne Cheney when Cheney headed the National Endowment for the Humanities, reveals the shocking truth about "postmodernists": They "like making art out of opinions and unfiltered experience."

Who are these lunatics and how can they be stopped?

Actually, "no artist nowadays uses the label 'postmodernism,'" Raskin says. "It had a lot more cachet in the '70s and '80s. Artists may be interested in poststructuralist philosophical ideas as a way of making sense of the world in which we live, but I can't think of a single young artist -- or old artist, for that matter -- who calls himself a postmodernist. 'Postmodernism' is a bogy monster designed to frighten middle America. Nobody knows what it is, but they get the sense that it's bad."

Next Page: The last time a political party defined culture, Chagall wound up having to leave Germany

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