Category Archives: Archives

Archives: Readings in New Expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit

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Originally posted on 18 February 2011.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Potsdamer Platz. 1914. Oil on canvas. 6′ 6 3/4 x 59 1/16″ (200 x 150 cm). Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. © Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, New York

Though he wrote more extensively about it in his English Drama Since 1940, David Ian Rabey first suggested a “New Expressionism” as one of the strands of contemporary theatre in his 1997 book on David Rudkin:

Rudkin’s drive to express the poetry of otherness, from the wellspring of conventionally submerged inner possibilities, has some affinities with the objectives of the early twentieth century German Expressionists, whose savage and passionate affirmations of Dionysian dynamism sprang defiantly from their profound sense of individual isolation and fascination with sickness and death. In 1917, Kasimir Edschmid described the visionary imagination of the Expressionist writer as crucially different to that of the documentary or social realist: “The Expressionist does not see, he beholds. He does not describe, he experiences. He does not reproduce, he creates. He does not accept, he seeks.” In 1918, Kurt Pinthus extolled drama as “the most passionate and effective form” for expressionism: “There Man explodes in front of Man.” Lotte H. Eisner notes how expressionist phraseology is ruled by a desire to amplify the “metaphysical” meaning of words towards a “total extravasation of self,” where “exterior facts are continually being transformed into interior elements and psychic events are exteriorized.” Michael Patterson observes that “the very name of the movement suggested that … having rejected realism, artistic creation could have its source only in the subjective personality of the artist; and yet, especially in a public medium like the theatre, the artist’s desire to communicate remained intense.” To this end, the Expressionist “sought renewal not in mass movements” but in the “passionate search for individual regeneration,” where dramatic progression is dictated by the writer/protagonist’s search for self-realization as possible redemption of his suffering. Expressionism’s “bold violence of images …” made the theatre once again a place of intense sensory experience.” [1]

Rabey goes on to mention that Rudkin himself identifies his own drama with gothic art, but I’d like to back up a little to the historical basis of New Expressionism and examine for a moment its relationship to the Neue Sachlichkeit movement that followed it in Germany and which suggests an additional dimension of this description. Although the Neue Sachlichkeit movement is often characterized as a reaction against the internal and personal vision of Expressionist writers and painters, it can in another sense be seen as its continuation. The painters of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement like Otto Dix, George Grosz and Christian Schad reacted against Expressionism’s abstractions but did not entirely abandon them for photo-realism. The paintings and portraits rendered by the painters retained the two-dimensional quality of Expressionist work, which foregrounded all the subjects of an individual painting rather than dispersing some of them through perspective, and in their subject matter seemed to claim some of the dream-like qualities of Surrealism as well. More importantly, the Neue Sachlichkeit movement foregrounded art’s relationship to urban modernity (though, as the above Kirchner painting demonstrates, the Expressionists themselves also rendered urban scenes and subjects).

Schopenhauer’s will operates through urban modernity and its residents as well as any other site, and the new sharpness with which both painters and writers of the Neue Sachlichkeit foregrounded the sensuality of the human body suggests various avenues for the exploration of both New Expressionism and erotic tragedy, especially in its ambivalent relationship to gender roles and erotic experience. In a 2001 study, Richard W. McCormick discusses the emergence of the Neue Sachlichkeit from the decline of the historical Expressionist movement, a movement “that began in German painting around 1905, became important in literature around 1910, flourished just before and during the war (especially in the theatre), but by 1920 was nearly exhausted. Only then, when this once revolutionary aesthetic had begun to degenerate into a fashionable, decorative visual style, did it enter the cinema, and by 1924 it was pretty much over there too.” [2]

More observations from McCormick follow below.

Otto Dix. Portrait of Dancer Anita Berber, 1925. Oil & tempera on plywood. 47 1/4″ x 25 5/8″.

… I want to make a point of affirming as emancipatory the blurring of fixed gender and sexual identities — not just to take a position that is now much more acceptable, but because the enmity to such blurring seems to me clearly connected to the crimes of the Third Reich. In this I differ with more canonical interpretations of Weimar “decadence”: in my opinion what ought to be celebrated includes precisely that wich has been derided as decadence and “effeminate weakness” by many writers on the left — work in the postwar era on Weimar culture by Peter Gay and by Siegfried Kracauer come to mind….

I disagree strongly with this intepretation both of Weimar culture and of “decadence.” The comparison with the Third Reich is instructive, however, for in that regime “decadence” was denounced as biological degeneracy, a denunciation that was clearly connected not only to anti-Semitism but to misogyny and homophobia as well. As opposed to the open anxieties about gender expressed in Weimar culture, Nazi misogyny was embodied in a cultural politics that had much less space for any acknowledgement of male weakness (except in submission to the state) or for any confusion on the part of either sex about “natural” gender roles — not to mention confusion about “race.” It ought to be obvious today that this drive for clear boundaries and identities led only to barbarism.

In contrast, I want to emphasize again that what was most emancipatory about Weimar’s crises of identity was precisely the blurring and confusion of traditional categories of identity. We find in Weimar culture a relatively open discussion of the hollowness — indeed, cynicism — of the masquerade that prescribed roles and identities seemed to demand. … [In both masculine and feminine masquerade] one notes an anxious attempt to conceal any deviation from traditional norms for gendered behavior. This anxiety in turn can be interpreted as a tacit admission of what Judith Butler has called the performativity of gender roles, a concept that involves the realization that there is no underlying “essence” to them at all: “If gender attributes and acts, the various ways in which a body shows or produces its cultural signification, are performative, then there is not a preexisting identity by which an act or attribute might be measured; there would be no true or false, real or distorted acts of gender, and the postulation of a true gender identity would be revealed as a regulatory fiction.”

… [T]he New Objectivity and Expressionism were in many ways merely two sides of the same “coin,” as it were — a rather undialectical shift from a romantic and idealistic inwardness to a somewhat forced “unsentimental,” materialistic affirmation of the external surfaces of modernity — and it was a transition made by many artists and intellectuals of more or less the same generation. Furthermore, it is clear that to the extent that this move to “sober” New Objectivity was an attempt to come down from the idealist, anti-modern heights of “auratic” art to embrace modernity, the masses, and the metropolis, it was a moved that was marked by ambivalence on the part of the intellectuals and artists who were engaged in it. It is also true that this move can be seen as the attempt of an endangered social group, the intelligentsia, to find a niche for itself in the emerging modern society that preserved some of its former prestige and autonomy. It was also an attempt that largely failed. The book burning in May of 1933, soon after the end of the Republic, would provide the most visible demonstration of this failure. …

But I want to stress again that there is a need to celebrate the emancipatory aspects, especially those emancipatory, indeed utopian moments of “polymorphous perversity” in Weimar culture — an emancipatory “queerness,” if you will, that still fascinates us to this day. I use this term not just to imply a questioning of traditional norms with regard to gender and sexuality, but also to imply a contestation of fixed categories and identities that must be seen as crucial to the project of radical democratic politics. This, I would insist, is a project important for people of all identities. What better legacy from the Weimar Republic can we salvage as we face the new millennium? [3]

Footnotes
  1. David Ian Rabey, David Rudkin: Sacred Disobedience. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997, p. 12. [↩]
  2. Richard W. McCormick, Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity: Film, Literature, and “New Objectivity.” New York: Palgrave, 2001, p. 7. [↩]
  3. Selected from Ibid., pp. 7-14. [↩]

From the archives: The subterranean history of Europe and the martyrs of love

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Originally published 1 May 2012:

Beneath the known history of Europe there runs a subterranean one. It consists of the fate of the human instincts and passions repressed and distorted by civilization. From the vantage point of the fascist present, in which the hidden is coming to light, the manifest history is also revealing its connection to that dark side, which is passed over in the official legend of nation states, and no less in its progressive critique. …

Most mutilated of all is the relationship to the body. … Love-hate for the body colors the whole of modern culture. The body is scorned and rejected as something inferior, enslaved, and at the same time is desired as forbidden, reified, estranged. Only culture treats the body as a thing that can be owned, only in culture has it been distinguished from mind, the quintessence of power and command, as the object, the dead thing, the corpus. In humanity’s self-abasement to the corpus nature takes its revenge for the debasement of the human being to an object of power, to raw material. The compulsion toward cruelty and destruction stems from the organic repression of proximiity to the body, much as, according to Freud’s inspired intuition, disgust came into being when, with the adoption of the upright stance and the greater distance from the earth, the sense of smell, which attracted the male animal to the menstruating female, fell victim to organic repression. …

In the fiendish humiliation of prisoners in the concentration camps, which — for no rational reason — the modern executioner adds to the death by torture, the unsublimated yet repressed rebellion of despised nature breaks out. Its full hideousness is vented on the martyrs of love, the alleged sexual offenders and libertines, for sexuality is the body unreduced; it is expression, that which the butchers secretly and despairingly crave. In free sexuality the murderer fears the lost immediacy, the original oneness, in which he can no longer exist. It is the dead thing which rises up and lives. He now makes everything one by making it nothing, because he has to stifle that oneness in himself. For him the victim represents life which has survived the schism; it must be broken and the universe must be nothing but dust and abstract power.

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno
Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments
Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2002, pp. 192-196.

From the archives: Schoenberg and the New Expressionism

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Originally posted on 19 October 2010.

In his monograph on the music of Arnold Schoenberg [1], Charles Rosen describes one of the composer’s major achievements as “emancipation of the dissonance”: “a freedom from consonance, from the obligation to resolve the dissonance.” Although preceded in this project by the late Beethoven, Wagner and Debussy, it was Schoenberg in the Expressionist period who most courageously “demanded not only the full chromatic complexity that other composers … had already won, but even more: a release from the basic harmonic conception of the cadence, the movement toward release of tension, toward absolute repose, which had been fundamental to centuries of music. From this refusal of resolution comes the aptness of the style of the Schoenberg of 1908 to 1914 for the representation of anguish and the macabre.” (Rosen 26)

New beauties also accompany this representation; despite the division of Schoenberg’s career into “atonal” and “serial” periods, this particular demand stretches over the whole of his musical career. Rosen also goes on to discuss the specific exploration of this dissonance and the possibilites that inhabit it in both the chord and the melody. “[The] source of the dissonance of early Schoenberg (or of Skryabin, Strauss and Debussy) is not merely harmonic (or vertical [in the chord]) but melodic (or horizontal): that is, the melodies no longer imply pure tonal relations, and played by themselves alone they would defy attempts to interpret them coherently within a system of triads. … [The] individual melodies themselves … are no longer conceived in terms of triads and therefore demand a free-moving polyphonic texture.” (Rosen 35)

In the Expressionist drama, as in Expressionist music, a similar freeing of dissonance was attempted. Qualities of individual art forms may not be identical, but they may be similar, and it is these qualities that lend to a work an “Expressionist” dimension. One might spatially conceive of a “horizontal” melody that moves through time in music as plot or narrative moves through time in the theatre; similarly, the “vertical” conception of the chord may have a speculative equivalent in the idea of dramatic character. The implications are clear: tonal or triadic behaviors in music, behaviors which trap dissonance and insist upon its resolution, are paralleled by received ideological conceptions of how a plot must be constructed, how a character must behave: the plot must be “well-made” (according to a conservative structure, whether Aristotelian, social-realist or post-modern), the characters’ behavior explicable via traditional social or cultural conceptions of the “well-behaved” individual. Expressionist theatre, like Expressionist music, exploded these conceptions and freed the stage, wiping the canvas clear for the presentation of new dramatic and theatrical possibility. Before Schoenberg, the most remarkable example of unresolved dissonances was of course Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde; Schoenberg’s breakthrough was denying in his own work that opera’s closing resolution at the Act III curtain, leaving experiential possibilities even more open-ended.

Schoenberg’s music also had implications for tone color [2]; in freeing dissonance, he also freed the individual instrument, suggesting sonic possibilities and investigations of timbre necessarily unheard in a traditional conception of composition, as the performer’s instruments — the body and the voice — are similarly freed in the theatre. Like the individual musical instrument, the individual body is similar to others in some respects (thus the groupings of woodwinds, brass, string and percussion instruments) and extraordinarily variable in others (the violin and viola, for example, and even in the case of individual violins or any other given instrument). This calls for a greater discipline and precision on the part of the performer, especially where the musical structure is unfamiliar to the ear and grates against compositional tradition: one must needs pay attention to the instrument and the sound — as well as the body of the performer — in a manner hitherto unparalleled.

Without argument, Schoenberg has been one of the most influential composers of the twentieth century; even Stravinsky found inspiration in Schoenberg’s work. From solo to chamber to orchestral to operatic works, the music of Schoenberg (and the two other exemplars of the Second Viennese School, Anton Webern and Alban Berg) decisively introduced new beauties and aesthetic possibilites. Music before and after Schoenberg is not the same, but much of it still goes unheard, especially the works of the serial period; he has been accepted into the canon with grudging acquiesence. [3]

So too have the dramatists of the New Expressionism — many of whom are also grudgingly accepted into the canon, their works unperformed and unread outside of a comparatively small circle of cognoscenti. The dramatists have recognized the similarity. According to James Knowlson, Berg’s Woyzeck was one of Samuel Beckett’s favorite operas; David Rudkin’s familiarity with Schoenberg himself is exemplified through his translation of the libretto of Moses and Aaron for a 1964 Peter Hall production at the Royal Opera House.

The work of Samuel Beckett and Arnold Schoenberg was also, of course, central to the conception of Adornian aesthetics; Adorno had planned to dedicate Aesthetic Theory to Beckett, and his polemic Philosophy of New Music is an impassioned defense of Arnold Schoenberg against the neoclassicism represented by Igor Stravinsky. (Adorno makes something of a straw man of Stravinsky, which drew the anger of Schoenberg.) In his recent monograph on Beckett, Andrew Gibson cites Adorno in words that describe Schoenberg’s project as well, especially in the advanced capitalist culture of the 20th century:

Even as Beckett settles for the world of advanced capital as where he “happens to be,” however minimally, whatever the moments of collusion, he also holds open another space for thought to those that characterized the dominant ideologies of his era. This is what Simon Critchley means when he writes of Beckett’s “weak messianic power.” Beckett is scrupulous, almost beyond comparison, in his repudiation of suspect positivities. He is adamantine in his refusal to conspire “with all extant meanness and finally with the destructive principle” (to quote Adorno). He therefore chooses a via negativa. If “the task of thinking is to keep open the slightest difference between things as they are and things as they might otherwise be,” then that task is supremely exemplified in Beckett. As Connor says of Worstward Ho, Beckett will not surrender the idea of another sphere or possibility of value, however apparently absurd, minimial or purely negative its form. This negative space is the space of art; or rather, Beckett takes the preservation of the negative space to be integral to art’s task. (Gibson 159-160)

There is a fine Web site devoted to Arnold Schoenberg’s work maintained by the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna. This includes a complete list of compositions (with free recordings of most of the compositions, along with useful annotations) and — also intriguingly — a catalogue of Schoenberg’s library at the time of his death: no Freud, Hegel or Marx, only two unmarked volumes of Nietzsche, but many volumes of Karl Kraus’s Die Fackel and a near-complete (and heavily annotated in Schoenberg’s hand) edition of Arthur Schopenhauer.

Footnotes
  1. Charles Rosen: Arnold Schoenberg, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975 [↩]
  2. “Each phrase can be given an entirely new instrumental color, and is consequently characterized less by its harmonic content than by the instrumental combination that embodies it. This emancipation of tone color was as significant and as characteristic of the first decades of the twentieth century as the emancipation of dissonance. Tone color was released from its complete subordination to pitch in musical structure: until this point what note was played had been far more important than the instrumental color or the dynamics with which it was played.” (Rosen 48) [↩]
  3. It also led, in Schoenberg’s own time, to a profound sense of isolation, not unlike that shared by many New Expressionist dramatists; in 1937 he wrote an extensive essay on his own work, with the puckish title “How One Becomes Lonely.” [↩]

From the archives: A few notes on the subject

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Originally posted on 23 March 2012.

One of the responsibilities of criticism in this century is the reclamation of the individual subject, a subject who has been susceptible to undermining and erasure in the postmodern condition. [1] The difficulties of the human dilemma, that subject and object inhere in the same identity in the empirical world to those who stand outside of ourselves, are no different now than they have been over the millenia. Modernist thought explored the crisis of the subject, attempted to reconceive it for a post-industrial and urbanized world; some postmodernisms have evaded the question by denying the existence of the subject entirely, by rendering it a construct as much an object as the human body. Criticism and the essay inhere in the realm of subjective thought, wherever that may be, though we can’t map it as we can map the brain; we can say where thought occurs, but not from whence those final thoughts express themselves in our subjectivity.

The capitalism that expressed itself through the industrialist dynamic, however, is not the same as that expressed through digitization and globalization. The Culture Industry encourages us to commodify ourselves as objects; the criticism that would emerge from an engaged subjectivity is a criminal activity. As we give up subjectivity to enjoy our status as objects to be entertained, or sell our privacy to the lowest bidder for more Facebook friends or Twitter followers, we give up that critical faculty which belongs to subjecthood. This is writ more largely in the assumptions that underlie the German word kultur, not just those pages and endeavors that are categorized and alienated from the broader discourse as culture, arts, and leisure in the experience of the newspapers. The individuals of the Occupy movements subsume their individual subjecthood in the mass as well: as part of that larger object called a collective protest. We are rendered consumers and salesmen of an abstract progressive ideology, as we are consumers and salesmen of aesthetic product. We want buyers, forgetting in the process that there is no greater sucker, no one more susceptible to the sales pitch, than another master salesman. The lack of critical subjectivity that would allow him to recognize the inauthenticities of his own sales pitch is the same lack of critical subjectivity that would allow him to recognize the inauthenticities of others. As an American philosopher once put it, “You can’t cheat an honest man.” [2] This is the same in theaters as when we read newspapers or participate in political actions.

Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, a mid-20th century project, is being reconceived for the 21st century by a variety of writers, explicitly by Edward Bond and Heiner Müller and implicitly by Richard Foreman and Howard Barker and many others. Criticism is not ready to receive it until critics recognize that the work of these theatre artists is an attempt to reconstruct the individual subject in opposition to, contending against, the Culture Industry, at the same time that that Industry continues, in its ravenous hunger, to consume and market even those objects that mitigate and militate against it. Critics, and especially reviewers, are embedded in this Culture Industry; so far as they unquestioningly practice according to its assumptions, they will not recognize it. Postmodern criticism fails these works precisely in its erasure of the subjective consciousness: it does not know how to see through the use of the subjective eye that needs to be reclaimed.

The primary literary sources for a consideration of this crisis remain Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation and the great quintet of Shakespeare’s tragedies that limn the ambivalence of subjectivity in the enlightened world: Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Macbeth, and especially Antony and Cleopatra, which eroticizes this crisis.

Footnotes
  1. See especially Theodor Adorno’s “The Essay as Form” in the first volume of Notes to Literature. An online .pdf version can be found here. [↩]
  2. Another dramatized aphorism from the same philosopher is relevant here as well. Man to W.C. Fields at a poker table: “Is this a game of chance?” Fields: “Not the way I play it.” [↩]

From the archives: A report card for the arts

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When the 1 March sequester went into effect, the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts was cut by 8.2%, from $148 million to about $136 million, according to this report (this $148 million was less than half the budget for Disney’s Oz the Great and Powerful, being released this Friday, and a little more than twice the budget of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln) — another argument that it may be just about time to close the whole thing down, as I puckishly suggested in the below post from 9 March 2011.

First couple Michelle and Barack Obama enjoy (and are enjoyed at) a 2009 performance of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone on Broadway

Yesterday, Tyler Green in “Barack Obama and the arts: A disappointment” at the Modern Art Notes blog issued a mid-term report card of sorts for the Obama administration’s support of the arts through the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Public Broadcasting Corporation, as well as the administration’s valorization of arts education. The whole is worth reading, but here are the central paragraphs:

In his just-released fiscal year 2012 budget, the White House proposed 13 percent funding cuts for both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. This gave Congressional Republicans an opening: Noticing that the White House wouldn’t … take a stand on arts funding, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives promptly doubled the president’s proposed NEA and NEH cuts to 26 percent each, the deepest decline in 16 years [this includes, needless to say, the years of the Bush administration].

Just as troubling: The White House has not slowed Congress’ penchant for cutting art funding wherever it finds it. Candidate Obama said that supporting arts education funding was one of his top arts policy priorities. So much for campaign promises, because the White House just stood idly by as Congress cut art education funding earlier this month. As part of passing a continuing resolution to keep the federal government functional while Congress works on a FY 2011 federal budget, both the House and Senate cut $40 million in funding for art education.

Let’s look back at Candidate Obama’s much-vaunted, eight-part arts policy campaign platform. Candidate Obama proposed new art education programs, including an “artist corps,” but has offered nothing of the sort — yet. Candidate Obama said that he supported increased NEA funding, but after supporting modest increases in the NEA’s appropriation earlier in his presidency, President Obama just proposed that big funding cut. Candidate Obama proposed an increased focus on cultural diplomacy, but so far the president’s most significant effort on that front has been a tiny $1 million program. … The Obama campaign pledged to streamline the process for artists needing visas to enter the United States, a situation which is hard to measure but which administrators report has improved. Obama promised health care for artists. We’ll see how that works out. And finally we’re still waiting for the Artist-Museum Partnership Act to be approved by Congress so that artists who donate their work to cultural institutions receive a fair tax deduction. Judged against Candidate Obama’s own plans, President Obama still has a way to go — and has even taken some steps backward.

The $146.3 million for the NEA in the proposed 2012 budget (the NEH and PBS have rather different missions and a set of problems of their own) works out to a little under $3 million for each state, which is a little less than two weeks’ pay for Charlie Sheen in Two and a Half Men.  During an economic downturn it is reasonable to believe that belts will  be tightened and budgets cut, but the economic downturn had already begun by the start of Obama’s administration in 2008, and the signs of a recovering economy are clearly not reflected in this 13 percent cut (for all the complaining about the Republican-led House of Representatives, they just finished the job that the Obama budget proposal started).

Some governments prosecute artists; others, especially democratic governments on the eve of elections, coddle them. For all of the outreach to artists that Obama’s campaign attempted in 2008 (and Tony Blair’s government in the UK in the 1990s, and Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s in 2007 — progressive liberals all, one would think), it has not generated the support for the arts that was keenly expected in the first rush of enthusiasm for this outreach. Artists were invited to the table only to be sent away with empty stomachs and expectations for a more glorious future.

Artists and arts organizations have been unable to make persuasive cases for maintaining the current levels of the NEA subsidy, let alone increasing that level, and in part I believe it’s because that the argument that the arts are somehow instrumentally “good for society” in a number of ways is, even if arguably correct, insufficient. There are many things that are instrumentally “good for society” for which the government pays, the arts only one element among them. It’s true that the arts generate jobs, but really all businesses do that, from automobile factories to office complexes; if I lose my job (at an organization completely unrelated to the arts), the newsstand across the street where I buy my paper and the restaurant where I buy my lunch will lose my business too. And then, budgets and balance sheets are a zero-sum game. If a community has $30,000 to spend, how can it do so to the greater benefit of the community? A nurse’s salary in a geriatric psych unit, or a production of King Lear? A necessary infrastructure improvement to the roads or a staging of in the next room (the vibrator play)? A schoolteacher or a new play program? (This last, as Garrett Eisler suggested yesterday, is not a rhetorical question; he quotes a Bronx middle-school principal, faced with budget cuts, who says, “Do you cut your arts program or your math teacher? It’s not a choice anyone wants to make.”)

Given that there has been no huge hue and cry from the general public about these cuts (artists and adminstrators are predictably outraged, but so are teachers and parents when education cuts are announced), one has to consider precisely what value the NEA has to this general public, and it’s clear that this value is very little. Governments support the arts to appear enlightened, even if they’re not; it’s a small price to pay for the electoral support of the creative community; and whether it’s ultimately a gesture of dilettantism or philstinism is of little interest. Democracy is democracy, and the people speak — or, in this case, they remain silent.

Perhaps it’s time for the Obama administration — and us — to stop hypocritically paying rhetorical lip service to the arts while cutting its government support. Perhaps it’s time to close the NEA. Shut it down, zero it out, lock the doors and sell the carpets. Send Rocco Landesman back to Broadway and the private sector, where he can do less damage to the delicate psyches of playwrights, literary managers and artistic directors. The repercussions will, for some, be unfortunate, but they will be local and brief.

Would things change for artists? Given the paltry sum that the NEA already disburses, it’s unlikely. Those who are still truly dedicated to their work will continue to find a way to do it and present it to the public; it may be infinitesimally more difficult, but it will still happen. And we will have bought, with the savings of this $146.3 million, something that is beyond measure: an honesty about the administration and our culture, and the importance of governmental support for the arts to that culture. Of course, if the disappearance of the NEA itself finally meets with vociferous public disapproval, then the Obama administration can rectify the solution by refunding it during its second term. If it has one.