Commentary
The National Endowment for the Arts and Its Opposition: Danto's
Argument for Art for Our Sake
It is in works of art that nations have deposited the profoundest intuitions
and ideas of their hearts; and fine art is frequently the key— with
many nations there is no other—to the understanding of their wisdom
and of their religion.
Hegel, On Art (ca. 1825), Part I
In The New York Times, op-ed page of Sunday, August 27, 1995 (sec.
E, p. 15), Arthur C. Danto published an editorial titled "Art for Our Sake."
What prompted his piece is an argument made by fiscal conservatives who
wish to eliminate federal funding of the National Endowment for the Arts
(NEA); this argument has been made several times since then, so it is worth
examining today. (A Web search for "anti National Endowment for the Arts
and conservatives" yields over 101,000 results!) According to these conservatives,
the arts should not be funded by the NEA because the arts are an elitist
preoccupation. A plausible recasting of the argument is as follows:
P1 The arts are the results of an elitist preoccupation.
P2 Anything that is an elitist preoccupation should not be funded.
C The arts should not be funded.
Professor Danto attacks P1. It could not have been an elitist preoccupation
(or distraction) to paint and to appreciate the French cave drawings in
the Ardeche. Why? For two reasons at least: they stir our deepest human
impulses and lie very close to whatever is distinctively human. The genetic
endowment that motivated the cave painters is the same that motivated later
artists. Secondly, elitist concerns did not exist 20,000 years ago, so it
is something in human nature that inspired these artistic concerns.
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