Gioia (himself an accomplished poet and critic) should have known,
other workshops, taught by historians and journalists—on writing essays,
memoirs, and personal journals—did not belong to “the arts” at all.
The ill-named “American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic
Genius” (an ambitious program launched by the NEA in 2005) promised
to “introduce Americans to the best of their cultural and artistic legacy.”
Grants in its Visual Arts Touring component would be awarded to muse-
ums for mounting exhibitions that would then travel to other museums.
The exhibitions could “focus on schools, movements, [and] traditions ”
that included but were “not limited to” the Hudson River School and
American Impressionism. Among the other categories were “Aspects of
American Art Post-1945 [artspeak for “avant-garde”] to the Present.”
Given the NEA’s bias, exhibitions of work by painters continuing in the
tradition of the Hudson River School and the Impressionists would surely
not qualify for grants.^42 Touring grants would also support exhibitions in
categories that did not, in fact, qualify as art (“fine art”), among them,
photography, decorative art, industrial design, architecture, and costumes
and textiles. The original initiative was reduced in scope at the start when
music and dance were dropped to concentrate on the visual arts.^43
By lending legitimacy to avant-garde work and to other non-art proj-
ects, the NEA (whose grant-making influences that of state and local
funding agencies, as well as that of corporations and foundations) has
since its inception had a mostly deleterious effect on the contemporary
practice of art. Though it no longer directly supports individual avant-
gardists, it makes grants to arts organizations, theater and dance compa-
nies, museums, universities, and foundations that do. The NEA’s lifetime
achievement award, the National Medal of Arts, moreover, has honored
numerous avant-garde figures—abstract painter Helen Frankenthaler,
“sculptor” George Segal, Minimalist (abstract) painter Agnes Martin,
and Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, among others—thus further legitimiz-
ing their lofty status in the culture.^44Cheating the Young
The avant-garde monopoly in art is most disturbing of all in the realm of
education, where it can have a pernicious effect upon impressionable
students. They, after all, include our future artists, philosophers of art,
art historians, critics, and teachers. And it is they who will be the audi-
ences for art as well.
The situation is dismal. Art instruction in today’s schools consists
mostly of studio art, in which students learn little from teachers, many180 Louis Torres