in their country. The small size of the Norwegian cultural community no
doubt goes a long way toward explaining why the attempt to appoint
Nerdrum to the National Academy created such a stir. But we must
remember that the affair ultimately turned on the issue of public funding
of the arts, and thus legitimately raised political questions of national
importance. The debate was over appointing Nerdrum, not just to any
school in Norway, but to the NationalAcademy, and since public money
was at stake, it was in fact appropriate for government officials to be
drawn into the fray.
Thus the Norwegian Academy affair is more than just a representa-
tive incident in Nerdrum’s lifelong struggle with the forces of mod-
ernism. The issue of public funding of the arts can actually take us to the
heart of Nerdrum’s critique of modernism. In his view, the problem with
modern art is that it has made a devil’s pact with the modern state.
Modern art “has become a part of the official state ideology or struc-
ture”^15 in return for government support of the arts. Public funding is
paradoxically intended to free the modern artist from having to please
the public anymore. As Nerdrum sees it, modern art is heavily invested
in the ideal of the autonomy of art, which he correctly traces back to
Immanuel Kant and his Critique of Judgment. In this understanding of
art, the artist is supposed to be free from all external pressures so that he
can follow the dictates of his authentic genius wherever it leads him, and
that means first and foremost that the artist should be free from all com-
mercial pressures, any need to compromise his artistic vision to please
paying customers. The ideal of the autonomy of art has become so dom-
inant in modern aesthetic discourse that it has come to sound like plain
common sense to us. “Of course the artist must be autonomous,” we feel
like saying; how can he be true to himself as an artist if he is constantly
worrying about pleasing a public that is largely ignorant about art? It is
an axiom of modernist thinking that the artist is to set the law for the
public; the public is not to set the law for the artist. The history of twen-
tieth-century art is supposed to be one long story of a public of bour-
geois philistines resisting the brilliant innovations of creative,
forward-looking artists, while the artists, as the prophets of modernity
and the only true visionaries, heroically try to lead the public out of the
wilderness of worn-out conventions into the promised land of what
Richard Wagner called “the artwork of the future.”
The ideal of the autonomy of art sounds wonderful in theory—who
wouldn’t want to be financially independent?—but in practice, it raises
thorny questions. In particular, where is the liberating financial support
for the artist supposed to come from? Traditionally, to earn a living, an
The Importance of Being Odd 13