artist had to please someone, either a patron from the court or the
church, or the paying customers who constitute the commercial public.
Both the patron-based and the market-based systems of supporting art
obviously had their defects, and often forced artists in directions they
might not have pursued if they had possessed complete aesthetic free-
dom. But the only alternative to private funding of the arts is public
funding, and it brings a whole new set of problems in its wake. A sys-
tem of public funding must be administered, and that means that in the
modernist vision, art becomes just one more part of the administered
world, a public institution, bound up with the bureaucratic state.
Nerdrum’s career has been one long—and largely negative—encounter
with the various forms of national art institutions in the modern world—
national schools, national museums, national academies.^16 He has thus
observed how public funding of the arts actually works in practice: it
means art administered by bureaucrats and bureaucratic committees.
The ideal of the autonomy of art is that anyone should be free to follow
his or her artistic calling as the spirit dictates. But in practice—because
the financial resources of the modern state are not infinite—money
must be allocated and that means that decisions must be made. As in all
the operations of the modern state, these decisions are necessarily
bureaucratic in nature and are usually made by committees—in particu-
lar, the various forms of peer review that administer much of public
funding in the modern world.
And the key point about committees is that they have no taste.
Indeed, by their very nature they are not supposed to express personal
taste, but rather to exercise expert judgment. A patron of the arts or a
paying customer is free to follow his or her taste. In patronage or the
commercial market, the simple statement: “Because I like it” is a suffi-
cient reason for supporting the work of an artist. But no self-respecting
government committee can offer: “Because we like it” as their justifica-
tion for allocating public funds to a particular artistic project. In their
bureaucratic nature, committees must render professional judgments
based on expert opinions—hence in the art world they tend to be domi-
nated by academics or quasi-academics, like museum curators. And in
democratic regimes, any form of public funding is under great pressure
to be democratic, to allocate money in a non-discriminatory manner and
to spread it around as evenly as possible. In a democratic context, this
goal sounds unobjectionable and indeed desirable. But we should
remember that the traditional point of artistic taste was precisely to be
discriminating. That is what it meant to be a connoisseur of art.
Patronage or the marketplace did not always succeed in discriminating14 Paul A. Cantor