properly between good and bad art, but at least these systems, in forcing
artists to please somebody, imposed a kind of discipline on them and
impelled them to develop their craft. By contrast, funding by committee,
precisely because it seeks to substitute professional judgment for ama-
teur taste, results in making art more and more academic, leading artists
to conform, not to what the public wants, but to what the art establish-
ment deems to be true art. That is how modernism has come to domi-
nate the whole world of art under a regime of public funding.^17
It is a mistake, then, to think of modern forms of public funding of
the arts as the new equivalent of the old system of patronage.^18 Artistic
patrons may have been members of the governments of their day, but in
their decisions about art they acted as private individuals and felt free to
indulge their personal taste. But, however much members of committees
charged with funding the arts today may secretly be influenced by their
personal taste, they must act as if they were serving a public trust and
thus deciding according to publicly promulgated and acceptable proce-
dures and criteria—which is to say that they must act bureaucratically.
Committees operate by consensus and, given their composition in the
modern, democratic world, they inevitably end up supporting artworks
that conform to the modernist conception of art that dominates the acad-
emy and the art establishment today. Nerdrum is struck by the unifor-
mity of art in the modern world: “Modernism itself has become a
tradition which has conquered the entire western world” (OK, 10). For
Nerdrum, this is the inevitable result of art becoming dependent on pub-
lic funding and hence in effect a ward of the modern state.
Modern artists hoped to achieve their autonomy by turning their
backs on all forms of patronage and commercialism and making a bar-
gain with the state for public funding. But as in all areas of human
endeavor, he who pays the piper calls the tune, and the modern state has
not turned out to be the purely benevolent and undemanding source of
support modernist artists were looking for. This has clearly been the case
in the various totalitarian regimes, whether communist or fascist, that set
themselves up as the saviors of art in the twentieth century, but in prac-
tice turned their artists into slaves of the state. But Nerdrum would argue
that this is also true of the democratic, welfare states, which in a more
insidious fashion have undermined the independence of the artist even
as they claimed to be giving him his freedom. The modern artist may
think that he no longer has to “please” anybody in order to go about cre-
ating his art, but to get government grants and in general to function in
the world of art as a public institution, he must still “satisfy the criteria”
for grant proposals and others forms of public recognition. In particular,
The Importance of Being Odd 15