This is an essay from The Culture We Deserve, by Jacques Barzun.#

In this essay, Jacques tackles the assumption that there can never be too much Art, and that there was once a Golden Age of Art Financing.#

This year, in any year, the budgets of the federal and state agencies that support the arts are to be cut again. Meanwhile, costs in the arts are going up-rent, utilities, printing, and various incidental expenses. Yet one continues to read and hear of one more dance group being formed, yet another chamber orchestra making its debut, newborn theatre companies striving to lure audiences, festivals and exhibits being organized. Each new enterprise is self-assured of prestige, confident of deserving support, and hungry for subsidy from public and private funds.

This disparity between shrinking means and growing supply points to attitudes and assumptions about art that have not been examined for a long time. The most common assumption is that there cannot be too much art, and hence that the public has an obligation to support whatever qualifies under that name. If private funds fall short, let public money make up the difference. But since public money is not an elastic substance, some rethinking is in order, aimed at developing new standards of judgment and response. [pg. 120]

It is important to note that Jacques writes "has not been examined in a long time," not "has never been examined."#

Already in 1840, Balzac noted with dismay that there were two thousand painters in Paris. Degas, fifty years later, said: "we must discourage the arts." But the ever enlarging display of art cannot, of course, be cut or held back. We can pay farmers not to grow crops, but we cannot pay artists to stop making art. Yet something must be done. To lead people on when there is no chance they will ever fulfill their desire is immoral. And our training schools, art councils, endowments, and foundations are doing just that. They flatter the hope and belief that every good work and worker will be recognized and subsidized. When no such thing happens, anger and distress naturally follow.

Nor does the artist's anger refer solely to money. Government grants are awarded by persons (often themselves artists) who assume the role of bureaucrat. Their role cuts them off from the community of applicants. Subsidy, even by a private foundation, is an official act, and on this subject the French experience of three hundred years is conclusive. In France, the academic imitators got the commissions and subsidies; those who produced the works we admire today had to survive as best they could. The term official art means art that is competent and safe. As John Sloan said in urging government support: "Then we'll know who our enemy is." [pgs. 124-125]

The final pages of this essay are elegant in their expression of Jacques' opinion.#

These suggestions and possibilities have nothing to do with trying to reduce the role of government in society. Nor do they relate to money alone, or artistic ambition alone. When I urge this new soberness, I am thinking of high culture as whole and our relation to it. In the competition for cash, punctuated by elegant ballyhoo, in the overabundance of the offering and the fuss about it in print and on the airwaves, something has happened to the artistic experience itself. Its quality has been lowered by plethora. Great works too often seen or performed, too readily available in bits and pieces, become articles of consumption instead of objects of contemplation. They lose force and depth by being too familiar through too frequent or too hurried use. When I hear of someone's proudly "spending the day at the museum," I wonder at the effect: the intake is surely akin to that of an alcoholic. Music likewise is anesthetic when big does-symphony after symphony, opera on top of opera-are administered without respite. We should remember the Greeks' practice of exposing themselves to one tragic trilogy or one comedy on but a single day each year. High art is meant for rare festivals, where anticipation is followed by exhilaration and the aftermath is meditation and recollection in tranquillity. The glut has made us into gluttons, who gorge and do not digest. [pg. 127]