PropagandArt

Just got an email from my friend Susan well worth passing on; it's an article in Frieze Magazine written by her sister, Nancy Spector, who is Curator of Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim and Commissioner of the US Pavilion for the Venice Biennale 2007.

The impact of the Bush administration on the art world, I always thought, was confined to its serving as malignant inspiration for any number of deprecatory pieces. We tend to forget that they have their hands on the slender levers of the government's arts funding; and lo and behold, the results are the same rot we've come to expect everywhere.

When I received a gold-engraved card from the White House inviting me to a reception to launch the administration’s new Global Cultural Initiative, I thought at first that it must have been an art-world prank – perhaps a tactical media intervention by the Critical Art Ensemble. But then I realized it was my current role as the commissioner of the US Pavilion for the 2007 Venice Biennale that had earned me this unexpected distinction. The correlation between the Bush White House and culture seemed oxymoronic to me; the title ‘Global Cultural Initiative’ does, after all, have the same vague propagandistic ring and sinister undertones as ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’.

Set in the White House’s grand East Room lined with portraits of past presidents, the presentation was introduced by Laura Bush, who reminisced about the influence of culture during the Cold War, citing the Voice of America’s broadcasting of jazz music into the Soviet Union as a catalyst for the dissolution of communism. Under-Secretary of State Karen Hughes, Bush’s personal propaganda tsar, proceeded to outline the multiple-agency programme, stating that ‘art and culture can play a vital role in helping achieve our strategic public diplomacy goals’. She stopped short of explaining what those goals might actually be.

So not only are there goals, to the delighted astonishment of the world, but they can be achieved through jazz. Nobody knows, of course, if Osama bin Laden is a jazz fan. Perhaps if we'd actually, you know, caught the man, we'd know.

Since George Bush took office in 2000 there has been a concentrated assault on art, not with the flamboyant rhetoric of the so-called ‘culture wars’ of the 1980s and 1990s, but rather through an insidious privileging of all things patriotic. The NEA now supports the literary aspirations of returning Iraqi war veterans with a programme dubbed ‘Operation Homecoming’, and it channels millions of dollars from its limited budget into the ‘American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius’ initiative, which funds ‘acknowledged’ cultural achievements, thus further codifying the already accepted canon. This is all happening strangely below the radar, and I wonder why there has been no public (or at least art-world) reaction.

Not content with listening to our phone calls and reading our mail, now the administration is the arbiter of our cultural legacy as well, it seems.

But then again, the man is fond of comparing himself to Truman, so this latest bit of presumptuousness shouldn't come as any surprise. The Decider decides, after all; now, he's deciding what's hot, and what's not, in our cultural legacy.

The mind reels.

(Originally posted at The Daily Gotham)

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