social responsibility
and the art critic
by Eleanor Heartney
Discussions of the critic's social
responsibility always seem to get bogged
down in hand-wringing over the fate of the
National Endowment for the Arts. Questions
are posed in accusatory tones: Are critics
doing enough to defend the endowment? Have
the art magazines shirked their duty by not
permitting more coverage of this important
issue? Have we made it clear enough to the
public and to our public servants how vital
arts funding has become for our national
culture?
In fact, plenty of ink has been spilled, to
very little practical effect, over this
issue. Instead, I would argue that the
right's attack on the NEA has been a
brilliant diversionary tactic to keep
people in the cultural field from turning
their attention to a far larger problem.
This is the cultural conservatives' efforts
to reshape society into a form that greatly
weakens the open exchange of ideas and the
freedom of opportunity essential to a vital
culture. The symptoms of this change are
myriad: they include the flow of money and
resources upward, away from the working and
middle classes; the growing inequality of
wealth and opportunity; the steady
withdrawal of money from education,
libraries, public radio and television; the
privatization of the realms of public
discourse and the reinvention of America as
a place where all speech is an extension of
marketing.
In this climate, one of the critic's social
responsibilities should certainly be to
investigate the ways in which art and the
art world are implicated in these
developments. Here we might recall Deep
Throat's directive to the Watergate
investigators--"follow the money." Critics
should be asking more questions about where
the support for art is coming from and what
the implications of various forms of
patronage might be.
We should also be looking more closely at
the changing constitution of the art
world--to what degree has it become a
mirror of the larger social world? Can
anything to be done to rectify the growing
disparity between the rich and the poor in
the art world, and the growing lack of
"upward mobility" for artists, curators,
and critics who cannot rely upon a
comfortable independent income in an
increasingly "pay your own way" art world?
Should artists who are themselves
struggling be the backbone of support--
by means of benefit auctions which serve
to undercut the market for their work--
for money-starved alternative spaces?
Can something practical be done about the
class divides and unequal distribution of
wealth within the art world itself? What if
the artists who have benefitted most in
economic terms from the art world be
expected to put something back in? Just as
there are calls now for highly successful
Hollywood directors and actors to
contribute to the kind of not-for-profit
theaters where new talent gets its start,
shouldn't Blue Chip artists be asked to
help provide for the future vitality of the
world which has been so good to them?
By raising such issues, critics might
manifest their social responsibility
through their writing. But sometimes a
serious engagement with the social world
requires one to put down one's pen, close
up the computer and become active in other
ways.
I want to turn now to a personal anecdote
to suggest what I mean. After the dismal
returns of the 1995 gubernatorial and
Congressional elections came in, my partner
Larry Litt and I undertook an informal
survey of artists about their voting
practices. "Did you vote?" we asked them.
"And if you didn't, why not?" The answers
were both illuminating and dispiriting.
"Well, I meant to, but I couldn't get out
of the studio," we were told. "It really
doesn't make any difference anyway." Or,
more militantly, "I don't vote because it
just contributes to the corruption."
This experiment led us to the creation of
the Artist Voter Project, which began
simply as an effort to recruit friends and
acquaintances to help us man voter-
registration tables at art schools and the
openings of alternative spaces. Throughout
the fall of 1995, we ran drives at perhaps
20 spaces and gave out about 1,500 voter
registration drives. It was fun and we were
happy to be doing something useful.
As long as we kept to this simple
manageable goal, things went well. But
then, as happens in such situations, we
began to get more grandiose ideas. We
thought that it was not enough to register
voters. We began to think of motivation
projects that would encourage artists and
art students to vote. These were
projects--like a "register to vote"
poster competition for schools, for
instance--that required exhibition
spaces, the cooperation of institutions,
and money for mailings, openings and
coordination. In order to implement
these ideas, we decided that we needed
to fund-raise. And this brought us for
the first time into the bizarre and
contradictory world of art funding.
Although we never got any funding, we got
quite an education from this experience
about why things don't happen and why art
world activism is so often ineffective.
Strange things started to happen. When word
got out that the Artist Voter Project was
planning some projects, other related arts
organizations began to contact us,
suggesting that we work together. "Working
together" turned out to mean giving them a
rather sizable contribution so we could get
their literature. We tried to explain that
we were not a funded organization, but
just a group of individuals trying to do
something, and that we had no funds to
contribute. It became clear that for many
of these "activist" organizations, their
social mission consisted of raising funds
to pay for mailings that would be used to
raise more money.
We ran into some other strange situations.
For instance, there was the organization
that got a sizable grant to look into the
need to encourage artist voting, and spent
most of it on a conference where everyone
congratulated themselves on their concern.
There was the New York-based organization
which was raising money to rent a bus and
take a group of concerned New Yorkers on a
bus registration drive throughout the
South. (I guess SoHo or even Harlem were
not exotic enough.) And we found
institutions who liked our ideas, and would
be happy to do them if we put up all the
money, or who felt that they could just as
easily take our ideas and do them
themselves.
Ultimately, we discovered that the
institutional structure of the art world
really doesn't contain a place for the
individual who just wants to do something.
There is a bureaucracy, there are channels
of action, there are complicated politics
that keep things from actually happening.
The art world is very good at examining
problems, but not very good at doing
anything about them.
In the end, we concluded that the social
responsibility of the art critic is the
same as that of the ordinary citizen. It
is a matter of personal commitment and a
willingness to spend some time and energy
on something that seems important. The only
way out of the paralysis in which we seem
to find ourselves at the moment is personal
effort. So yes, come fall, we will be out
there again, running voter registration
drives at SoHo art spaces.
ELEANOR HEARTNEY is a New York critic. Her
collection of essays, Critical Condition,
is forthcoming from Cambridge University
Press in 1997.
