REMARKS

Robert Hughes

Well, ladies and gentlemen, when I greatly accepted the honor of speaking to you tonight, I was under the impression that the name of the recipient of the award this evening was a deep, dark secret. And so I found that I’ve written a speech which contains no link to Robert Wilson, but I’m going to leave that to the person designated as the blonde with the envelope, Aggie Gund. I will talk in more general terms.

In America, as you know, there has been a long and uneasy co-existence between a fairly small number of people who thought that creativity, and thus the arts were to be encouraged and respected for their own sake. And a larger majority who felt otherwise. And in his first message to Congress, John Quincy Adams declared that “For government to refrain from promoting the cultivation and encouragement of the mechanical and of the elegant arts, the advancement of literature would be treachery to the most sacred of trusts. Benjamin Franklin, on the other hand, who had a visceral disapproval of Thomas Jefferson’s constant gadding about buying costly books and busts and paintings for Montecello grumbled that Americans would, in fact, be better off if, instead of bringing back copies of the Medici Venus, they could get hold of the recipe for Parmesan Cheese.

The east coast of this country was settled by people, who believed that they were enacting a sacred history, in which the word and not the image was the supreme source of truth. The Puritans who created New England out of what they believed was a howling biblical waste, may not have been much like the modern fantasy that we have of the Puritans, certainly few of them seem to have resembled Demi Moore in any particular. But they were the ideological descendants of the men who virtually razed the Medieval culture of England. The statue breakers, the iconoclasts and the smashers of stained glass.

Alas, they found no such things here to destroy, so they had to do it to the Massachusetts Indians. Distrust of the sensuous, the invented visual image, of self-delighting creativity, was written into America’s contract with itself from 1620 on. There was something misleading and dangerous about art, for these early Americans, except for furniture, silverware and family portraits. And it wasn’t just the Puritans. You find William Penn, the great social reformer who founded Philadelphia asking his Quaker flock, “How many players did Jesus Christ and his apostles recreate themselves at?”

Well, poor William Hicks the painter of “Peaceable Kingdoms,” and the one early American Artist wo lived and died a Quaker, wrote the painting was one of those trifling insignificant arts, which was never been of any substantial benefit to mankind. There was also a woman Quaker sculptor, a Patience Wright, but all we know of her is that Abigail Adams, the wife of the second President of the United States, referred to her in a letter as, “The Queen of sluts.”

Right, from its beginnings of European settlement, America developed two shaping myths, which have set up peculiar cultural eddies ever since. The first was the central myth of American newness, American exceptionalism. It animated the zeal of the Puritans. It drove the conviction of Washington and Jefferson and others that they were creating a politics unlike any the world had seen, as indeed they did. And in the early 19th century, it was transferred to American landscape, with all its unforeseen power and beauty seen as the fingerprint of God on earth. Then, presently, the worship of the new shifted to technology, to science, in the hands of great myth-makers like Thomas Eakins, Walt Whitman, and the Roblings, who built the Brooklyn Bridge.

And then the 20th century, because America’s institutional culture was so infused with ideas about the new. The gap between the appearance of new art and its acceptance, was far shorter than it was in France or in England. When the Museum of Modern Art was created in 1929, the very words, museum and modern, struck most Europeans as self-contradictory.

The pious legends of martyrdom, hostility, and public indifference, that were part of the story of the European avant garde, never had quite so much force in America, though, of course, they were carefully tended and maintained as a means of maintaining the heroism of the new. Americans learned to believe that art progresses, that its value to human consciousness lay in an idea of renovation, seen as therapeutic in itself. Newness was one thing, but the other thing that caused the eddies was the idea of art as moral improvement. Art redeemed itself from vanity by being useful and educational, and morally uplifting. On this idea, the vast edifice of American museums was raised.

But we find now that creativity is actually not there as a kind of radiation therapy, to make its audience more moral. If it were, I and my colleagues, in the criticism of the arts, would be Mother Teresa by now or at least Arianna Stassinopoulos. Whenever I tune in on the swelling chorus of American belief in moral improvement through the arts, I think of one of the heroes of 15th century Italian patronage, the war lord of Rimini, Sir Gezmondo de Melitester. He was a man of exquisite taste. His architect was Leon Batiste Alberti. His painter was Pierre Rodello Francesca. His court sculptor was Agostino Doduccio.

I mean, you can’t get much more elevated than that. And yet in real life, Sir Gezmondo was a man of such callousness and rapacity that he was known as “Il Lupo,” the wolf. And after his death, he became the only man other than Judas Iscariot, whom the Catholic Church officially pronounced to be in Hell. A distinction which he earned by trussing the young bishop of Farno up in his own rochet and publicly performing an unnatural act upon him in front of his assembled troops in broad daylight in the Times Square of Rimini.

It is indeed fortunate that such people do not sit on the boards of major American museums. But, in practice, we know that the Rothko on the Board Room wall, does not necessarily turn its lucky owner into Bambi. Art doesn’t do this. What art does is that it makes us more conscious of our world. It both binds us to it and makes us more critical of it. It places us in contact with the subjectivities of others.

An immensely valuable process. It helps us to order our experience. It may makes us more alert. It gives us pleasure and sometimes ecstasy, something which many people find slightly disreputable. The creativity of others inducts us into a virtual reality, which we can freely choose or as freely reject. And it claims the right to explore that whole virtual room, or the limits of that virtual reality. But the one thing that it cannot do, is instrumentally change our moral behavior. And that is what both sides, in the present, so much pumped up American culture wars would like it to do.

In moments of stress, people and, it seems, especially Americans, reach for moral arguments about culture and creativity. Their episodic intolerance is aggravated, at present by the deep anguish that descended upon this country after it won the Cold War and found itself no better off. With the death of Communism, new anti-Christs, and minor demons had to be found inside the United States, so that the two PC’s, patriotic correctness and political correctness have mutually fostered this search, creating an atmosphere of inflamed accusation.

Scholarship and the arts then become scapegoats and grotesquely politicized stereotypes. Consequently, Congress, and, indeed, the nation is not full of indignant, wanna-be reformers who know literally next to nothing about American culture, except that they want to get tough on it. They have no idea that there is a vast complex and valuable tract of images between Norman Rockwell’s “Christmas Turkey,” and André Serrano’s “Photograph of a Plastic Jesus, Submerged in Urine.” But they do know that there is a large and politically quite powerful wing of zealots, claiming, fraudulently in fact, to speak for all Christians and that government arts funding is a bone that could be tossed to them.

Thus the dispiriting and absurd campaign that has been waged for the last few year, to separate the American government from all forms of American creativity. To say, in effect, that we are there for merchants and bankers, for doctors and soldiers, for Rabbis and farmers. But for you painters and dramatists and writers, never! Because you’re such an insignificant part of the Republic that we imagine. Because we don’t trust you and we don’t think you’re any real use.

The one thing that was needed to support this wholesale assault, by people like Jesse Helms and the czar opportunists like Newt Gingrish, was a strong statement from the White House, affirming that the creative arts do, indeed have an essential role in American life and that the Democratic administration did, indeed, mean to keep backing them, however symbolically, with the admittedly tiny amount of government money that is put at the disposal of the national endowments. But as we know, no such utterance was made. And in the four years of his administration, President Clinton has pronounced the word art, about as often as Ronald Reagan spoke the word AIDS. And for much the same reason, because his handle has told him that any such defense would be politically toxic, and would not get him any votes, because those who were dismayed by the Republican attack on arts funding, had nowhere to go but the Democratic party. Besides, he had no apparent cultural convictions of his own, beyond a belief in Hollywood.

Nobody who chooses Maya Angelou, that black female Rod McKuen, to write his inauguration ode can be said to have a very commanding faith in literature. However, a Democratic presidency needs to show some faith in the arts, if only to avoid invidious comparisons to JFK, who, in truth, didn’t care much for them anyway.

So the official line emanating today is that the purpose of art is to educate children. Everything that Mrs. Clinton has said about this matter has been couched in terms of therapeutic benefit for the extremely young. It’s as though Mozart, when he was writing his work at the age of 11, had six-year-olds, rather than grow-ups, in mind.

The arts, in the official discourse of American today, which is rotten with therapy, seem to be judged largely by their presumed effect upon children. One side suspects them because they might corrupt children and the other side tolerates them because they might instruct children.

Since the only American who ever went on record as actively disliking children was W.C. Fields and is long dead, this is a no-lose situation for both sides. It is an immense ocean of warm sanctimony. But of course, children are all very well, in their way. But where the arts are concerned, we should be allowed to hear it for the grown-ups once in awhile. That, I take it, is the purpose of the Dorothy and Lillian Gish prize. To reward artists who really have made a difference to American culture at large. Who have made adult art for adults. Who have taken on the full burden of complexity and shown us what riches it holds. In doing this, this prize affirms what the American government should affirm but does not. Thank you very much.