As the President has proposed the largest budget increase in 20 years for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), now is a good time to look back at an April 22, 2003 Dennis Prager column on artists' values:
Many, perhaps most, great artists are geniuses in one area and underdeveloped elsewhere in life. It seems that when God grants great artistic talent to an individual, that individual is given few other gifts, least of all moral clarity or wisdom.
That is why there is rarely any link between artistic greatness and human greatness. We should no more expect a great actor or composer or painter to be a great human being than we should expect a great lawyer, truck driver, businessman or athlete to be a great human being. Art rarely makes a person wiser or kinder, whether the person is a connoisseur of art or the creator of it.
Those of us who love classical music -- and as an occasional orchestral conductor, I am particularly involved in music -- have long had to confront the lack of connection between genius and goodness or wisdom. Richard Wagner, for example, was one of the world's greatest composers and a racist anti-Semite. Neither Beethoven nor Mozart was known to be a particularly decent human being. Herbert von Karajan, one of the most celebrated conductors of the 20th century, served as Kapellmeister under Adolf Hitler and never apologized for his support of the Nazis. The great African-American singer Paul Robeson passionately supported Joseph Stalin until the day that mass murderer died.
. . . Only those who worship art should be surprised. And there are many of them. With the demise of the worship of God in Europe, secular Westerners began to worship new gods, most especially art and artists. This explains why so many people have asked how Germany, which produced Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, could also produce gas chambers -- as if producing great composers should in some way raise the moral level of that society.
So the next time you see "artists for" or "artists against" some cause, without reading any further, you can pretty much bet your mortgage that whatever it is they are for or against, they are morally wrong. While God may have granted artists little wisdom, He apparently did not skimp on hubris.
To the Left, state funding of their religion (art) is an absolute moral obligation; however, such funding to other religions - especially traditionalist and "unenlightened" Christianity and Judaism - is unconstitutional and corrupting to both church and state.
Let's keep in mind what the Salvation Army would do with our tax dollars versus what the NEA would do. While it has a new chairman who many believe will reverse its moral decay, the fact remains that in the past the NEA's priests have funded many projects with obscene and/or anti-religious content, including homosexual film festivals and blasphemous exhibits, in addition to plenty of just plain undisciplined, unskilled garbage, what historian Paul Johnson calls "fashion art." There is no guarantee this will not recur. Furthermore, in an era of out-of-control federal spending, the government should not waste 140 million tax dollars on what is, at best, a non-essential budget item, similar to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (see our Jan. 1, 2004 entry).
Use our Take Action page to ask President Bush to reconsider the proposal and privatize the NEA. Ask your other representatives to do the same. A free market in art, like a free market in education, will liberate both the producers and consumers of the product.
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