Title: Live the Good Life
(Amazon has a page for the book, but doesn't have even a computer-generated image for it. Hmm. It wouldn't be fair to gank an image from another online bookseller. Let's see what Morguefile can do...here's an image from OgleEye tagged as "good life." If you click it should open the Amazon page for the book.)
Author:
Wolf von Eckardt
Date:
1982
Publisher:
American Council for the Arts
ISBN:
0-915400-24-3
Length:
129 pages
Illustrations:
many black-and-white photos, some graphics
Quote:
“Government involvement in the arts has been part of civilization since
civilization began.”
Everybody
has a vision of “the good life,” so when I saw yet another book describing yet
another vision on sale, cheap, I picked it up. How would Von Eckardt define the
good life?
Von
Eckardt wants more art in the cities. He wants funding from private donors, and
free contributions from struggling young artists, but he has no problem with
government funding either; he thinks the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
should have been shoehorned onto Pennsylvania Avenue. “In…Mesopotamian, Babylonian,
and Egyptian civilizations, church and state were the same and the creation
of art was an integral part of the state religion,” he writes wistfully. “In
the Athens of Pericles…[w]ealthy citizens were asked to ‘lead the chorus,’ that
is, pay for the production of a play, an honor as compelling as paying taxes.”
He
dreamed of the sort of totalitarian “planning” that would overrule the sinister
forces of democracy, individualism, and frugality. “[M]any slums are being
reclaimed…This does not mean that the center city will necessarily regain all of
its lost population. That depends on whether the city will offer affordable
housing. It would be unfortunate if the lack of effective regional planning
were to force the new generation of suburbanites to settle on the suburban
fringe…Unfortunately,w e have no tradition of national land use, let alone
regional planning.”
Too many
artists, Von Eckardt complains, sit around and wail that “they,” the
government, don’t fund “us” the artists. “Artists…must urge, vote, pressure, coax, cajole, wheedle, and exhort the Muses into positions that allow them to
whisper into the ears of planners, administrators, and politicians. The cause is not served by general complaints that artists need more support…We all hear
enough about what society can do for the arts. We want to hear what the arts can
do for society and for the things society happens to be particularly interested
in at the moment.”
He wrote from Washington, D.C., the city to which I came during the year after
this book was published. Plenty of people in Washington agreed with Von
Eckardt. If they didn’t think artists should sell out to the “planners” and
crank out the kind of propaganda art for which the old Soviet Union became
infamous, well, they’d take their funding where they found it. They had no
problem with the idea of their “creativity” being exploited for political
purposes, or rewarded based on its usefulness for political purposes rather
than on its merits, or funded by coercive taxation rather than by the kind of
individual communication toward which creative artists struggle.
Results
were, to put it charitably, mixed. There’s a lot of art and culture, free for the soaking up, in every part of
Washington (and its suburb-towns). Perhaps the best way to assess Live the Good Life is to reflect on the
extent to which that art and culture really gave Washingtonians “the good
life.”
What
leaps first to my mind is that a lot of it is indeed beautiful, and enjoyable.
The newspapers that list even the semi-planned art, music, drama, dance, and
handcrafts events that are available each weekend are thick papers. Of course it’s possible for Washingtonians to choose to spend a
weekend at home, or out of town. (Washingtonians traditionally come from somewhere else, in order to earn money in
Washington, and they traditionally consider it obligatory to use as many of the
long weekends and mandatory holidays as possible for travelling, taking that
money back home, and spreading it around.) It’s not, however, possible for
Washingtonians to consider going out, look at the entertainment options
available, and decide to stay home because nothing interesting is going on that
weekend. The city (and suburbs) have certain obligations to the tourists. Those
obligations include bringing art, music, etc., from every State and nation, and
sharing it liberally—one might even say prodigally—with anyone who goes outside
on a weekend. As a result Washingtonians are bombarded with far more art and
culture than they can consume. A serious “planning” concern involves staging
open-air concerts far enough apart that the bands don’t clash with one another.
What
leaps to mind next is that the best of Washington’s art-and-culture is the
least “planned.” I feel almost subversive in whispering that (tiny print,
please) the Smithsonian Museums never were my very favorite places, and I don’t
think I ever went to the Kennedy Center at all. Too much “planning,” staging,
marketing, makes a mob scene, which does strange and unpleasant things to any
artistic endeavor. The bigger an event is, the more widely publicized, the less
pleasure it gives. I've enjoyed Smithsonian events but I suspect I would have enjoyed them more if they'd been smaller-scale and staged at Georgetown University.
Finally…from
the artists’ own point of view, the idea of “downtown” as a place to visit, not
a place to live, has much to recommend it. Humans do not thrive in densely
populated areas. Artists, due to their need for creative solitude, suffer the
effects of crowding more acutely than other people. When artists do work in
crowded conditions, some of them do produce art that is good in a way, but what
their work is good at communicating is depression, worry, angst, alienation,
and hostility. When artists produce the
kind of art that people want to look at, listen to, read, dance to, or sing
along with, they can indeed go into inner
cities, and find inspiration in inner cities, but they work privately in
spacious, wholesome places.
So, has Von Eckardt’s book any value? I think it has historic value. The arts don’t
need to be heavily “planned” and subsidized into the service of a political
party or movement, but it’s useful to be able to document the early stages of
the current encroachment of “planners” on the arts and on other aspects of city
and town life.
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