The arts, the humanities, and the federal government
Plus, moves at the Louvre.
Hello. Since the last time we spoke, I have:
Attended Villa Albertine’s Translation Prize Ceremony honoring two translations of contemporary French works: Eve Hill-Agnus’s translation of Ultramarins by Mariette Navarro, which Deep Vellum will publish in March, and Gregory Elliott’s translation of Pourquoi la guerre? by Frédéric Gros, which Verso will publish next January.
Went to a great reading hosted by Wish You Were Here.
Saw New York City Ballet’s New Combinations program, which included Christopher Wheeldon’s From You Within Me, an lyrical and architectural piece that was lovely, if a bit predictable, Balanchine’s avant-garde Variations pour une Porte et un Soupir, a sometimes grating yet theoretically charming duet, and Justin Peck’s latest, Mystic Familiar. There are some wonderful moments in Peck’s latest; the very first scene, in which dancers, cloud-like, drift across the stage and the final moment, when the curtain goes down as the dancers jump in place again and again, palms upward, were energetically entrancing. That said, the middle two quarters of the dance suffer from an overt sentimentality that Peck can slip into from time to time; the weakest parts of his musical/ballet Illinoise were ones that felt like a bildungsroman by way of ballet, and the same is true for Mystic Familiar. The choreographer appears to have picked up some habits from Broadway—some U-shaped formations and repeated single file lines, from which dancers peel off one by one feel cliché and a bit corny. The heir apparent to Jerome Robbins, Peck shines the most when he leans into controlled chaos and acrobatic, experimental partnering. He gets closer to that strength near the end of Mystic Familiar, but then the piece is over before it feels like it’s had a chance to fully develop. There are some familiar comforts here, but also, this is Peck’s 25th piece for City Ballet. I’d love to see something truly new.
A fun program overall, and I appreciate the choice to throw something as esoteric as the Balanchine on the slate for a day that invariable draws big crowds. The best things to see the remainder of the season are Alexei Ratmansky’s newest work for the company, which I believe to be his take on Paquita, in the Innovators and Icons program, The Firebird in the All Balanchine II program, and, of course, Peter Martins’s Swan Lake.
One thing I loved to see was how sold-out the show was. This was one of NYCB’s Art Series nights, in which all tickets are $54, including an DJ-ed afterparty that surprisingly included free beer and bourbon. The next (and final) Art Series night of the season is next Saturday night, showing the Innovators and Icons program.
Now, the news.
Trump has dissolved the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities, which Ronald Reagan first established in 1982 to support policy objectives in the arts and humanities and facilitate public-private partnerships in the cultural sector, the New York Times reported. In 2017, the committee disbanded in protest of Trump’s then-comments on white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, VA. “Our job is to protect those who tell America’s story, we wanted to be on the right side of history,” committee member Eric Ortner said at the time. President Biden restored the committee in 2022.
What does such a committee do? In the past, it has petitioned the president for expanded funding for arts education, formed the National Student Poets Program, created the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Awards, and supported programming the sparked dialogue through film screenings, preserved historical and cultural artifacts, and led educational programming at the White House.
Trump’s reasoning for disbanding the committee, which included Lady Gaga as co-chair and Shonda Rhimes, Jon Batiste, Kerry Washington, and Jennifer Garner as members, was about “taxpayers.” But it does not take a stretch of the imagination to comprehend why this regime has no desire to support the arts and humanities—fields that encourage a diversity of perspectives, the preservation of history, and expansive thinking.
It is important to recognize that support for the arts has historically been bipartisan. Trump’s previous efforts to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts were repeatedly blocked by Congress. The NYT reported in 2021 that the NEA’s budget is minuscule when compared to the cultural budgets of European nations or even of cities; New York City has an annual cultural funding budget of about $200 million, while the NEA’s 2024 budget was just slightly more, at $210.1 million. We’ve discussed before how the federal government is not the largest funder of the arts and humanities in the nation, and how it is generally understood that the arts are an economic engine, fostering urban development and job-formation. But the tech oligarchs who seem poised to enact a coup—if they have not already started to do so—seem to care little about job growth or the financial security of the general population.
The arts have long been critical to the economic viability of this country. FDR’s New Deal notably provided jobs for “thousands of artists, including musicians, actors, dancers, writers, photographers, painters, and sculptors,” according to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum. This resulted in hundreds of murals, which are still visible in public buildings across the country, among other creative outputs. Of course, there was still backlash to arts funding back then: the Federal Theatre Project, which revitalized the U.S.’s struggling theater industry from 1935 to 1939 and “opened shows simultaneously across the nation, with scripts lightly tailored to their region, making theater relevant to everyone” lost its funding from Congress after just four years. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was the the House Un-American Activities Committee that accused the FTP of “being a Communist front and of producing New Deal propaganda,” The Atlantic reported last year in a review of James Shapiro’s The Playbook. Everything old is new again.
The private sector has always wielded more power on the battlefield that is the “Culture War” in the United States. This is why the arts are so often decried as being the domain of “urban elites” who are out of touch with the lives of ordinary people. It is because we don’t have universal healthcare, accessible higher education, and state funding that makes it possible for one to even scrape by a living in the arts or the humanities without a trust fund, a fully separate career, overwhelming gig work, a wealthy spouse, or sheer dumb luck. This is a feature of the system. It is by design.
How much scholarship is lost when people can’t afford a career in academic or archival work? How much art never gets the chance to see the light of day or the chance to even be produced when would-be creatives feel compelled instead to funnel their energy into content creation that would get them brand sponsorships—or have no choice but to spend their waking hours working for money, taking care of their families, and doing all the things that must be done to survive under capitalism? How many stories about the abuse of power and the subjugation of marginalized communities go untold when it becomes impossible to sustain a career in journalism?
I think we can easily comprehend what is lost. What’s harder to imagine is just how different the world could be if the opposite of all of this could be true.
Meanwhile, in Mexico, an anti-fascist mural by artists Philip Guston and Reuben Kadish has been unveiled after a $150,000 six-month restoration, funded by the Guston Foundation. The mural, titled “The Struggle Against Terrorism,” was originally finished in 1935, the NYT reported.
A leaked memo from Louvre director Laurence des Cars to culture minister Rachida Dati revealed that the museum is in disrepair with areas that are “no longer watertight,” and others that “experience significant temperature variations,” all of which is bad for the preservation of the more than 35,000 artworks it has on display. Des Cars also noted that the museum has few places for visitors to rest—an accessibility issue—and subpar dining options. Early last week, French president Emmanuel Macron announced that the museum would get a major renovation (budget undisclosed) which would give the museum a new, larger entrance, put the “Mona Lisa” in its own room, and fix the damage that Des Cars noted. It is expected to be completed by 2031.
In the meantime you can catch the Louvre’s exhibit on the “Figures of the Fool” on its final day tomorrow. But if you can’t do that, you can also look at ArtNews’s review, which examines how the fool and madness have been understood since the medieval era.
An update on the AI art front: the U.S. Copyright Office has decided that artists can copyright work created with the help of artificial intelligence, but that protection does not extend to work created entirely by generative AI.
For the first time in 138 years, one of the oldest surviving opera manuscript by a Black American composer was performed on Friday, January 24, Smithsonian reported. Edmond Dédé’s 1887 composition “Morgiane” made its worldwide debut in New Orleans at the St. Louis Cathedral by the city’s premier opera company, Opera Créole. The company will also perform the opera—“a fantastical story of a young bride abducted by a villainous sultan, until the bride’s mother…reveals a shocking secret to help save her kidnapped daughter”—tomorrow in Washington, D.C., and on February 5 in New York.
Also, the Smithsonian Institution is freezing federal hiring and closing its diversity office, to abide by Trump’s executive order we spoke about last week. “We are closing our Office of Diversity but retaining our efforts at visitor accessibility as it serves a critical function,” a spokesperson told NPR. While the Institution is not a federal agency, it gets the majority of its budget from the federal government, and two-thirds of its employees are government workers.
Many museums that receive federal funding are still assessing how the anti-DEI executive order will impact them. Hyperallergic reached out to more than 20 institutions and reported that “ambiguous responses from institutions suggest widespread uncertainty and lack of clarity on the consequences of noncompliance.”
If you can read cursive, the National Archives and the National Park Service are in need of your help transcribing Revolutionary War Veteran Pension Files.
Publisher Simon & Schuster will no longer require authors to acquire blurbs for their books published under its flagship imprint, which is great because blurbs create “an incestuous and unmeritocratic literary ecosystem that often rewards connections over talent” publisher Sean Manning wrote in Publisher’s Weekly. Small wins. ▲