The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [169]
As for the sequencing of the human genome, commercial science played a role but its aims were quite particular. The genome is vast, and the profit-seeking wing of the sequencing enterprise balkanized the territory, looking only for the profitable sites. The fullness of the genome was described only by the public Human Genome Project, and that was supported by philanthropic gifts (mostly from the Wellcome Trust in England) and by government funding (mostly the National Institutes of Health in the United States).
Not surprisingly, the institutions that support such noncommercial enterprises will change over time. If we tire of the focused patronage of an established church, we may separate church and state and give a tax exemption to all denominations. If we don’t like royal patronage, we may turn to private philanthropy. If the privately endowed colleges serve only the elite, we may turn to state and community colleges supported by the public purse. More broadly, where church or crown or private endowments do not meet our needs, we may turn to what might be called “democratic patronage.” Public education, public hospitals, public libraries, pure science, the arts, and the humanities: in the last century, all of these have been underwritten by democratic communities that tax themselves to support things of value that would not otherwise thrive.
Which brings me back to the fall of the Soviet Union, for it was the cold war that energized much of the public funding devoted to art and science in the decades after the Second World War. In my own country at least (and I must confine my remarks to the American case, that being the only one I know well), these were the years when our leaders felt called upon to show off the liberal, capitalist state, and contrast its vitality with the banality of the Eastern bloc. Neutral nations and Eastern-bloc dissidents were meant to see the remarkable energy and innovation that the West’s freedoms produced. In the case of support for the arts, the energizing distinction was well expressed in a 1952 New York Times Magazine essay by the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Barr: “The modern artists’ nonconformity and love of freedom cannot be tolerated within a monolithic tyranny and modern art is useless for the dictator’s propaganda.”
The history of this period of what I now think of as “democratic-propaganda patronage” falls into at least three phases, a series of responses to the question that Barr used as the title of his essay, “Is Modern Art Communistic?” Barr argued the negative, setting American freedom and nonconformity against the Soviets’ totalizing impulse, but his position held no sway in the U.S. Congress. Elected officials in the United States regularly attacked the arts (“All modern art is Communistic,” declared one Missouri congressman) and when the U.S. State Department tried to include artwork in its cultural diplomacy the Congress directly undercut the effort. The exemplary moment came in 1947, when an exhibition of modern painting called “Advancing American Art” (including work by Georgia O’Keeffe and Arshile Gorky) traveled to Europe, first to Paris and then to Prague, where the Russians felt called upon to mount a rival exhibition. They needn’t have bothered, for the exhibition was sufficiently opposed at home, described in Congress as having been assembled by “the Communists and their New Deal fellow travelers.” The tour was canceled and the artwork sold as surplus government property at 5 percent of its value.*
Thus did Phase One of postwar cultural support really begin, the covert phase, for when Congress failed to support American cultural propaganda, the CIA stepped in. As the director of the CIA’s International Organizations Division later remarked of one congressional opponent: “He made it very difficult to get Congress to go along with some of the things that we wanted to do––send art abroad, send symphonies abroad, publish magazines abroad, whatever. That’s one of the reasons why it had to be done covertly… In order to