Our art institutions are failing. To save them, let conservative artists thrive.
Shouldn’t the arts be expansive enough to include works that offend everyone?
It’s no secret that Democrats and those sympathetic to left-leaning ideas are at the forefront of many of our arts and cultural institutions, especially in the fine arts. For decades, anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) measures — what many refer to as “left-wing ideology” — have been a priority in the art world.
As a First Amendment absolutist, I believe people have every right to express those worldviews. Yet, what of perspectives from contemporary artists on the political right? It’s time to start considering whether the dominance of left-leaning ideologies may be playing into the loss of some of Philadelphia’s most beloved arts institutions.
Late last month, the University of the Arts — an institution whose roots stretch back more than 150 years — announced that it would soon close. And in January, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts announced the discontinuation of its Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts programs. These losses to our city in the last six months have been devastating.
I’ve had many private conversations with arts patrons and artists on the right over the years. These individuals want to support and create contemporary art that celebrates the ideals of the United States and Western civilization. Or, like many liberals, they want to be free to make decisions based on artistic merit and not on DEI mandates.
“One of the things I will not do is hire by race … Ballet does discriminate, just not by race,” Lincoln Jones, the director of the American Contemporary Ballet, told the Free Press. “This is a highly athletic art form that discriminates by body, talent, and artistic sensitivity.”
This was not well received. Jones says his agent warned, “If you say that, you’ll never work again.” The celebrated choreographer says he also lost funding after he refused to put up a black square on American Contemporary Ballet’s Instagram page after George Floyd was murdered by police in 2020.
This is not a new phenomenon. In her 2021 essay, “The Plight of the Conservative Artist in a Liberal World,” conservative singer-songwriter Kay Clarity wrote, “The more that extreme left dogmatism becomes normative in the art world, the harder it is for conservative-leaning artists to get past various gatekeepers as well as work with their colleagues on projects.” She added that few conservative artists “survive in this climate with their convictions and artistry intact.”
This authoritarian McCarthyism against conservative artists is anathema to creative expression.
And the political right believes that creative expression is the heart of capitalism. When conservatives offer scathing critiques of some artistic endeavors, we get stereotyped as being anti-art or wanting to defund it. Wrong. Some of the largest donors to causes on the right also give big money to the arts, including Philly’s own Stephen A. Schwarzman, the founder of Blackstone. I, and many others, support copious amounts of money flowing to the arts, as long as it does not come from the government.
There are good reasons for this. Art that must be bent to government authority is not art — it’s propaganda.
Former President Barack Obama’s administration proved this point. In 2015, then-National Endowment for the Arts communications director Yosi Sergant and White House Office of Public Engagement deputy director Buffy Wicks asked artists and art institutions applying for NEA grants to “plug Barack Obama’s domestic agenda.”
The NEA, from its inception as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” policies in the 1960s, morphed with expedience from arts advocacy to left-wing buffoonery. The tipping point for many Americans losing what scholars call “political trust” in the arts came in 1989, when an NEA grant helped fund a public exhibit that included the photograph Piss Christ by Andres Serrano, which featured a crucifix submerged in urine.
And this wasn’t the worst thing the NEA funded that year. It also gave money to an art exhibit featuring pedophilia.
By the 1990s, the public outcry against the agency was so powerful that lawmakers slashed its budget. Then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R., Ga.) nailed it when he said cutting the NEA’s budget wasn’t just about government spending. It was also going after “an elite group who wants the government to define that art is good.”
Art is a social act — a work that is transformed by both its creator and consumer. Art thrives when there is an intimate connection with an audience. Art institutions must be free to embrace unorthodox, offensive, and even abhorrent views and ideas — just not when they are using government money.
To thrive, the art world’s power brokers must fling its doors open to the radical ideas they now find abhorrent by embracing art from the political right.
After all, shouldn’t the arts be expansive enough to include works that offend everyone?