Blood, sweat, and beauty

A Department of the Arts? These artists said no

In my recent column on proposals to elevate culture and the arts to a Cabinet-level department (see ICYMI below), I quoted the unvarnished opinion of the American painter John Sloan. "Sure, it would be fine to have a Ministry of the Fine Arts in this country," Sloan said of an earlier scheme to create a federal bureau of fine arts. "Then we'd know where the enemy is."

Many great artists, writers, and thinkers have felt much the same way. In "Art," an essay published in 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson derided the notion that government should play a role in nurturing or promoting culture and the arts. "Beauty will not come at the call of the legislature," he avowed. "It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men."

In 1978, the novelist John Updike was asked to testify before a congressional subcommittee on a bill authorizing a White House conference on the humanities. He was courteous but highly skeptical.

"I would rather have as my patron a host of anonymous citizens digging into their own pockets for the price of a book or a magazine," he said, "than a small body of enlightened and responsible men administering public funds." He understood that with government funding comes government control, and government control is always a threat to artistic truth and excellence. The National Endowment for the Arts has always touted its grants as a kind of official stamp of approval for worthy art, but what serious artist wants to be patted on the head by the state? In Updike's words:

I would rather chance my personal vision of truth striking home here and there in the chaos of publication that exists than attempt to filter it through a few sets of official, honorably public-spirited scruples. . . .

If I try to think of writers who, in the last century, have most brilliantly illuminated our sense of humanity, which I take to be the end purpose of the humanities, I think of Freud and Kafka, of Proust and Joyce, of Whitman and Henry James, and wonder, How many of these brave, strange, stubborn spirits would have won a subsidy from their governments? I think a government, in time, can come to cherish a nation's cultural heritage, its creators safely dead and in perspective. But in the living present how can . . . grants panels not be drawn to the sociologically winsome and the amusingly communal? How can legislators asked to vote tax money away not begin to think of "guidelines" that insidiously edge toward censorship? If government money becomes an increasingly important presence in the financing of the humanities, is there a danger, I respectfully ask, of humanists becoming lobbyists, and of the strategies of politics displacing the strategies of the mind?

If that was cause for concern in 1978 — before the contemporary culture war had exploded, before "cancel culture" was targeting careers and destroying reputations, and before a toxic partisanship had begun to corrode American politics at every level — how much more is it so today?

Novelist John Updike: Put government in charge of overseeing and funding arts and culture, and it will 'insidiously edge toward censorship.'

In 1948, the far-left Progressive Party nominated former Vice President Henry Wallace as its candidate for president and adopted a platform that called for the establishment of a federal Department of Culture. "Art, to the Progressives, had political utility; if cosseted and fed, artists could be of great use to the powers-that-be," the novelist Bill Kauffman explained later in a monograph for the Cato Institute. "One is reminded of Robert Frost's observation that in socialist states, the subsidized artist faces a choice between 'death or Pollyanna.'"

At the time, many artists resolutely opposed anything like a federal arts bureau. The head of the American Symphony Orchestra League feared that dependence on government largesse might turn musicians into "mere pawns in a centrally managed, nationalistic program whose control could be so buried in bureaucracy as to give little hint of its ultimate purpose." The sculptor Wheeler Williams insisted that "the true artist is perforce a rugged individualist and does not want to be kept a poodle by the government with dilettante experts as nursemaids."

Larry Rivers, a jazz musician and painter often called the "godfather" of Pop Art, warned that "the government taking a role in art is like a gorilla threading a needle. It is at first cute, then clumsy, and most of all impossible." The renowned Lawrence Ferlinghetti, bookstore owner and Beat poetry publisher, mocked what he called "cooperating poets and publishers" who tied themselves to federal handouts. He knew well how dangerous it can be to let government have any role in approving, promoting, or financing the arts. It was under Ferlinghetti's City Lights imprint, after all, that Allen Ginsberg's Howl, that infamous, filthy, revolutionary, influential, and now venerable poem, was published, asd a result of which Ferlinghetti was charged with violating the obscenity statutes and prosecuted.

Kaufmann rounded up other examples:

[P]oet Robert Lowell . . . in 1965 turned down an invitation to read at the Johnson White House. "Every serious artist knows that he cannot enjoy public celebration without making subtle public commitments," Lowell explained. . . . Ernest Hemingway, cussed ornery independent, grumbled, "A writer is an outlier like a Gypsy. . . . If he is a good writer he will never like any government he lives under. His hand should be against it and its hand will always be against him."

The case for a federal department of the arts is no more compelling today than it was 50 years ago, and not just because there is no warrant for any such thing in the Constitution. It would be bad for the arts themselves. The less the arts have to do with the smelly business of government and politics, the healthier they'll be.

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My favorite Bellows painting

Speaking of art:

In April, I tried something new: I wrote an Arguable post about a painting, John Singer Sargent's captivating likeness of a Moroccan woman inhaling the incense of burning ambergris. As I am neither an artist nor a scholar, I wasn't sure what kind of reaction to expect. To my gratification, I received comments on that post from quite a few readers, many of whom had never written before and several of whom were as enamored of that painting as I am.

So I thought I would write today about another painting I love: This is Stag at Sharkey's, a 1909 work by George Bellows, a one-time semipro ballplayer (both baseball and basketball) who became one of the most acclaimed American artists of the early 20th century. He was a contemporary of John Sloan, whom I quoted above; both were members of what later came to be called the Ashcan School of painting.

The painting depicts a fight at Sharkey's Athletic Club, a rowdy New York saloon with a boxing ring in the back, located across from Bellows's studio on Broadway. At the time, prizefighting was illegal in New York, so bouts were held in private clubs like Sharkey's. Participation was usually limited to members, but occasionally an outsider — a "stag" — would be granted temporary admission and allowed to compete.

This is a painting pumped full of testosterone — it is visceral, raw, relentless, primal. Bellows was an artist of the Realist school. He portrayed not romantic, ethereal images of water lilies and ballet dancers but gritty scenes of congested slums, day laborers, construction sites. And of fights — Bellows made several paintings, sketches, and drawings of boxing matches, but Stag at Sharkey's is the most admired.

The painting conveys the unbridled violence of the two men contending for the prize. With blurred, furious brushwork, Bellows evokes the force with which the elbow of one fighter collides with the jaw of the other. Blood spatters not only the two boxers, but also some of the spectators watching from the crowd. Those spectators are looking up at the fight, and so are we — Bellows paints the scene from the perspective of the crowd, which sits down low, their faces level with the floor of the ring.

Nothing about this painting prettifies the feral brutality of the scene. "I don't know anything about boxing. I'm just painting two men trying to kill each other," Bellows later said. Presumably he enjoyed watching prize bouts — countless people do, myself not among them — but there is at least a hint in the picture that not everyone feels the same way. At the center of the front row of spectators, directly below the entwined feet of the fighters, sits a young boy, peering up at the clashing giants. With only half his face visible, the boy seems anything but gleeful or exultant. His expression is worried, anxious. Is this the first time he has been brought to a fight? Did he know what to expect? Does he care who wins the ferocious battle or does he just want it to end?

Of course, this is one fight that will never end. In Stag at Sharkey's, Bellows gives us two boxers locked forever in the heat of that one thudding moment, with elbow meeting jaw and neither fighter yielding an inch as the referee tries vainly to separate them. And perhaps Bellows, too, is in the fight. His "slashing brushstrokes themselves are a violent act," wrote art historian Robert Haywood in 1988, "magnifying boxing's anxiety and vehemence toward the perfected body."

Those "slashing brushstrokes" are part of what appeals to me about Stag at Sharkey's. They infuse the picture with such energy and intensity that the fighters — and, for that matter, the ref and the spectators — seem actually to be moving. Beyond any detail of technique, however, I marvel at Bellows's ability to evoke such beauty and grace from a scene so violently and desperately physical.

Since 1922, Stag at Sharkey's has been owned by the Cleveland Museum of Art. I grew up in Cleveland and may have seen the painting during a school trip when I was a child. If so, the memory has long since faded. The next time I travel to Ohio, I intend to go back for a good long look.

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Hayli's Law and lemonade liberation

Hayli Martenez was 9 years old in 2017, when, with her mom's help, she opened a lemonade stand in her front yard in Kankakee, Illinois. She called her fledgling business Haylibug Lemonade. Her price was 50 cents a cup and all her earnings went to her college fund.

Hayli's neighborhood is plagued by crime, and at first she was nervous about spending so much time in public.

"It was kind of scary because we liked to stay in the house. We didn't like to come outside because of all the stuff happening around here," Hayli told Illinois Policy.

"As we kept doing it, I got to see everybody smile when they tasted my lemonade. It was just . . . wow! They were lining up to get my lemonade."

Then town hall dispatched its grinches.

After the local paper ran a story on the Kankakee lemonade stand, agents from the city and county health departments ordered Hayli and her mother to shut it down or face fines.

Stories like the Martenezes' have been widely reported in recent years. Kids in Texas, New York, Virginia, Colorado, Oregon, Maryland, Georgia, and California are among those who have been forced to stop selling lemonade to neighbors and passersby on the grounds that they never got the necessary permits, health inspections, or other tokens of official approval.

(In fairness, common sense has broken through in some places: When police in Niceville, Fla., received complaints about an unlicensed lemonade business being operated in the town, the investigating officer discovered that the "business" was two little girls selling cold drinks outside the Faith Independent Baptist Church. He decided there was nothing wrong with what they were doing, gave them $100, and even joined them in a water-balloon fight. Maybe every town should be named Niceville.)

Now, thanks to Illinois lawmakers, Hayli is back in the lemonade business.

On July 9, Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed Hayli's Law, a measure passed unanimously by the Illinois House and Senate. The statute provides that "the Department of Public Health, the health department of a unit of local government, or a public health district may not regulate the sale of lemonade or nonalcoholic drinks or mixed beverages by a person under the age of 16."

Illinois has long been ranked among the worst governed states in the union, but this is a happy exception, well worth applauding. And other states are following suit: New Hampshire's legislature passed a "lemonade law" last week and sent it to Governor Chris Sununu for his signature. "It allows kids under the age of 14 to sell soft drinks on their private property without getting licenses or permits from cities and towns that otherwise require them," reports Reason magazine, which notes that the measure received "a surprising amount of pushback" in the legislature, where some lawmakers — true to the Granite State's philosophy of limited government — wondered why the state had to get involved in what has generally been handled at the municipal level.

There is a larger issue here: the clumsy licensure requirements and regulations that states pass or promulgate without thinking through what enforcement will mean. State licenses are required for scores of occupations — everything from hairstylists to funeral directors to massage therapists. Licenses are often mandated by the state at the behest of the industry, which sees the requirements as a way to hold down competition.

Few would challenge the soundness of requiring surgeons and emergency medical technicians to be properly trained and licensed. But years of empirical studies have shown that requiring licenses for many other occupations — manicurists, sheet metal contractors, dental assistants, fortune tellers (!) — do little to protect public health or consumer welfare.

As for Hayli and her peers, the Country Time lemonade brand is pressing other states to get on the "lemonade law" bandwagon. It has set up a legal-ade website to promote the issue. Its nonpartisan slogan: "Whether you live in a red state or blue state, every state can be a yellow state." So far, though, only 16 states have been colored yellow on Country Time's map. Governor Sununu's signature should raise that to 17. That still leaves a lot of lemonade-stand deserts for lawmakers to rectify. Come on, people, do it for the kids.

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ICYMI

I wrote yesterday's column in response to recent suggestions that America needs to have a federal Cabinet department focused on culture and the arts — a US version of the ministries of culture that are common elsewhere. It's not a new idea: A delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention proposed that Congress be empowered to promote art and literature. But the idea was spiked. Like religion, the arts are vital to American life and indispensable to the marketplace of ideas, and that is why they should remain government-free. Whatever might be wrong with arts and culture in contemporary America, more government isn't the solution. Ministries of culture are for other countries; here we cherish separation of art and state.

My Wednesday column was on the antigovernment protests in Cuba. Thousands of citizens spontaneously poured into the streets to vent their frustration at wretched living conditions, decrepit health care, and endless food shortages. Many chanted "Abajo la dictadura" ("Down with the dictatorship") and "Libertad!" Some even waved American flags. That must have shocked American leftists, who offered little support for the pro-freedom protesters because they were too busy condemning the longstanding US embargo as the cause of Cuba's misery. Cubans know better. The agony they live with is caused by the ruthless communist despots who for more than six decades have kept them in chains. Regime change is the key to ending Cuba's misery.

I returned to Hubwonk, the podcast of the Pioneer Institute, a leading Boston think tank. The topic was antisemitic violence, prompted by my recent column on the broad-daylight stabbing of Rabbi Shlomo Noginski in Boston. In my conversation with host Joe Selvaggi, I explained that antisemitism is the oldest of hatreds, a lethal virus that is continually evolving. At various points in history, the hatred of Jews has been focused on their religion; at other times, on their "race." Today, antisemitism chiefly takes the form of unhinged loathing of the Jewish state. Click here to listen.

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(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).

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