The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,24

text—is peripheral to the discussion. Perhaps it is true, as someone suggested, that English teachers have always envied the mathematicians—all those little formulas they put on the wall—and that they now would like to have a group of formulae they could also put on the blackboard. But where the criticism is itself the art form—that doesn’t mean it isn’t an art form—but when it denigrates the sources, there is a genuine threat to the preeminence of the creative artists. And that is significant, and it is filtering down to the artists themselves, some of whom are totally isolated from the critics in a way they never were before. There was a time in fourteenth-century Germany, in eleventh-century Italy, when the great translators were the poets, when the great critics were the writers; they did both. Now it is separate; the creative artist goes one route and the critic goes another.

Because the individual artist does not manage or control, at least in literature, what is taught—not even what is produced and what is decided to be taught—the endowment plays an incomparable role in his life. With an agency like the endowment there is a place and a means for creative artists to come together and make decisions about what ought to be nurtured, and what ought to be of value, and what ought to be supported. He may not have that right in universities; he certainly has not that right in publishing institutions; he probably does not have it in the media that exist and surround him. But he does have it in a confederacy and a brotherhood and a sisterhood—in the structure as provided by the panels and the programs of the National Endowment for the Arts. The endowment assuages the guilt of a gifted person who has the “misfortune” to do something extraordinarily well the first time. The endowment says out loud and in cash, “Your needs can be met. Your early work may be worth attention, even though it is early, even though you have not hit your stride, even though this may not be the ‘breakthrough’ work.” The endowment says, “We will give you some help now. Your problems of audience, your problems of distribution, your problems of rent and time and space and data are not fixed stars; they are not immutable. They can be solved—and if not totally solved, they can be ameliorated.”

The endowment, through its panels and its programs, says, out loud and in cash, that your ethnic aesthetics are not to be questioned by people who don’t know anything about them. It says your cultural differences are not to be denigrated, especially by people outside the culture. It says your working-class background will not keep you from the full expression of your art. For, among other reasons, this is a country founded by laborers and farmers and small businessmen and convicts and clerks and pirates—so we know about your working-class background because we are your background.

Half of all of the funding categories have a place for the express aid and guidance for support of this beleaguered, guilt-ridden, frustrated species—the individual artist whom we have perhaps inadvertently relegated to the necessity of pain and struggle.

The individual artist is by nature a questioner and a critic; that’s what she does. Her questions and criticisms are her work, and she is frequently in conflict with the status quo. But the artist can’t help that; if she is to have any integrity at all in her art, she can’t help it. The endowment does not penalize her for the controversy her art may engender because it is, or ought to be, axiomatic with the endowment that the last things we wish to encourage are safe art and safe artists. So the endowment takes risks—takes them itself and thereby underlies and legitimatizes the necessity for risk, the necessity for innovation and criticism. And it is in that climate that individual artists develop.

I remember a time, years ago, when I sat on a literature panel; the big problem was trying to get the writers to apply. They didn’t want it; they thought they were going to be censored; they thought the government was meddling in their books; they thought they couldn’t say certain things. There was a taint attached to the acceptance of the fellowship grants and the direct grants, and only with persistence were the panels able to overcome it. With persistence, the panels of the endowment have become Brother Theo to little Vinnie van Gogh.