The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,25
They have become a friend to little Jimmy Joyce. They are a platform for that outrageous, shocking, controversial George Bernard Shaw. But, in addition, we are food, we are rent and we are medical care for that arrogant and feisty Zora Neale Hurston—who didn’t have any of that at the end. We have a chance to be the audience in the performance hall for Scott Joplin—who didn’t have it at the end. What we do is no small thing; it is the first of the four or, I guess, five legs upon which the endowment stands. And any kick to that leg, any break in it, is insupportable because the endowment cannot stand without it.
Now for a very personal note. I do not want to go into my old age without Social Security, but I can; I do not want to go into my old age without Medicare, but I can, I’ll face it; I do not like the notion of not having a grand army to defend me, but I can face that. What I cannot face is living without my art. Like many of you here, with your own particular backgrounds, I come from a group of people who have always refused to live that way. In the fields we would not live without it. In chains we would not live without it—and we lived historically in the country without everything, but not without our music, not without our art. And we produced giants. We, the National Council on the Arts, the endowment, are the bastions; we will make it possible to keep individuals and artists alive and flourishing in this country.
Arts Advocacy
WHENEVER ANYONE begins to think about arts advocacy, a complex obstacle presents itself at once: artists have a very bad habit of being resilient, and it is that resilience that deceives us into believing that the best of it sort of gets done anyhow—and the “great” of that “best” sort of lasts anyhow. The public and even academic perception is that nothing, neither social nor personal devastation, stops the march and production of powerful and beautiful artworks.
Chaucer wrote in the middle of the plague.
James Joyce and Edvard Munch carried on with a blind eye and a weak one respectively.
French writers excelled in and defined an age writing in the forties under Nazi occupation.
The greatest of composers was able to continue while deaf.
Artists have fought madness, ill-health, penury, and humiliating exile—political, cultural, religious—in order to do their work.
Accustomed to their grief, their single-minded capacity for it and their astonishing perseverance in spite of it, we sometimes forget that what they do is in spite of distress—not because of it.
Last year I spoke to an extremely gifted and well-established artist who told me he vetoed a living for a fellow artist because he thought having so much money would undermine the recipient—hurt his work—and that the applicant was “too good to receive such a financial windfall.” To me the shock of that revelation is that, in some quarters, it is not shocking at all. For even when there is attention turned to an artist’s plight in the form of a modest living, there is at the same time a problem of perception: What constitutes a hospitable environment and what principles inform whether we provide or deny it?
It brings us, as always, to the question of how haphazard should art support be. Should it take its text from the hazard of being an artist and become itself erratic, risky? Should it examine artists’ lives, note the pain in so much of them, and imitate that pain by enfranchising it—even producing it, as in the anecdote above, for the good of the artist? Should grief and penury be built into art patronage, so the marketable wares created under those limiting circumstances are folded into the equation of the work’s value in the marketplace in years and eras to come?*
When all attention is withdrawn from artists, they have always been mad enough to do it anyway, so what’s the fuss? Can’t they depend on enlightened philanthropy when available—and look elsewhere when it isn’t? Or can’t they depend on the marketplace—which is to say design the art itself for the marketplace—and hope the target will not move before their work is completed? Or can’t they rely on government support and trust to chance or the law of averages that their work will prove at least equal to the dollar value of the support?