Abstract
This chapter turns away from aesthetics and back to politics. This return is necessary because as we discovered in Chapter One, justifying arts subsidies consists of two distinct tasks. One requires answering an aesthetic question: what value does art have for society? The second requires answering a political question: to what extent should a government be in the business of making people’s lives go better? The need to address the political dimension of subsidy cannot be overemphasized, for it is conceptually prior to the aesthetic dimension. This is true not only because making a person’s life go well involves quite a bit more than just exposing her to art; it is also true because even someone who considers art absolutely essential to the good life can with no inconsistency oppose giving it government subsidy. Perhaps this citizen loves both art and state neutrality, wishing for subsidy but arguing that the state ought not promote any particular conception of the good life. Having examined the aesthetic dimension of the proposed democratic justification, this chapter evaluates whether the proposal can meet the argumentative burdens of political philosophy. It does this by evaluating whether the justification offers cogent responses to the best arguments against subsidy, many of which appeared in Chapter One as criticisms of perfectionism.
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References
Democratic Education, pp. 45–47.
Such specificity bestows the argument with what Harry Brighouse terms the virtue of “publicity” in political justifications. Brighouse, Harry. “Neutrality, Publicity, and State Funding of the Arts,” in Philosophy and Public Affairs, October, 1995, pp. 35–63.
Gutmann summarizes Rawls’ criticism as follows: “The problem with perfectionism, as Rawls suggests, is that it provides an inadequate response to the criticism that governments should not force citizens to subsidize goods that do not contribute to their own or the public welfare. The claim that citizens must support art because it is intrinsically valuable not only is unlikely to persuade anyone not already convinced, it opens the door to more troubling claims. If the intrinsic value of great art is great enough, it may be invoked as a sufficient ground for restricting the liberty of some citizens to pursue lower forms of culture. It is, as Rawls suggests, both easy and dangerous to fall back on notions of excellence and intrinsic value when appeals to justice fail.” Gutmann, Amy. Democratic Education. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987, p. 258.
Gutmann writes “Democratic perfectionism sanctions state subsidy of culture only if it is publicly approved, and then only if it satisfies the standards of nonrepression and nondiscrimination.” Quoting Thomas Scanlon, Gutmann goes on to assert “[There is) nothing objectionable about an argument among equal citizens about what is to be recognized as good.” Democratic Education p. 259.
Democratic Education, p. 260.
Now clearly democratic perfectionism is less objectionable than is perfectionism in its more elitist varieties, for in maximizing the citizenry’s role in determining which values to encourage, paternalism is minimized. And questions regarding the existence and knowability of so-called ‘objective’ values are at the least side-stepped. However, while these improvements are real, democratic perfectionism remains problematic for two reasons. One is that the possibility of repression simply appears in another guise: repression by an elite few is exchanged for repression by the majority, which typically carries with it a dangerous air of legitimacy. Furthermore, democratic perfectionism still faces the problem discussed in section III of Chapter One, that perfectionist justifications for subsidy simply do not accommodate much critically-acclaimed contemporary art.
I believe the explanation of this difference relates to differing accounts of democratic edu-
cation itself. In describing her ideal of democratic education, Gutmann exclusively emphasizes the rational, discursive elements of educating democratic citizens. If citizens are to be able to consciously reproduce their society, they must for instance be literate, and they must be capable of rationally deliberating about competing conceptions of the good life. But as should be clear from the arguments of Chapter Three, I believe that in addition to this rational dimension there is also an essentially metaphorical dimension to educating democratic citizens. Learning to judge the significance of one’s actions and decisions cannot occur solely though discursive analysis. One does not (and cannot) judge the subtleties of public life solely through rational thought and debate, although these are indeed important components of the process. Rather, the more complete ideal of a democratic citizen entails being able to assign meaning to political events, and this occurs in much the same way that a spectator, critic, or historian assigns meaning to such events. One arrives at judgments of meaning only through the trial and error process of interpretation.
I see nothing inherent to this extension of democratic education that makes it incompatible with Gutmann’s scheme. Whether or not there are such difficulties is a matter of independent interest, but one that cannot be further pursued here. A promising point of departure in exploring these differences is Gutmann’s claim that the ideal of democratic education is to bring each citizen up to the ‘democratic threshold,’ meaning that “no educable child may be excluded from an education adequate to participating in the political processes that structure choice among good lives.” With this starting point, one might then ask whether the kind of interpretive training I am suggesting is a necessary part of an ‘adequate’ democratic education. If so, then Gutmann’s ideal of a ‘threshold’ of democratic education should be extended. If not, then perhaps what I have identified is a kind of training that brings students not to the ‘threshold’ of democratic participation but to something beyond the threshold. But in either case, the aims of the education itself remain unchanged.
Cohen, G.A. “Self-Ownership, World Ownership, and Equality: Part II.” Social Philosophy and Policy. Vol. 3, no. 2, Spring 1986, p. 77.
Anarchy, State, and Utopia, p. 169.
Anarchy, State, and Utopia, p. ix.
Strictly speaking, this last argument is more an argument based on claims about the proper role of the state. Its appearance here reveals the close interrelation of such claims with claims about just taxation.
Rawls writes: “[Tlhe principles of justice do not permit subsidizing universities and institutes, or opera and the theater, on the grounds that these institutions are intrinsically valuable, and that those who engage in them do not receive compensating benefits. Taxation for these purposes can be justified only as promoting directly or indirectly the social conditions that secure the equal liberties and as advancing in an appropriate way the long-term interests of the least advantaged.” A Theory of Justice, p. 332. For a discussion of the exchange branch, see pp. 282–3.
Furthermore, although the drafters of the American Constitution did “allow a large sphere for such intervention by government as the people deem necessary to establish preconditions for the development of a competent citizenry,” they nonetheless “ruled out projects for the regulation of private life by the national government.” The Democratic Muse, pp. 8–10.
The Democratic Muse, pp. 11, 197–98.
See G. A. Cohen and Keith Graham, “Self-Ownership, Communism and Equality,” in Social Philosophy and Policy, pp. 25–44. See also Cohen, “Self-Ownership, World Ownership, and Equality: Part II,” pp. 77–95.
Anarchy, State, and Utopia, p. 319.
Feinberg, Joel. “Not with My Tax Money: The Problem of Justifying Government Subsidies for the Arts” in Public Affairs Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 2, April 1994, p. 102.
Not with My Tax Money,“ p. 102.
This is of course not to say that such fees would perfectly satisfy the demands of justice, for because such fees would likely not cover the entire cost of the projects, some additional taxation from general sources would be needed. But the fees would at least allocate some of the burden in a way that that directly reflected the degree to which a given citizen received any of the benefits.
Not with My Tax Money,“ p 102.
Nagel, Thomas. “Symposium on the Public Benefits of the Arts and Humanities,” in Columbia Journal of Art and the Law, vol. 9 (1984), p. 236.
Not with My Tax Money,“ p. 120.
Manning, Richard M. “Intrinsic Value and Overcoming Feinberg’s Benefit Principle,” in Public Affairs Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 2, April 1994, p. 134.
However, Manning does agree with Feinberg’s claim that the government may justifiably support an activity even in the absence of any direct, universal benefits for the indignant taxpayer. That is to say, Manning believes that the demands of the benefit principle may be met even when the indignant taxpayer claims to be receiving nothing that he or she considers to be of any value. To hold otherwise, Manning maintains, is either to embrace a false empirical assumption that a person is always the best judge of her own good, or to embrace a false metaphysical view of the self as ‘individual creator.’ Public Affairs Quarterly, pp. 134138.
Overcoming Feinberg’s Benefit Principle,“ pp. 138–9.
Overcoming Feinberg’s Benefit Principle,“ p. 139.
Source: “Chronology of Controversy,” a fact sheet prepared by the National Endowment for the Arts, 1992, p. 1.
Chronology of Controversy,“ p. 1.
As a side note, if this were in fact Serrano’s intention, he would have been well-served by making that fact a bit more clear up-front, for it is difficult to believe that he did not realize that his work would be devisive and controversial. This case raises interesting issues in interpretive theory, namely the relevance and propriety of considering the artist’s intentions in evaluating a work of art. See Monroe Beardsley’s classic article “The Intentional Fallacy,” with William Wimsatt, in The Verbal Icon, Chapter 1, University of Kentucky Press, 1954.
Furthermore, ‘disharmony’ in a democracy is neither inescapable nor undesirable. See Gutmann and Thompson, “The Disharmony of Democracy.”
Although we do make some concessions of this type when we exempt pacifists from combat duty by granting them the status of ‘conscientious objector.’ At the same time, however, we do not exempt such persons from paying the taxes needed to fund military operations. “Chronology of Controversy,” p. 2.
NEA has traditionally been required by Congress to award 28.5 percent of its funds directly to state arts agencies who in turn distribute these monies as they see fit. Beginning in FY 1996, however, this percentage has increased to 40 percent. Furthermore, the NEA no longer grants any funds directly to individuals, with the 60 percent of their funds not awarded to states awarded directly to local arts institutions and arts companies. Data from talk given at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, by A.B. Spellman, Director of Guidelines and Panel Operations, National Endowment for the Arts, February 21, 1996.
Overcoming Feinberg’s Difference Principle,“ pp. 138–9.
Beyond Neutrality, p. 153
I draw this distinction, based on conversations with George Sher, and from “Paternalistic Behavior,” by Bernard Gert and Charles M. Culver, Philosophy and Public Affairs 6, no. I (Fall 1976).
Dworkin, Ronald. “Can A Liberal State Support Art,” in A Matter of Principle. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985, p. 230.
Democratic Education, p. 287.
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Schwartz, D.T. (2000). The Politics of Subsidy. In: Art, Education, and the Democratic Commitment. Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture, vol 7. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9444-8_5
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