Scholars, economists, revolutionaries keep debating, but one very good answer has held now for 2, 500 years. The function of art, Aristotle told us, is
. You go to the theater, you listen to a symphony, you look at a painting, you watch a ballet. You laugh, you cry. You feel pity, fear. You see in others’ lives a reflection of your own. And the catharsis comes: a cleansing, a clarity, a feeling of relief and understanding that you carry with you out of the theater or the concert hall. Art, music, drama — here is a point worth recalling in a pandemic — are instruments of psychic and social health.
Not since 1945 has the United States required catharsis like it does in 2021. The coronavirus pandemic is the most universal trauma to befall the nation since World War II, its ravages compounded by a political nightmare that culminated, last week, in an actual assault on democratic rule. The last year’s mortal toll, its social isolation and its civic disintegration have brought this country to the brink. Yet just when Americans need them most, our artists and arts institutions are confronting a crisis that may endure long after infections abate.
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Professional creative artists are facing unemployment at rates well above the national average — more than 52 percent of actors and 55 percent of dancers were out of work in the third quarter of the year, at a time when the national unemployment rate was 8.5 percent. In California, the arts and entertainment fields generated a greater percentage of unemployment claims than even the hospitality sector. Several hundred independent music venues have closed; art galleries and dance companies have shuttered. And in my own life, I’ve listened to painters and performers weep over canceled shows and tours, salivate over more generous government support in Europe or Asia, and ask themselves whether 2021 is the year to abandon their careers.
Beyond value in its own right, culture is also an industry sector accounting for more than 4.5 percent of this country’s gross domestic product, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.Credit... Invisible Creature
“Hell, they’ve got to eat just like other people, ” said Harry Hopkins, the first supervisor of the Works Progress Administration, when an official in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration queried whether artists merited federal employment. Art, music, dance and theater are social goods, but also individual professions — ones more endangered than at any time since the 1930s, and facing lasting damage even as the pandemic abates.
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The effects of this cultural depression will be excruciating, and not only for the symphony not written, the dance not choreographed, the sculpture not cast, the musical not staged. Beyond value in its own right, culture is also an industry sector accounting for more than 4.5 percent of this country’s gross domestic product, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Other leaders have noticed: in their New Year addresses, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, singled out culture as a sector in economic peril, while Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said that “freelancers and artists fear for their livelihood.” But until last month, when the outgoing U.S. president belatedly signed a stimulus package with targeted arts relief bundled within, this government had barely acknowledged the crisis that Covid-19 has posed to culture. Nor have private philanthropists filled the gap; while some large foundations have stepped up their disbursements, total giving to North American arts organizations has slackened by 14 percent on average.
As President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. prepares to take office next week, and begins to flesh out his proposals to help the nation recover, he and his cabinet have the chance — the responsibility — to offer a new settlement for American culture. Mr. Biden had planned an “F.D.R.-size” presidency, and, with the Democrats’ recapture of the Senate, such heft seems more viable than it did after Election Day. What can the new administration do for culture in crisis? What examples should it draw from in American history, and current international practice? How should Washington approach culture policy with state and local authorities, with nonprofits, and with the entertainment industry? Does the U.S. government need a “Dr. Fauci of culture, ” as the Washington Post theater critic Peter Marks called for last month — or even a full-bore Department of Culture, with a cabinet-level secretary?
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As a senator and as vice president, Mr. Biden repeatedly backed government support for the arts. The country he will now lead, as the pandemic wanes and as the economy recovers, is going to require major social catharsis — and he needs to ensure that the arts are still there to provide it.
The Biden campaign promised that America could “build back better, ” and throughout 2020 the president-elect extolled F.D.R.’s New Deal as a blueprint for American renewal. For the administration to show that sort of Rooseveltian resolve — and, with control of the Senate, it just about can — it’s going to have to put millions of Americans on the federal payroll: among them artists, musicians and actors, tasked to restore a battered nation.
Arshile Gorky at work on “Activities on the Field, ” his 1936 mural project for Newark Airport sponsored by the W.P.A, which underwrote 2, 500-odd murals in addition to sculpture, painting, posters and advertisements.Credit... Eisman, via The Arshile Gorky Foundation/Artists Rights Society, New York
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The Works Progress Administration was a latecomer to Roosevelt’s economic recovery plans, begun in 1935 as part of the so-called second New Deal. Federal Project Number One, as its cultural division was known, accounted for only about one-half of 1 percent of the W.P.A.’s budget — but it endures as its most visible legacy, especially in the murals that adorn the country’s post offices, courthouses, school buildings and even prisons. And it should offer the Biden administration a blueprint for a new, federal cultural works project, which treats artists, musicians and writers as essential workers, and sees culture as a linchpin of economic recovery.
Today cultural advocates like to offer a roll call of American artists employed by the W.P.A. as proof of its necessity: Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky, Louise Nevelson, Norman Lewis, Alice Neel, Jacob Lawrence, Philip Guston. The programs, notably, offered Black artists more public support than at any time in the 20th century. Charles White’s mural “Five Great American Negroes, ” now in the collection of Howard University, was a W.P.A. commission.
But the bulk of the 2, 500-odd murals the program underwrote, plus piles of sculpture, painting, posters and advertisements, came from artists who never achieved fame. Most were under 40. Most favored folksy, realist scenes of American life. And most worked in places that America’s culture industry habitually ignores: for example, Bonners Ferry, Idaho (pop. 2, 543), where the artist Fletcher Martin decorated the courthouse with bas-reliefs of local loggers and miners.
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Zora Neale Hurston, far left, during a recording expedition in 1935 for the Federal Writers' Project. The interviews Ms. Hurston did for the project would profoundly influence her novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”Credit... Alan Lomax, via Library of Congress
Visual art was the largest of the four (later, five) cultural divisions, but other branches were just as vital. Ralph Ellison, John Cheever and Saul Bellow worked for the Federal Writers’ Project, compiling life stories of American workers; the interviews Zora Neale Hurston did for the project would profoundly influence her novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” The Federal Theater Project put out-of-work actors and writers on stages far from Broadway, where audiences saw free plays about Dust Bowl farmers or tenement dwellers known as “living newspapers.”
Unlike today, when grantmaking institutions routinely require artists to justify their work before they make it, the W.P.A. programs did not mandate a style; all the government required was an engagement with an American theme, no strident politics, and no nudity. If a few of the program’s murals have stood the test of time, such as Gorky’s bulbous compositions originally at Newark Airport, there’s a reason that Pollock, Krasner and other figures of the postwar avant-garde turned so thoroughly from the socially engaged projects of their youth. More than a fair bit of the art produced under W.P.A. programs was boosterish, conservative, forgettable.
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Programs, not cultural grants, awarded on the basis of need rather than merit. (Another New Deal program, run by the Treasury, had a smaller and more selective roster of artists.) A new W.P.A.-style program, likewise, shouldn’t be thought of as government support for “the arts” — that lightning rod of budget negotiations year after year. Nor should it be treated in the same manner as, say, New York’s Percent for Art, which requires city-funded construction to set aside money for public art works.
A new W.P.A. is, as the name indicates, an emergency work scheme, whose motivation is economic stimulus. Artists shouldn’t have to prove their “social impact, ” shouldn’t have to get a dozen stakeholders to sign off on every note or brush stroke. They should demonstrate what their forebears did in the 1930s —
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