Keep the Arts Safe From More Federal Interference

Let's take a straw poll: All those in favor of putting Dick Cheney in charge of the nation's arts and culture, please raise your hand. Anybody?

Okay, how about Mike Huckabee?

Pat Robertson?

Rick Santorum?

Thought so.

The ascension of Barack Obama to the Oval Office has been accompanied by a growing chorus clamoring for the creation of a Cabinet-level arts overseer. Of all the suggestions about what the new administration ought to do, this surely ranks as a close contender for the worst. And yet it continues to gain momentum. Producer Quincy Jones has been flogging the idea, and an online petition in favor of a culture czar now has more than 100,000 signatures. The U.S. Conference of Mayors recently endorsed the proposal, as has a former secretary of the National Endowment for the Humanities and a lobbying group called Americans for the Arts.

Pehaps it's natural that arts advocates would hope a liberal Democrat would "bring arts and government under one umbrella," as a recent news report put it. Artists are romantic, and in tough economic times it's lovely to think of a federally funded American Renaissance. It also is easy to postulate reasons for giving the government more power over the arts when the government is run by your friends.

ON CLOSER examination, most of the arguments don't hold up very well. Perhaps the strongest is the least appealing: bureaucratic efficiency. At present the National Endowment for the Arts, the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, and so on lack a common director, and putting them all in the same ministry seems like a sensible reorganization of the flow chart -- much like what was done with the various agencies re-assigned to the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11.

Another argument for a Cabinet-level culture czar is the lament that America stands apart from much of the rest of the world by not having one. Americans for the Arts president Bob Lynch bemoans the fact that, when international conferences of culture ministers are held, very often the U.S. is not even invited! The horror.

But American exceptionalism is not an argument against American exceptionalism. The U.S. also stands alone in having a strict separation of church and state. It stands alone in its application of the exclusionary rule -- suppressing from criminal trials any evidence the police obtained improperly. Being different is not, ipso facto, wrong. Sometimes it is a great virtue.

We also hear a Cabinet-level position would signify that America "values its culture." This is not just a non sequitur, it actually contradicts our sense of the order of things in other realms. America values religious faith, too -- so much so that the First Amendment forbids governmental involvement. America values freedom of the press -- so much so that of all professions, only one (journalism) receives explicit constitutional protection from governmental interference. America values private property -- which is why the Fifth Amendment protects it against capricious governmental takings.

QUINCY JONES says the arts are "spiritual" and that culture is "the soul of a country." That is yet another reason government should stay out of it. The last thing America needs is yet more meddling in the arts -- yet more bureaucrats deciding that this book is worthy of special favor while that one is not, that this music should receive Washington's imprimatur while that music is beneath recognition.

Perhaps some artists do not shudder at the idea of being further entangled with government when government is run by people who happen to agree with them about wealth redistribution and abortion rights. But the advocates for a new culture czar should stop and think about the inevitable day when the social conservatives whom they sometimes fear and largely despise return once again to the corridors of power.

When the day comes, they may pine for a return to the strict separation of art and state. How is art supposed to speak truth to power when it is power's indentured servant?

My thoughts do not aim for your assent -- just place them alongside your own reflections for a while.

--Robert Nozick.

Contact A. Barton Hinkle at (804) 649-6627 or .