Thomas F. Reese, “Shifting Boundaries/Contested Spaces: Art, Culture,
and Late Twentieth-century Consumer Society,” V International Forum on
Contemporary Art Theory, Guadalajara, Mexico; September 29, 1996.
Introduction
The title of this session on “Alternative Money?” follows others in the
symposium on “The Displaced Institution” and “Beyond the Work of Art.” The
implication is that a significant change occurred—or will occur—in the art world,
and that “alternative” money will reactivate artistic practices in an era that is
“post-museum” and “post-commodified-object.”
Artists recognized in the 1960s what was self-evident; art, aesthetics, and
money are inextricably linked in ways that compromised their freedom. The boom
of art markets and institutions in the 1980s, however, demolished once and for all
modernist dreams about the autonomy of aesthetic values and, more specifically,
about cherished expectations that avant-gardes could control the presentation of
their production beyond the studio. The rise of conceptual, performance, and
body art, and other refusals to produce commodifiable objects was a direct
response to many artists’ reawakening to those realities of late-twentieth century
life.
Artists hoped then, and still hope today, for alternate money that will
liberate them from the values of economic systems based on rationality, mass
production, and commodification. The critical analysis of government and nonprofit support for the arts in the United States in the period between 1965 and
1997, however, reveals few “free” spaces when it comes to questions of the
relationships between money and artistic form and content. In other words, there
is no money without strings. 1
1
Arts funding and its many histories must always be addressed in terms of specific national
traditions and theaters of action. Conditions and practices in the US differ radically from those in
Switzerland, France, Mexico, or Canada. One principle, however, holds true everywhere—
alternate money is never alternate. Where money is spent on the arts, those who expend it want
control, which creates automatic hierarchies. Institutions are easier to control than artists. Big
institutions are easier to control than small ones. And established artists are easier to control
There are, however, possibilities for artists to criticize and challenge
dominance and to imagine new forms of civic life in which artistic practices and
interventions will continue to have a critical and influential place. To create this
terrain, however, artists must continue to construct visions of new societies, and
also publics and support networks that put them at greater distances from the
controlling structures of money and politics. In other words, artists must identify
their communities of interest and build from those communities up, rather than
from institutions down. But in so doing, they must also weigh carefully their
responsibilities to these communities by determining the nature of their mediating
role between their support base and their own needs for freedom of exploration.
I am not optimistic about the short-term future, and foresee little new
”unfettered” money on the horizon. I am optimistic, however, that artists will
survive with or without alternative money. Whether they will reach the broad
audiences they did in the last ten years, and do so through the same institutions
that supported them before is doubtful. Artists, museums, government, and
foundations have developed in the last twenty years broad new constituencies for
the arts, whose slow but progressive ascent is already resulting in new structures
of power in the art world. The recognition of the impact of this restructuring of
power, of course, has not been lost on individuals and institutions with a stake in
maintaining the status quo in taste, in the market, and in their own hold on power,
as we shall see.
Domains and Protagonists
This paper addresses the status and future of arts funding in the United
States in 1996-1997, and offers a frame to help us analyze some of the structural
origins of the US arts crisis in the period between 1965 and 1997. It describes
five separate but interrelated lines of activity and/or support in the US art world.
The first is that of art makers. The second is that of arts institutions—principally
museums—and their boards and patrons. The third is that of government,
than experimental artists. As a result, project funding becomes a vehicle of focusing production
towards institutional goals.
largely through funding programs directed both to artists and institutions and
administered by the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. The
fourth is that of private initiatives sponsored by individuals, corporations, and
non-profit organizations, including charitable trusts. The fifth, and the most
difficult to define as a collective enterprise, is that of the many different publics
who participate in art events. Their participation simultaneously shapes their
consciousness and that of others active in the art world.
These five domains are rarely homogeneous or imbued with a common
sense of purpose. Each comprises a broad spectrum of interests—artistic,
economic, and political; each struggles to promote its own goals and to
perpetuate its internal structures of power and influence. These five
heterogeneous sectors constitute the matrix in which artistic production,
consumption, and motivation take place. They are obviously complementary.
Each sector responds to changing conditions within the trajectories of parallel
realms in distinctive ways. Each also affects and triggers reactions in the other.
Indeed, each sector generally constitutes its initiatives with conscious goals of
effecting changes in other sectors. Seldom, however, are the flows natural from
one to the other.
Even in rare moments where there is general consensus within these
heterogeneous domains, each sector obeys its own agendas and timetables,
driven by its unique missions, value systems, and constituencies. Analysts vary
greatly in the importance they assign to each of these sectors in providing
leadership, often on the basis of their identification with one or the other. Few,
however, are seen as neutral. For example, few funders simply “support artists;”
in the democratic ethos and rhetoric of the United States, private donors and
institutional sectors generally claim some measure like the “social good” as the
basis for their largesse
The potential for disruptive tensions within sectors and across sectors
always exists, and tensions are especially exacerbated when the activities within
and across distinct sectors are seriously out of synchronization and have no
common agenda or strategy. When these disjunctions occur, they are capable of
creating serious frictions in the art world, as each sector attempts to leverage the
others to its purposes as though the ability to leverage capital can know no limits.
The present analysis utilizes a model that posits that different sectors of
interest—whether within a given domain or across different domains—at a single
cut through time have different trajectories, or at least positions that are at
different stages of development with respect to movements taking place in longer
durations that are visible in hindsight. The model is complex and can only be
delineated in broad contours here. A full and adequate presentation would
demand an extensive analysis of the different paradigms operating in each
domain at different points in time in order to portray common interests that join
distinct groups of artists, institutions, politicians, and funders across domains and
the coalitions that were created.2 The next step would to represent the effects of
structural discords at key moments in the formation or defense of artistic policies.
Here I am constrained by space to focus on the latter and to forgo laying a
foundation that is adequate for readers unfamiliar with the specific forces active
in each sector during the period between 1965 and 1997; I apologize.
I hope, however, that the frame might prove useful as we continue our
effort to define the nature of the play of discords within and across sectors with
greater precision. For the present, though, I would make several preliminary
observations. First, there was a major paradigm shift in the 1970s and 1980s
that destabilized power relationships that have operated in the art world since
WWII. Second, this shift was characterized, among other qualities, by the
multiplicity and hetereogeneity of highly dispersed fields of actions and
participants—a base that differed significantly from the hegemonic structures of
2
In other words, we could delineate the alliances among late modernists and minimalists,
dealers, large elite metropolitan arts institutions, and the programs of institutional support created
by the Ford Foundation in the 1960s. Or, alternatively, we could define the coalition among
community-based artists, local politicians and community activists, Carter’s White House, and,
say, the direction of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Arts and Humanities Division in the late 1970s
and 1980s.
Euro-American modernist production. Third, the new paradigm opposed the very
concept of “centers;” its practitioners favored instead a radical opening of
discourses and practices, erasing proscriptive barriers and embracing radical
critique as its3 modus operandi. In light of these changes, a survey of the arts in
the 1990s does not yield a core set of formal inventions and practices that
become the nucleus around which collectors, institutions,, foundations, and art
communities coalesce. Instead, one perceives a vast field of activities that have
a critical and disruptive function as they create a space for new forms of
expression in field still monopolized by modernist institutions.
In an attempt to frame certain conditions of artistic practice that emerged
in the period after 1965, my narrative unfolds in a temporal sequence. My goal is
to delineate conditions and events in distinct sectors; it is not to imply cause-andeffect relationships as the narrative moves from sector to sector. Nevertheless,
as noted above, many of the efforts of artists and participants have been
simultaneously proactive and reactive, and highly critical of dominant forms of
artistic and institutional practice. It would be wrongheaded to imagine, like the
modernists, that our task might be to find a progressive center around which to
build networks of support. Instead, we must embrace and learn from the diversity
of experimentation and expression of groups formerly excluded from participation
in the arts as a powerful force that is radically expanding art’s constituencies.
Tolerance is not always a virtue widely shared by artists, but the new
forms of participation represent major advances in creating broader and more
diversified structures of support for the arts in the next decades. The old center is
not holding; and fewer and fewer people seem to yearn for the identification of
another center to take its place. The impact of this new highly dispersed field of
practices and adherents for future thinking about creating support for the arts is
fundamental. It demands that we build coalitions of understanding and that we
work together across sectors. We can no longer continue to construct hierarchies
3
of value whose function is to prove the worth of one form of expression at the
expense of others.
I. Artists
Modern art, as charted in the theoretical discourses of “post-modernism,”
defined art’s autonomy by positioning art as an aesthetic domain that was
independent of culture and possessed values separate from those of ordinary
life. In fact, the critic and theorist Clement Greenberg posited modernism as a
movement that exiled everything that was non-essential to the artistic medium.
As George Marcus and Fred Myers observed in a very astute reading of the postmodernist “art scene,” these “formalist” definitions of art were “defensive
responses to the surrounding context—to the threat of ‘art,’ for example, of
theatricality, entertainment, Kitsch, and mass culture.”4 Marcus and Myers
characterize Modernism’s urge as an exclusionary activity that awakened in
artists an insistence on the intrinsically political dimension of artistic practice,
which demanded a provocative and challenging agenda.5
The desires of artists to break free of this Greenbergian heritage and the
“white-cube phenomenon,” which ruled triumphant in museums that enacted and
perpetuated the canon, were then in large part fueled by the privatization of the
museum and the attendant neutralization of the museum as a forum for social
and political discourse. The transition of power from Carter to Reagan in 1980
and the latter’s campaign to privatize the public sphere provided still greater
cause for alarm, as many artists undertook to transform once venerated
museums into sites for the performance of counter-demonstrations that
challenged that very institution’s authority. These artists were in revolt against
the museum as an institution whose power base was created and maintained by
coalitions between museum professionals and private economic elites.
George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers, “The Traffic in Art and Culture: An Introduction,” in The
Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1995), p. 22.
55
Ibid. p. 25.
4
Complementary shifts in society and the nature of artistic discourse made
artists more and more aware of the censorial and exclusionary power of
institutions. Artists from feminist, gay and lesbian, post-modern, and marginated
communities realized the hegemonic status that modernist aesthetics had
achieved. National and international values in the arts were increasingly
controlled by political, economic, and cultural elites; not by artists. Issues of
identity, representation, and cultural ownership attained new importance for
artists and publics that felt that they had been silenced, and they launched
offensives that rigorously questioned the foundations of institutional power and
demanded that institutions take greater responsibility with respect to issues of
their representation.
In that historical moment, associated by many with “post-modernity” and
the “crisis of representation,” there were new realizations that our concepts of
modernity were positivist, progressive, and future-inceptive, and solved
problems of choice and destination by privileging certain realms of activity and
marginalizing others—the aesthetic over the social, the high over the low, the
universal over the specific, western codes over other ways of perceiving the
world, and so on. These realizations inspired many artists to interrogate the
boundaries between x and y in order to understand the effects of exclusionary
tactics.
Art and other forms of cultural expression became new and powerful
vehicles for voicing identity, whether individual, communal, or artistic. Works of
art were symbolic structures that could communicate artists’ visions of identity to
others of similar identity, and express their sense of marginalized identity to
society at large. Works of art were semaphores that provoked self-reflection and
debate, and the artist was the communicator who imagined not just him or her,
but the “us.” Such expressive communications could represent localized notions
of identity, or they could reflect global conditions of existence. They could be
popular and accessible or recondite, on a continuum from accessible to avantgarde productions.
Discussions of cultural difference, homogenization, and heterogeneity
quickly replaced older discourses about formalist, conceptual, and expressive
modes of display and representation. Arts institutions were transformed over time
into primary arenas for the production of public discourses about cultural values.
They became sites where difference and identity were produced and contested.
In sum, the arts came to represent to many a “danger zone.” And, institutions
that privileged “aesthetic” or “aestheticizible” forms of artistic production—which
were easily appropriated, commodified, and neutralized within private and
expansionist institutional contexts—were openly challenged by practitioners of
resistant strains of critical engagement. But since the institutional missions of
many museums demanded that they track new artistic developments, they could
not hold artists and their issues forever at bay. Exclusion became increasingly
difficult as artists developed tactics that directly challenged art-world institutions
controlled by boards and funders who often had deep stakes in promoting older
forms of artistic production. Hence, institutions became sites of criticism and
works of art became the vehicles of these critiques.
II. Museums and their Boards
The premiation of abstraction, minimalism, and other formalist and
conceptual projects in the 1960s and 1970s by the academic and economic elites
who controlled museum and cultural boards was probably linked, as Russell
Berman suggested, to the apparent neutrality of these images with the public at
large. These movements generally eschewed popular culture and were
accessible largely to the cognoscenti; they did not deal with social and economic
issues in ways that were understandable to a broad cross-section of the
population. They did, however, continue to provide a social benefit long
cultivated by “high culture” museums, notably the privileged access by certain
elites to the company of “arbiters of taste” and the “symbolic—and real—capital”
associated with works of art and museums. The profile of individuals drawn to
boards of museums associated with contemporary artistic practices as
distinguished from historical collections remains to be written.
Works of art produced by Modernists soon became capital assets in the
collections of individuals and corporations who supported arts institutions
financially and otherwise. These artists’ constancy of purpose and the
steadiness of production was a clear incentive to investors. Museums, together
with their many tributaries and subsidiaries, replicated the economic institutions
of a society based on commerce and capital, which was the source of the
museum’s success in post-War North America, culminating in the boom years of
the art market in the 1980s.
Nevertheless, US museums and similar cultural institutions in the 1980s
and 1990s were increasingly put under pressure by artists and society to open
themselves from a role of proclaiming and displaying canons to the notion of
serving as sites where identities and difference are presented and debated.
These transformations represented radical changes from the roles that these
institutions had played in the 1960s and 1970s, when the growth of the economy
and surplus capital had encouraged museums to expand their power by
aggressively recruiting social and economic elites, both private and corporate,
and to assume aggrandized roles in the direction of public cultural life. But
growth and their expansionist role brought new pressures—legal, ethical, and
economic—to bear on the institution, and, as we will see, the transition
engendered conflict with artists, sponsors, and publics.
Museums remained and remain ascendant institutions in the 1990s. With
extraordinary optimism, older institutions continue to launch new capital
campaigns, and new museums with increasingly specialized missions and
constituencies proliferate throughout the country. Institutions and boards seem
oblivious to issues of saturation and overexpansion. Instead, they bask in the
museum’s success, measured in statistics that continue to demonstrate a growth
in attendance and of new audiences for the arts. These have been stimulated by
major initiatives created and funded by governmental and non-profit institutions.
Many museums were perhaps wary, but not yet threatened by the social
dynamics initiated by new forms of artistic practice and participation, but both
possessed the potential of alienating politicians and private sponsors, and
eventually did.
III. Government
The primary US government arts-funding agency, the National
Endowment for the Arts, was created in 1965. The agency consolidated its
financial support under Nancy Hanks’ stewardship, which began in 1969, and
continued during the Nixon presidency. The growth and consolidation was due to
the fact that she was able to construct a powerful network of patrons and
supporters for the arts. Indeed, her decision to give museum funding a key place
in the programs of the Endowment enabled her to garner support for increased
agency budgets by relying on already established networks of trustees and
patrons of major cultural institutions. Their support was made secure by
emphasizing funding for the large institutions they served.
In the late seventies, the Carter administration established new priorities
for the agency. Carter’s advisors favored the decentralization of funding for the
development of new audiences and greater support at the community level.
When Reagan came to office in 1981, one of his goals was to shift public funding
initiatives to the private sector. Reagan quickly targeted the National
Endowments, proposing budget cuts of more than fifty percent. The
administration, however, was surprised at the powerful lobby that weighed in to
support the endowments at that time, as a result of the strong coalitions that had
been formed among cultural, economic, and corporate elites and the arts. When
the endowments were threatened, everyone came to their rescue, even
community groups who felt that they had been marginalized in the Reagan’s
administration’s budget process.
What was the bond between cultural conservatives and the arts that kept
even supply-side business elites in the camp of museums and high culture? Part
of the answer was the art boom of the 1980s, which witnessed unprecedented
economic growth in the markets for art and gave works of art a new chic status
as capital commodities. Another part was the museum’s increasing adoption of
the ethos of large business enterprises, in which box office, mass marketing,
and capital-development campaigns took on intensified institutional importance.
In museums, many collectors, individuals, and corporations became ready
partners as institutional insiders in creating economic value for works of art and
in developing the museum as an integral element and even an economic
pacesetter in US consumer society. One of the many effects was the
neutralization and commodification of works of art, which was a major source of
alienation for many artists—one of many disruptions in the field or matrix defined
in this paper.
As discussed above, the art boom provoked counter-moves by artists,
who became increasingly aware of the ways in which institutions and capital
manipulated their artistic products, originally conceived with strong political,
social, and critical agendas, so that they might serve more purely aesthetic
functions in the museum and in private collections. More and more artists
explored their own social and cultural experiences, particularly questions about
the nature of their own identities and their debts to the communities in which they
were formed. Many artists contributed in important ways to the redefinition of the
personal and political functions of art in an increasingly diverse society. Their
work spoke increasingly of cultural difference and identity rather than of cultural
hegemony.
In addition, many of these artists sought to reconnect art and life in new
ways, rejecting the earlier formalist definitions of art that represented defensive
responses to the surrounding context—for example, theatricality, entertainment,
Kitsch, and mass media. Many artists in the late 1970s and 1980s came to
occupy positions that demanded that they attack the very base of support that
caused so many art institutions to prosper, even when they depended upon the
support of those institutions for their survival, biting the very hand that fed them.
The frictions between producers of art, wealthy private and corporate backers,
and government funding institutions for the arts—Hanks’ powerful coalition—
were inevitable as each believed the other was indebted primarily to its sector’s
labors.
IV. Foundations
The United States developed a strong tradition of elite, private-sector
support for the arts from the late nineteenth century. Furthermore, tax-incentives
developed in legislation drafted between 1913 and 1917 stimulated philanthropy
and benefited cultural and arts organizations, but it was only following the Great
Depression that the New Deal embraced the arts as an instrument of public and
economic development policy. When the government took up the issue of
support for the arts and humanities again in 1965 with the authorization of the
National Endowments in 1965, one of its strategies was to commit public moneys
to leverage individual, corporate, and foundation-sector support for programs the
endowments endorsed. This remains one of their major arguments of success in
moments when they are under fire. But leveraging is often a goal of more than
one partner in an operation, as we shall see.
What then was the position of the non-profit foundation? Here, we will
focus on one small but important group of innovative foundations within a
generally conservative field. The names Ford, Rockefeller, Pew, and Warhol
identify this group. The Arts and Humanities Program at the Rockefeller
Foundation under the leadership of Alberta Arthurs after 1978 stands
symbolically here for others without denying uniqueness to other programs. The
policy and mission of the Rockefeller Foundation, which between 1965 and 1989
spent $73,000,000 on the arts, was presented to the US Senate in 1990 as “the
encouragement of creative artists . . . whose work can advance international and
intercultural work in this country . . . supporting the flow of art between Third
World countries and the United States, and increasing opportunities . . . for ethnic
populations in the United States.” During these crucial decades, the foundations
like Rockefeller and Ford provided “alternative money” to encourage new sectors
of artistic and community participation in the art world that did not previously
exist. The funds were not invested to support artists. They were investments
intended to achieve mission-driven objectives not only to develop strong and selfperpetuating financial bases of support for arts institutions, but also to activate
the arts as social catalysts in American society. These two goals did not always
produce compatible roommates.
But how did programs like these come into existence? First, it is important
to note that they developed in close relationship to strategic initiatives in other
sectors of support. The Carter administration had inspired national reflection
about the public role of the arts in a cultural democracy. In contrast, the Reagan
presidency emphasized the need to transfer all such cultural and artistic funding
to the private sphere, which led to the administration’s early campaign to
eliminate government support for the arts and culture. Reagan’s plans to transfer
financial responsibility to private individuals, corporations, and non-profit
foundations were obviously opposed by the non-profits, whom Reagan clearly
expected to assume leadership and to fill the funding gap. Individuals and
corporations were opportunistic in their support and could withdraw if it were not
beneficial to their political and economic interests. But the non-profits were
mission driven and generally had broad structural goals in effecting institutional
change. Consequently, non-profits responded to Reagan’s attempt to privatize
the public sphere and to shift the financial burden in part to their sector by
refocusing and redirecting their goals in the 1980s.
But foundations were not alone in their resistance. One significant effect
of the increasing privatization of the boards of public institutions—often in new
public-private operational partnerships—was to allow many institutional activities
to be unfettered by the normal constraints of civic and public accountability.
Consequently, cultural activists inspired by Carter’s earlier efforts at reform
demanded “public” responsibility from private boards because of the indirect
subsidies “private” non-profit organizations received through their tax-exempt
status. Not unexpectedly, elected conservative politicians, who opposed the
liberal agendas of non-profits that were free of government control, launched
similar criticisms against the non-profits in the mid-1990s.
During the Reagan, Ford, and Bush administrations, however, the
relationships between government funding agencies and non-profit foundations
were not externally hostile. Indeed, the relationships were highly collaborative.
The key to understanding this phenomenon is the fact that the administrative
bureaucracy and peer review panels in the National Endowments for the Arts and
Humanities had institutional commitments that continued, in spite of changes in
the political leadership of these agencies. This encouraged collaboration and
complementarity. As a result, non-profit initiatives could create funding that
government agencies could not easily provide because of political pressure. But
non-profits also tried to leverage the Endowments to join their independent
initiatives by tempting them with matching-fund proposals.
It is significant that many of the most innovative of these arts programs
were forged in foundations whose primary missions were social and economic
change, like Ford, Rockefeller, and Pew. Their agendas paralleled those of
artists whose work in the 1980s was critical of the depoliticization and
aestheticization of artistic production by arts institutions. In the art world, the
polarization was described, admittedly inadequately, in terms of “aesthetic”
versus “social” goals. Indeed, in Canada, where a coherent cultural policy was
established in the early 1980s, this functional division was explicitly endorsed.
Significant funds continued to be designated for the maintenance of
dominant culture institutions, where quality and tradition were the bywords. But
increasingly funds went to smaller educational and community-based institutions,
where community and empowerment were the bywords. In the United States,
most state and local programs sought to cover these three bases for political
reasons. Republicans voted for quality and tradition; Democrats for community
and empowerment. Most radically experimental or transformative work made
politicians of both parties run.
There is no doubt that in the United States the impact of funding
incentives that supported “social” goals made a significant impact on institutional
life in the 1980s and 1990s. The development of strong social programs for the
arts by private foundations resulted in a transformation of many sectors of artistic
and museum practice. Programs were more inclusive, more critical, more
participatory, and more oriented towards communicating with a broad crosssection of American publics. Museums in particular came to be seen, at least
potentially, as public spaces where identities were displayed and national and
communal values were critiqued.
Liberals saw a new domain of public education and debate; conservatives
saw a dangerous Tower of Babel. Conservative forces in Congress waited
patiently for a test case that would allow them to mobilize political and public
opinion and to try to deliver a final blow to federal support for the arts. The
conservative dismantling of the endowments began in 1989 and ended with the
drastic budget reductions of the national endowments in 1996.
The stage for the re-privatization of the arts according to a Republican and
conservative Democratic agenda was ready. Museums would depend more and
more on their own business acumen. Private boards of arts institutions would
control institutions with fewer restraints. Corporations would link support more
exclusively to marketing and promotional opportunities. Non-profit foundations
would fill voids in arts funding by focusing their grants on specific initiatives in
dominant culture institutions or by spreading support widely and thinly across
society in a collapsing and chaotic field of possibilities. The process would come
back full circle to 1965 with the power in the hands of large institutions and
private funders. Money would flow once again to the direct support of capital
projects and acquisitions and support for artists and public education would be
channeled more exclusively to those who contributed to the hegemonic vision of
the museum’s social and political role. But the Carter agenda, supported and
advanced by the non-profit sector, was a part of the museum’s legacy that could
not be suppressed. The cat was out of the bag, and the museum had already
played a vital role in the transformation of American consciousness and its own
values.