Art Ed, Capitalism and Censorship

Art Education, Capitalism, and Censorship

An edited transcription of an interview with Dennis Earl Fehr
by Michael Svoboda, host of Libri: The Radio Book Review on WPSU radio, an affiliate of National Public Radio

MS: My guest for this segment of the program is Dennis Earl Fehr. He is visiting Penn State to address the History of Art Education Conference, this year celebrating its thirtieth anniversary. We are pleased to have this conversation with him. Dennis, welcome to the program.

MS: Much of your work can be divided into two parts. One is your revision of the history of Western Civilization with an eye toward art education, and the other is your attention to contemporary social issues as they pertain to art education. Would you say that's a fair assessment, and then shall we start with your analyses of Western history?

DF: That's fair. I analyze social issues, always with an eye toward art education, because I read art education's role as being sociopolitical in addition to being aesthetic.

MS: Let's begin then, if you feel it's appropriate, with your effort to refocus the past.

DF: Sure. I'm by no means the first leftist scholar to write a revised history of Western Civ, but I'm the first one that I know of who has cast it in an art educational light. Yes, I continually make tie-ins between social issues and art education, because the tie-ins are everywhere I look. I'm not able to discuss art education without discussing its societal context. Some art ed scholars are able to discuss art ed in a vacuum. I can't.

MS: Mm-hm. It seems that you are saying two things: one is that, despite the fact that art has always played a significant role in our society, distinct groups of people have been denied access to it. The other is that art education has played a part in this, and therefore has ethical problems of its own.

DF: Well, art–let's perhaps use a different label–visual imagery, since some cultures don't have a concept of art, but all cultures make images. Visual imagery has played an important role in human history, and perhaps even more so in the tens of thousands of years of prehistory. When the West created a two-tiered definition of art—high art, or fine art, on the one hand, and popular art, or low art, on the other—high art came to be owned, literally and metaphorically, by the elite class. Today no one else can afford it. Van Gogh's Purple Irises sold for $54,000,000—we will never see that painting again. The owner can't risk showing it. It has disappeared from our heritage, except for slides and so on. Curiously, some members of the art community seem favorably impressed by this event. I call it a tragedy—capitalism run amuck. I'm not a foaming at the mouth anti-capitalist but, my God, so few people are critiquing it, and that's dangerous.

Fortunately, high art is becoming less important. The working class doesn't care about it. The middle class can't afford it. Popular, populist images—the kinds of images that are viewed condescendingly by some members of the artistic elite—are causing political change. Our consumer-culture billboards. The images we see in television commercials and movies, and now on the computer screen.

If you think your kids aren't viewing sexually exploitive images, for example, take it from a former elementary art teacher—they are, either in your home or at school. If you think they can't fool "Net Nanny" software, think again. I know of one web site, by and for kids, that tells them how. This is producing a generation with access to vastly more information about sex than my generation had. My friends and I hid our "Playboys" under our beds and that was about it. I don't know what 10-year-old girls did. Probably wondered in silence.

Having so much of a certain kind of sexual information may be good or bad, but either way this and all kinds of other imagery are shaping our world. And it's the kind of imagery art educators have been trained to ignore. We're trained in the academy to talk about male European and post-World War II American art, the kind that fills the toney galleries and museums. And we memorize the dead White guys who painted the paintings that hang in these museums. We forget that half of the art made by humanity has been made by women, but that—at least traditionally—it is of a different kind, often with fiber-based media. The paintings by men hang in museums, but where do the beautiful dresses and shirts made by women hang? In closets. Breathtaking quilts and blankets made by women sit in drawers, while the marble sculptures and bronze castings made by men sit on pedestals. When we start noticing that, we realize that art education must change. Want to make art ed relevant? Start teaching about the world with the images kids see every day. Yeah, we want to look at work from the Euro-canon too, but only as part of the total package of images that we view in art class. That's my message.

MS: So are there in your view no substantive differences, no distinguishing characteristics, other than its social milieu, between high and low art? No justification for a distinction other than that?

DF: Whether there are justifications or not—and that's a question I love; remind me to touch on it if I forget—of more interest to me are the distinctions themselves, because they are so fraught with political baggage. For example, the colors one finds in the folk art of Latin America are labeled gaudy by the White American middle class, and the content of a lot of folk art, and marginalized art, and art made by Nonwhites and women is considered somehow less sophisticated than art of the White male mainstream. These means of dividing popular art and fine art are not aesthetic judgments; they are political decisions. It seems that art students would benefit if their teachers mentioned that.

White males have formed the mainstream; Black males the blackstream; and women the hiddenstream. Each deserves its place in art education but never at the expense of the other two. Now, what was the question I said to remind me about? I get excited and lose my place.

MS: But before we address that, let me ask you a separate question, which relates to how institutions change their conceptions, and where the lags are. It seems that much of what you're critiquing has already changed. The interest in naive art and folk art by major galleries and art book publishers shows that they have embraced the very thing that you're talking about. Is this even an issue within the academy, among the public, or in the schools? Aren't your ideas dated?

DF: How I wish. Yes, there's good news. First of all, as I said, I'm far from the only voice out there. Despite the national shift to the right in the 80s and 90s, there's a growing and eloquent body of people on the left. The feminist movement of course has caused the lot of women and men in our society to improve, although our work is not done. And think of Latin- and African-American political activism and the legislation that has resulted. All of that spills over into the art world, so yes, the rules are changing. Postmodern politics are not going unnoticed in art education. Postmodern art ed is about art as cultural studies as well as aesthetic theory. It makes a nice marriage. That's the good news.

Among the bad news—where my critique is all too valid, I'm afraid—is the gallery system, which is the most conservative aspect of the art world. It's utterly capitalistic; it understands only the bottom line. I am in favor of people making money unless that's the only thing they understand. And the galleries are still too racist, sexist, and classist. You say, hey, they're showing folk art; they're showing work by women; they're showing work by Nonwhites. Yes, but only because they can make money. It's hip now not to be racist, sexist, or classist. The ruling class wants to posture itself as being sensitive to the lot of the oppressed, and its troubling way of doing that is by investing in artwork that will grow in value—for who? Its owners. That's the only interesting thing about the gallery system today. Otherwise it's the most boring part of the art world. The art teacher can choose to leave such issues out of the classroom or introduce them, and I encourage the latter.

MS: Mm-hm. Do you want to say anything else in terms of laying out your argument?

DF: I'll make my case regardless of where we go, so take it wherever you want.

MS: Okay. Well, in response to what you just said, it seems that an issue of concern to you is how we define art within a capitalist society. One of the interesting points you made at the outset was that art has become first and foremost an investment, and therefore is in danger of disappearing, in order to protect it as an investment. Therefore it has ceased to be a work of art, an expression to be displayed, and is instead now a treasure to be hidden and hoarded.

MS: The recent efforts of the elite to appropriate popular art suggest that definitions of high and low are being mixed. As galleries appropriate it, they may have a financial motive, but in a system defined by capitalism in the first place, is that not the only thing you can expect?

MS: And to complete my point, if the dominant class redefines populist artforms as objects of value, can class prejudice, at least in art, survive?

MF: But if capitalism, if art-as-investment, defines how we regard art today, then why should we even care about it? Is it even a factor in the transaction any more?

DF: Capitalism is based on ownership of material property, of course. The pivotal word that defines capitalism, it seems, is `me,' as opposed to socialism, with its greater communal awareness–I suggest that the pivotal word there is `we.' I'm not an avowed socialist, but socialism is viewed with undue harshness. And I'm not talking about communism. Communism has been the antithesis of socialism since about 10 minutes after the Russian Revolution. It's dying and godspeed. The mistake we're making is that no one reads Marx anymore to find out what the socialist argument really is.

Anyway, capitalists come along and, in their need to accumulate wealth—because that is how they acquire stature—they commodify what they can. Hey, here's art; that'll work. We see that happening everywhere. Periodicals such as ArtNEWS and Artforum aren't for artists; too many Mercedes Benz ads. They're for what I call the collectigentsia. If one wants to find good news in van Gogh's Purple Irises dropping out of circulation, perhaps it's in the fact that it creates room on the museum wall for work made by someone other than a straight, white male. Look at the roles of art that suffer in such a system, as measured by their lack of presence in art education curricula:

The spiritual role. Should that be a trivial role? That is what it has become. Do we care? How often are people moved spiritually when they view art today? When's the last time you had such an experience?

The aesthetic role: Should this role—the ability to have what John Dewey called an aesthetic experience, to be moved emotionally—be regarded trivially, as it often is? Think I'm overstating the case? What's the first question new students ask their art teachers about any work being discussed at a given time—“How much does it cost?”

And the educative role: Does art teach us nothing? If society believes in the power of art to teach, why is it a frill subject in some schools? My point is that these roles are subsumed under art's role as investment object. It seems that art teachers would be eager to confront these issues in the classroom. I call it cultural critique, ethical art ed, deconstructing the visual text, social studies. If you're in a situation where you're required to follow to the discipline-based art ed crowd, call it aesthetics. No one knows what that means anyway.

DF: Nowhere near the degree they should. Good art teachers continue not only to revive those roles, but push them into more important positions. My teaching assistants tell me their undergrads, especially the elementary ed majors, come to them with an art education that consists of two parts: appreciation for the technique of realism, and fascination in how much art costs. If a TA shows Jackson Pollock's Blue Poles and says that the Australian government paid $9,000,000 for it, they are fascinated, and often offended. If told that an oil by Jasper Johns, a living artist, gets eight figures, they are impressed, but also appalled. And their indignance is understandable. That is the kind of art education our society gets. And these students become parents, and some become principals and superintendents, and we start all over. Fairly or unfairly, it ends up the art teacher's task to move them out of that mindset and make them aware of more complex and worthy issues. Teachers of other subjects generally can't do it. Mom and Dad, the principal, the community can't do it because they already believe the same things.

MS: Alright, let me make a detour here and pick up an essay of yours which I found provocative for precisely these kinds of social issues. You talk about recent efforts to censor art and to crack down on the funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.

MS: Yes. However, we're going to put a different spin on it. You often seem to attack the elite and their ability to construct the terms of the debate; however, in this essay you could be read as defending an art elite against an argument for maintaining community values.

DF: No. The NEA has certainly played a role in promoting the high-brow status quo at times and I criticize it for that. The issues are broader, however. The NEA in its 30-year history—and I've been watching it and know whereof I speak—has funded over 100,000 projects, many of which involve art in the public schools. Depending on who's counting, between a dozen and thirty of those projects have been controversial.

In 1992 the Texas Institute for the Arts in Education received $150, 000 from the NEA to fund a three-year `arts in education' partnership with the Houston Independent School District and five performing arts groups. It's pumped a lot of art into the rural heartland, assisting organizations such as Montana's Indian Art/Culture Association, the Idaho Dance Arts Alliance, and the Opera House in Bishopville, South Carolina. It has funded young artists who flat out needed some cash to do their work, or it wouldn't get done. The Dance Theater of Harlem owes much of its existence to the NEA. In other words, the NEA has played an admirable role in underwriting much of the artistic productivity of this country in the last 30 years. As with Franklin Roosevelt's tax-funded, Depression-era Works Progress Administration, our nation's art heritage is the richer for it.

Note the parallels between the two: Roosevelt, the New Deal Democrat, started the WPA, and after a few years it went under. Lyndon Johnson, the Great Society Democrat, started the NEA in 1965. Given our new conservative leadership, I sadly predict that the NEA is toast. A few decades from now, when the pendulum swings back, we'll see government support for the arts re-emerge in a new form.

Envision a continuum with freedom on the left, indifference in the middle, and censorship on the right. Powerbrokers gravitate leftward when they feel secure. They become champions of culture. Endowments and patronage appear and art teachers can teach as they choose. When powerbrokers are indifferent, the schools follow, and we get an artistically uninformed public. Art education becomes a caricature of itself, as happened in the middle of this century and continues far too much today. Modernism dominated the artistic mainstream, but because the prevailing theory in art ed was not to impose adult knowledge, students did not learn the language of abstraction. So today's adults either ignore, or feel hostile toward, the art of their own period in history. It's a shame.

In times of uncertainty powerbrokers move to the right. They co-opt the arts, and hence art education. Leaders impose their visions in place of the visions of artists. Patronage shrinks, censorship revives, and art education ossifies.

MS: The issue is who is to define what is acceptable art, and you state that the people who are best qualified to do that are in fact artists and art fund administrators.

DF: Well, artists anyway. I'll put it this way–I cannot come up with a better group than artists for deciding who gets public money for art.

MS: But these other roles of art that you say are disappearing—religious expression, aesthetic expression, expression of the community—these controversies have to do with that. Mapplethorpe's and Serrano's work could be interpreted as attacks on populist values. Whether or not they have standing as works with their own aesthetic values, we could hardly describe them as expressions of community. Aren't you contradicting yourself?

DF: It's problematic if one does not do one's homework. The Serrano piece was a photograph of a crucifix in a jar of urine, and it was called Piss Christ. I question Serrano's defense, which was that the piece does not denigrate Christianity, but rather points out that society is denigrating Christianity. He claimed that his point was, “Look at what you're doing.” Maybe, maybe not. But that's a secondary issue.

When the NEA granted $75,000 to the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, they gave it as a block grant. The Center wanted to put on an art show. They applied to the NEA. The NEA gave them the money. Only then did they go out and pick the work. One of the pieces they picked was Serrano's. It was obviously out of the NEA's hands by that time. An offended viewer contacted Donald Wildman, the director of the American Family Association, a foaming-at-the-mouth hate group. Wildman started a letter-writing campaign. I'm not sure he even saw the show. The media fell in love with it and all of a sudden the NEA was tagged as having selected the Serrano piece and funded it.

As far as Mapplethorpe is concerned, a lot of people aren't ready to agree with my fundamental point on him. Let me start this way: Mapplethorpe's photographs that aroused the controversy are explicitly homoerotic. First, I should point out that very little of his lifetime corpus is about that; much of it is photographs of flowers. Anyway, our culture is in a stage of development in which homosexuality is despised. Two groups I've noticed that it's still cool to hate are prisoners, and gays and lesbians. It's no longer cool to hate women. It's no longer cool to hate Blacks. Society goes around pretending it doesn't. But it's okay to openly despise gays and prisoners. I'm sure there are other groups as well; those are the two I've noticed. So when I say gayness is okay, the religious right lividly screams that it isn't. When we all get to a point where we're okay with gayness, then we'll be okay with Mapplethorpe's work, and funding it with tax money will be equivalent to funding straight work with tax money. That's an argument that'll have to be made probably after we're dead. If we knew how many art teachers are in the closet, we'd likely be shocked. Let's get over it, hey?

MS: The theoretical point that I want to draw out of this is that, if we bring in community, our culture's legacy of high art over low art is a problem. The strongest defenses of Mapplethorpe and Serrano are higher arguments than confusion about funding. There's still the perception that controversial art is an attack on community. How do we embrace community-based expressions of art, which are perhaps more characteristic of low art, and yet retain the freedom to be controversial, which is characteristic of at least modern high art?

DF: Community values should never supercede Constitutional rights. When they conflict, if we come down on the side of community values and override the Constitutional premises on which this nation was founded, which is what the religious right wants, we're in trouble. That's dictatorship. At the 1935 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, Germany, Adolf Hitler claimed that we need to cleanse our society of the rotting filth and the moral pollution of modern art. Does anybody hear the echo of that in the rhetoric of the right, with their bogus arguments about family values, and how the traditional family, with Dad working and Mom staying home with the kids, is God's favorite model? I hear from social workers that often the adult abusing little girls, and little boys too, is not Mom's boyfriend or the funny uncle—it's Daddy. So when the right throws family values in your face like a clown with a pie, you have a response—a chilling one.

MS: Alright. Good answer. Concluding remarks you'd like to make on how someone approaching your work should read it? What should they look for?

DF: My work is a result of my insistence on thinking for myself—despite my fundamentalist Christian upbringing. Now here I am with my doctorate from a Big Ten institution and my tenured position at a large, research university. I'm an educated, middle-income, straight, white male—my demographics could not be less politically correct. Because of that, liberal feminists sometimes criticize me for what they call my trying to speak on their behalf. That view reveals shallow thinking. Radical feminists understand that everybody, male or female, has only three options: the first is to push sexism. The second is to shut up and thereby acquiesce to patriarchy. The third is to speak out against sexism. I choose the third.

MS: You seem more impassioned about feminist issues than most men. Where does that come from?

DF: I learned about sexism from watching the people in my fundamentalist church. The women were not allowed to speak at membership meetings, not allowed to preach, and so on. The congregation had shut off half its brainpool. Later I learned how huge sexism is—everywhere. In fact, it's so everywhere that it paradoxically seems to be nowhere—it's invisible to some people. When I realized that, being male or female didn't matter. I saw that men pay for sexism too, by dropping dead a decade sooner than women, probably from the stress of subjugating them. I started taking notes.. Now when I sit down to write, I draw on my angst for content and my academic training for form. When the two conflict, it's an easy call; I go with angst. It makes it harder to get into academic journals, but I'm bored by objectivity. Objectivity is a false notion. All research is biased and should be. The `Limitations of the Study' section of a research piece should start with a list of the researcher's biases. Problems with N being to small, and probability being to big, and mortality this and linear regression that, are all details; get a life. Anyway, out of all this comes my work.

MS: The guest for this segment was Dennis Earl Fehr, an associate professor of curriculum and instruction, and coordinator of the graduate art education program at the University of Houston, and author of Dogs playing cards: Powerbrokers of prejudice in education, art, and culture, a book published by Peter Lang. My name is Michael Svoboda. You're listening to Libri: The Radio Book Review, a production of WPSU, 91.5, State College. We'll be right back.