“De-politicizing Art”
By 
I’m gonna be honest with you: this is s a long, hard slog. I found big chunks of it incomprehensible.
When I was young my dad–mostly–made a living writing and often hammered home the charms of concision. These charms have yet to be discovered by any Federalist writer and this screed is no exception. Even the passages she quotes are nearly unreadable.
So I’m gonna squint my way through this, tilting my head like a confused dog, and try to tell you what I think she’s getting at.
- Art should be apolitical. I don’t know why or if it even can be. We imbue nearly everything with politics. Even food is political, for crying out loud. How, exactly, does one extract politics from art, and why would you want to?
- Art is currently dominated by women, which is bad for reasons.
- People of Arab descent cannot make art criticizing the West because Americans made Photoshop…or something.
- Women don’t like logic.
- Modern art is silly.
Anyway, that was my takeaway, but I’m gonna leave you with a couple of quotes, because this woman sure does have a way with words…
Also an overwhelmingly female one. At SVA, seven of this year’s eight graduate projects are curated by women. One is a collaborative effort by eight women. The sex imbalance tallies with a 2012 survey by Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies citing a preponderance of young women entering the field. That ratio brings with it a bent toward performance art—feminist panty raids on patriarchal culture and its categories.
I’m gonna be thinking about “feminist panty raids on patriarchal culture” for a long time, not gonna lie.
In sum, ending the endowments will not relieve us of art that prefers social practice and intellectual pretension to the cultivation of excellence. Truth and beauty are outcasts among creatures of the academic brain. They will remain in exile without the NEA. And art will remain an artifact of ideology so long as the academy keeps its grip on artists’ training.
I…um…well…ok. Is this truthful and beautiful enough for you?