glorycloud's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- the Boston Tea Party It is now in my personal private flow 4:01 PM late afternoon. I have been sitting in silence in our dining room staring into candle light. I wanted to share something I read last night in the book "The Culture of Complaint" by Robert Hughes. I noticed he quoted in his lecture a book I have been reading off and on titled, "No Place Of Grace: Antimodernism And The Transformation Of American Culture 1880-1920" by Jackson Lears. I will now quote from "The Culture of Complaint". "By the 1880's the function of art as quasi-religious uplift was beginning to modulate into a still more secular form, that of art as therapy, personal or social. This deeply affected the character of that special form, the American museum. By now, in its great and growing prosperity, America wanted museums. But they would be different from European ones. They would not, for instance, be stores of imperial plunder, like the British Museum or the Louvre. (Actually, immense quantities of stuff were ripped off from the native Indians and the cultures south of the Rio Grande, but we call this anthropology, not plunder.) They would not be state-run or, except marginally, state-funded. Because state funding, in a democracy, means tax-and since one of the founding myths of America was a tax revolt, the Boston Tea Party, the idea of paying taxes to support culture has never caught on here. Other countries have come, with many a weary groan, to accept the principle that there is no civilization without taxation. Not America, where the annual budget of the National Endowment for the Arts is still around 10 percent of the $1.6 billion the French government set aside for culture projects in fiscal 1991, and less than our government expenditure on military marching bands. Here, museums would grow from the voluntary decision of the rich to create zones of transcendence within the society; they would share the cultural wealth with a public that couldn't own it. For as the historian Jackson Lears has pointed out in his excellent study of American culture at the 19th century's end, "No Place of Grace", it is quite wrong to suppose that the Robber Baron's (and Baronesses) who were busy applying the immense suction of their capital to the art reserves of old Europe were doing so from simple greed. Investment hardly figured in their calculations at all-this wasn't the 1980's. Some of them, notably Charles Freer and Isabella Stewart Gardner, were deeply neurasthenic creatures who looked to art to cure their nervous afflictions and thought it could do the same for the less well off. The public museum would soothe the working man-the woman too. The great art of the past would alleviate their resentments. William James put his finger on this in 1903, after he went to the public opening of Isabella Stewart Gardner's private museum in Boston, Fenway Court. He compared it to a clinic. Visiting such a place, he wrote, would give harried self-conscious Americans the chance to forget themselves, to become like children again, immersed in wonder." pg. 180, 181 Robert Hughes music: Pixies "The Complete B-Sides" 4:27 p.m. - 2011-12-30 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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