Archivo

“Buchanan Knows What He Doesn’t Like”

Leonard’s “passionate dissent” against Pat Buchanan’s call to eliminate the NEA on the ground that “he sees it as a sanctuary for people who are subsidized by the taxpayer to do dirty things to one another.” Buchanan was reacting to the 1989 PBS P.O.V. documentary Tongues Untied, made by and starring Marlon Briggs, a black homosexual writer and film maker.

Leonard argues that the NEA is like “seeding for a Gross National Product of mystery and magic” and provides a great service as an “early warning systems of the fault lines of our culture.”

Leonard disagrees that “the market should determine art” and argues that the entire purpose of art is to surprise and shock. If the market really did determine art, there would never have been an Impressionist or Abstract Expressionist movement in painting, or a be-bop off shoot of jazz. He writes “a vigorous civilization invests in symbolic representations of itself, which means taking a chance on difficult creative people.”

Without national funding for arts, we wouldn't have this:

Jackson Pollock worked for the WPA. here is one of his early painting funded during that period:

 Male and Female, 1941

New word: bête noir = a thing strongly detested or avoided, literally “black beast”

New learning: Marlon Riggs died in 1994 at the age of 37 from aids…through his films and writings, he was one of the earliest aids activists.