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Arts are
under siege
To the Editor:
I read with great sadness in the Washington Post of the resignation of John Frohnmayer as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Apparently, he was forced from office by the president’s handlers, who were afraid that Patrick Buchanan might score some political points by attacking the Endowment and President Bush’s appointee, Mr. Frohnmayer.
The arts, and they who stand for freedom of expression, have been under attack in this country for some time now. It is not really about funding for the arts or one’s definition of artistic merit or obscenity, although that’s where the battle lines have been drawn. It’s really about our values as a society.
In his staff meeting to announce his resignation, Mr. Frohnmayer summed it up clearly, “I leave with the belief that this eclipse of the soul will soon pass and with it the lunacy WW artists as “enstmes amt ideas as demons.” Artists and ideas as the enemies of society—a chilling thought.
I came of age in the ’60s. A confusing time at best, but a time when being an artist was a noble profession. For it was the artists who gave us hope and a vision of something more enduring than the buck in this land of the bottom line.
Now we live in a time that suffers from a great callousness of the heart. It is a time when money and power are what are valued. It is a time of plague and of dead poets. A time when the dream has been revealed to be a nightmare. So let’s shoot the messenger.
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