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But is it
really art?
To the Editor:
I have a picture of former National Endowment of the Arts Chairman John E. Frohnmayer that I plan to artistically tape inside of a bedpan. I hope the Middle Street Gallery will display it since it is on the “cutting edge” of art.
Mr. Frohnmayer’s problem is that he was obviously unable to distinguish between liberty and license, and lacked a real concept of what art is supposed to be all about. He confuses “art,” which is a portrayal of beauty, with “truth,” which lies in the realm of free speech and philosophy, however it is often mistakenly applied to art.
While it is to be expected that many people—even artists themselves—confuse the values belonging to, respectively, art and philosophy; administrators in charge of furthering the former with taxpayers’ money should be required to demonstrate an ability to distinguish between the two. Mr. Frohnmayer could not, and was rightly forced to resign.
While he was throwing people’s money away on gross expressions of “truth” masquerading as art or “beauty,” I wonder what he or the NEA was doing to promote the true beauty of women’s oldest form of dance, the “art" of motion which is currently experiencing a sort of underground popularity in the United States and around the planet, and is inappropriately labeled as “Danse Oriental,” “Middle Eastern Dance,” and “Bellydancing”?
I say “inappropriately labeled” because depictions of the dance first appear on the walls of caves in France painted by our ancestors 15,000 years ago, and that the famous belly rolls and flutters are really but a small aspect of the dance, which consists of hundreds of isolated motions within the kinetic totality which draws strongly from the natural movements of female life.
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