Popular skepticism directed at knowledge can also damage our perception of the arts.
A few years ago a report in Psychology Today theorized that a root of the painfully visible anti-social troubles in the United States these days isn’t racism, or easy access to guns, or the dissolution of the family, or any of the string of usual suspects proffered by the right or the left. Instead, it’s anti-intellectualism — what the writer David Niose (Nee-Oh-See) called “an abandonment of reason.”
“It is beyond dispute that critical thinking has been abandoned as a cultural value,” he said. And from this abandonment comes all sorts of unexpected social ills.
Is the widely reported drop-off in support for the arts one of these ills? How about the increasing disappearance of the arts from general cultural literacy and school curricula? Are the arts simply too intellectual for contemporary America to bear?
Well, no, they’re not, but they certainly have the reputation of being. And in today’s culture, perception matters tremendously — it’s all but a stand-in for informed opinion.
In his 1964 book Anti-Intellectualism in American History, famed historian Richard Hofstadter said that in modern American culture intellectuals (in which group I would include artists) have inherited the suspicion and resentment that Puritans and egalitarians of an earlier age aimed at aristocrats.
Occasionally someone will dare to say that elitism in the arts is in fact compatible with American culture —or at least not somehow nefarious. When he served on the National Council for the Arts, Broadway actor and musician Theodore Bikel said art that sought government funding must meet a set standard of professional excellence.
“If that is elitist,” he said, “then so be it. The search for excellence is, by definition, elitist. We should not be in the business of making the mediocre palatable, but identifying the best there is and then giving it the widest distribution to the most people.”
Compared to other intellectual achievements that are truly elite, an appreciation of the arts is not, because anyone can teach him- or herself how to appreciate them simply by taking the time to look, listen and think. But that undemocratic assumption is still hard to shake.
It’s not that we don’t respect any intelligence, because most of the time, to some extent at least, we seem to. It’s more accurate to say that we’re intensely skeptical of any intelligence directed to purposes that aren’t immediately practical.
The arts have responded by trying to make the case that they have measurable effects on everything from local economic growth to standardized test scores. A more lasting, deeper transformation of the attitude would come through education, direct experience and some critical thinking. But that all depends on those things not being abandoned.