Does America Need a Ministry of Culture?

Bill Kauffman, quoting painter John Sloan from 1944, suggests that "it would be fine to have a Ministry of the Fine Arts in this country" so that "we’d know where the enemy is" — The Artist as a Kept Man. Our men of letters agree:

“A good writer,” said Ernest Hemingway, “will never like any government he lives under. His hand should be against it and its hand will always be against him.” His hand should not be extended stateward reaching for alms. The Armenian-American writer and pacifist William Saroyan, who refused to shake FDR’s hand at a reception, had the right idea. So did William Faulkner, who turned down a gala at which President Kennedy was honoring Nobel Prize winners, explaining that the White House was “too far to go for dinner.”

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... Gore Vidal, whom JFK appointed to the President’s Advisory Council on the Arts..., “made it a point never to attend a meeting” because “I didn’t believe that government—particularly one as philistine and corrupt as ours—should involve itself in the arts in any way. I am Darwinian in such matters: What cannot adapt dies out.”

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A Secretary of the Arts would be to the arts as John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, and Eric Holder are to justice. I’ll stick with Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Beauty will come not at the call of the legislature. … It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.” Or as the punks used to say, DIY. Do it yourself.