Joseph Epstein, editor, American Scholar, delivered the eighth in AEI's 1995-1996 Bradley Lecture Series April 15, 1996, in Washington, D.C. Excerpts follow.

If any arts policy may be said to exist in the United States it is represented by what remains of the National Endowment for the Arts. Many people take pleasure at the downsizing this agency has received in recent years; some would even welcome its liquidation at the hands of the Republican Congress. "The hell with the arts," many sensible people have said to themselves--or out loud--over the past ten or fifteen years when witnessing the great shambles that many artists and the NEA have made of public expenditures on high culture.

To be sure, public support for the arts was never enshrined in this country quite the way it was in Europe. Although nineteenth-century Americans agreed to use public money to decorate the Capitol with paintings and sculptures of national heroes, art and culture were generally thought to be the responsibility of the rich, if not always the refined. Thus did things remain until the eve of World War I, when government intervention in arts support began to appear at all levels.

During the New Deal, government went into the arts in rather a big-time way. Yet, even as the Works Progress Administration employed thousands of architects, painters, sculptors, and writers, such public support for the arts made people extremely edgy. Ironically, it was the cold war that gave government support for the arts a considerable push. Suddenly, artists and intellectuals found themselves sent abroad by their government to demonstrate the vitality of culture and learning under a capitalist democracy.

The establishment of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1965 was a crucial moment in institutionalizing public support for the arts. The official justifications for the agency have been various: that federal support protects the arts from the corruption of the marketplace, that only government can bring high culture to otherwise remote areas, that a great superpower is morally obliged to support its art and artists. All these justifications would seem to make sense. Why, then, has the country become so divided on the question of public support for art?

Part of the answer is the vastly overstated claims of the arts community about the intrinsic value of art. Chief among these is the assertion that there is no such thing as bad art, so that anyone who is against art in any form, no matter how mediocre, offensive, or even loathsome it might be, is a philistine or a villain.

The NEA always insisted that offensive, in-your-face art, such as the sadomasochistic photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe or Andre Serrano's "Piss Christ," represented only a minuscule portion of the grants the agency gave out. Unfortunately, the agency failed to realize the extent of the visceral disgust and anger most Americans felt as a result of these few examples of NEA funding.

Real artists should have been outraged by such junk being passed off as serious work. Instead, most artists, and the NEA itself, defended it as being in the great tradition of the avant-garde. But whereas the artistic avant-garde of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was dedicated to changing the way people viewed the world through changes in artistic technique, the avant-garde of our day is dedicated to changing the way people view the world through imposing its own radical politics on them.

The NEA would have done better to acknowledge that it had less than perfect control over occasional outbreaks of aberrant art, just as the administrators of many federal programs are not absolutely free from the corruption of brilliant hustlers. Instead, they decided to brand their opponents as ignorant dolts or philistine rednecks. When the Republicans won the Congress, it was fated that the NEA would be brutally dealt with, and, frankly, it was difficult to feel sorry about that.

Yet, I hesitate to stand by and let the institutions and purveyors of highbrow arts go by the wayside if they cannot survive under free market conditions. And I dream that the Republican Party will one day cease to be identified as the party of ungenerous solutions to complex problems, that it will become known as the party that takes culture at its best with the seriousness that it deserves.

The first step toward so doing is to recognize that the arts represent elitism of a kind that America needs in order to continue its sense of its own progress as a superior country. The arts are nothing if not an elitist enterprise, but they are elitist in the best American sense. They represent elitism detached from social class and privilege; they represent democratic elitism. Artists (and, for the most part, audiences) rarely come from the upper classes.

Both the creation and the appreciation of art are based on discipline, the cultivation of curiosity, the love of order, and the belief that men and women are capable of spiritual exaltation. None of this should make any earnest Republican blanch. And, thus, to answer the question, "Who needs an arts policy?" I say the arts themselves do, the country does, and just maybe the Republican party does, too.