John Andrew Fisher

The Unfulfilled Promise: Public Subsidy of the Arts in America

Preface 1. The Problem 2. What Are the Stakes? The Value of Artistic Experience * Art Experience and the Problem of a Mass Society * Art Experience as a Catalyst for Social Change * Art Patronage as Social Capital * The Philosophical Conflict 3. Elite Domination of the National Endowment for the Arts A Theoretical Formulation of Agency Cooptation * Budget Analyses * The Hanks Years * Legislative Oversight * Report of the Surveys and Investigations Staff * Conclusion * A Word on the Reagan Administration 4. State Arts Agencies The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts * Characteristics of State Arts Councils * (Washington, Texas, Wyoming, Ohio, North Carolina, Louisiana, New Mexico, Indiana, Idaho, California) * Concluding Observation 5. Achieving Cultural Democracy Aid to the Creative Artist * Fostering Community Arts * Some Conclusions Notes Index

The Value of Natural Sounds

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Is It Worth It? Lintott and Ethically Evaluating Environmental Art

The question ‘Is it worth it?’, as originally applied to artworks by Tolstoy and here reintroduced by Sheila Lintott, opens a fruitful avenue for understanding land art. It is, however, a question with many facets in need of analysis. I will try to sketch that analysis here. Although the target of Lintott’s discussion is the category of land art, the Tolstoyan question does not come up only in the case of land art. It frequently arises in cases of controversial or extravagant types of art of many sorts, and understanding its application to various types of art illuminates their artistic content as well as their artistic value. I take the is-it-worth-it question to be a question of overall value—i.e., the sum of positive and negative values the generation of a work necessarily or contingently brings into existence. Although Tolstoy may appear to pose primarily a resource question, in actuality he pursues the issue in more complex ways that apply to land art as well as to his example of an opera. Tolstoy usefully reminds us of the multiple locations for moral and value assessment in the calculation of the overall worth of any artwork. He worries about the opportunity costs of the labor and the materials that could perhaps have been better used than in producing an opera performance, but he also worries about the bad actions that went into creating the production, and he worries about the negative effects of the work on its audience. Still, his discussion is unsystematic. So I propose to generalize his insights and Lintott’s rich discussion into a systematic framework for factoring values into the overall worth of any artwork, not just land art. Although general, I believe that this framework is especially illuminating concerning whole classes of artworks of which nature artworks are a prominent example, given the way that both Lintott and I want to understand such works. But first, because Lintott’s focus is on the moral assessment of land art, I must register skepticism regarding the usefulness of this category for drawing any general conclusions, aesthetic or moral. As characterized by Sue Spaid, it encompasses such a wide range of diverse works and activities, from earthworks of the 1960s to contemporary ‘ecoventions’, that it is doubtful that this category has sufficient artistic unity to bear any ethical generalizations. And I think this is reflected in

Destruction as a Mode of Creation

marvelous temple apart. A child drops his grandmothers precious Ming bowl. Art objects are thus destroyed, and we note it sadly. It should not happen that way, but accidents, we say, do happen. 2. Wearing out. A visitor to Milan of a different century saw a different Leonardo fresco from the one we see. The Last Supper has suffered irreparable disintegration. Now hardly recognizable, in spite of the Pelliccioli restorations, it has been the victim of accelerating deterioration of materials. In Venice sulfurous industrial gases mix with rain water and air to become an acid deadly to many of the statues and stone buildings. The whole city is a victim of a cruel dissolution, not natural, but not unrelated to certain natural processes of wind, rain, and weather. This tragic destruction causes concern in every center of antiquities, and also in moder cities which are sometimes even less resistant to pollution damage. Ancient manuscripts must be kept hermetically sealed and protected from light, even in the best environ-

Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock

What the Body Told is the second book of poetry from Rafael Campo, a practicing physician, a gay Cuban American, and winner of the National Poetry Series 1993 Open Competition. Exploring the themes began in his first book, The Other Man Was Me, Campo extends the search for identity into new realms of fantasy and physicality. He travels inwardly to the most intimate spaces of the imagination where sexuality and gender collide and where life crosses into death. Whether facing a frenetic hospital emergency room to assess a patient critically ill with AIDS or breathing in the quiet of his mothers closet, Campo proposes with these poems an alternative means of healing and exposes the extent to which words themselves may be the most vital working parts of our bodies. The secret truths in What the Body Told, as the title implies, are already within each of us. In these vivid and provocative poems, Rafael Campo gives them a voice.

Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism

This second edition features a new 48-page Afterword--1980 updating Professor Beardsleys classic work.

The Use and Abuse of Art

The lecturer traces the historical development of attitudes toward the arts over the past 150 years, suggesting that the present is a period of cultural liquidation, nothing less than the ending of the modern age that began with the Renaissance.