The Gift

by Lewis Hyde

  Not surprisingly, the institutions that support such noncommercial enterprises will change over time. If we tire of the focused patronage of an established church, we may separate church and state and give a tax exemption to all denominations. If we don’t like royal patronage, we may turn to private philanthropy. If the privately endowed colleges serve only the elite, we may turn to state and community colleges supported by the public purse. More broadly, where church or crown or private endowments do not meet our needs, we may turn to what might be called “democratic patronage.” Public education, public hospitals, public libraries, pure science, the arts, and the humanities: in the last century, all of these have been underwritten by democratic communities that tax themselves to support things of value that would not otherwise thrive.

  Which brings me back to the fall of the Soviet Union, for it was the cold war that energized much of the public funding devoted to art and science in the decades after the Second World War. In my own country at least (and I must confine my remarks to the American case, that being the only one I know well), these were the years when our leaders felt called upon to show off the liberal, capitalist state, and contrast its vitality with the banality of the Eastern bloc. Neutral nations and Eastern-bloc dissidents were meant to see the remarkable energy and innovation that the West’s freedoms produced. In the case of support for the arts, the energizing distinction was well expressed in a 1952 New York Times Magazine essay by the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Barr: “The modern artists’ nonconformity and love of freedom cannot be tolerated within a monolithic tyranny and modern art is useless for the dictator’s propaganda.”

  The history of this period of what I now think of as “democratic-propaganda patronage” falls into at least three phases, a series of responses to the question that Barr used as the title of his essay, “Is Modern Art Communistic?” Barr argued the negative, setting American freedom and nonconformity against the Soviets’ totalizing impulse, but his position held no sway in the U.S. Congress. Elected officials in the United States regularly attacked the arts (“All modern art is Communistic,” declared one Missouri congressman) and when the U.S. State Department tried to include artwork in its cultural diplomacy the Congress directly undercut the effort. The exemplary moment came in 1947, when an exhibition of modern painting called “Advancing American Art” (including work by Georgia O’Keeffe and Arshile Gorky) traveled to Europe, first to Paris and then to Prague, where the Russians felt called upon to mount a rival exhibition. They needn’t have bothered, for the exhibition was sufficiently opposed at home, described in Congress as having been assembled by “the Communists and their New Deal fellow travelers.” The tour was canceled and the artwork sold as surplus government property at 5 percent of its value.*

  Thus did Phase One of postwar cultural support really begin, the covert phase, for when Congress failed to support American cultural propaganda, the CIA stepped in. As the director of the CIA’s International Organizations Division later remarked of one congressional opponent: “He made it very difficult to get Congress to go along with some of the things that we wanted to do––send art abroad, send symphonies abroad, publish magazines abroad, whatever. That’s one of the reasons why it had to be done covertly… In order to encourage openness we had to be secret.”

  What the CIA actually managed to do has been told in Frances Stonor Saunders’s book, The Cultural Cold War, which describes at length the interlocking structures of cultural and political power found in the United States in the 1950s. Nelson Rockefeller was well connected to both worlds and so played a key role. He had been, for example, wartime head of the intelligence agency for Latin America, and that agency, in turn, had sponsored touring exhibitions of contemporary American painting, tours that were mostly organized by the Museum of Modern Art, where Rockefeller also served variously as trustee, treasurer, president, and chairman of the board. The 1950s CIA was particularly keen on Abstract Expressionism, which Rockefeller himself famously described as “free enterprise painting.” As one agency staffer later reported, “We recognized that this was the kind of art that did not have anything to do with socialist realism, and made socialist realism look even more stylized and more rigid and confined.” Not that there was ever any direct support to artists like Jackson Pollock, or any formal agreements between the CIA and the museums. “For matters of this sort,” the staffer goes on to say, it “could only have been done through the organizations or the operations of the CIA at two or three removes.”

  As for “the organizations,” the most famous was the Congress of Cultural Freedom, which covertly sponsored a highbrow intellectual journal, Encounter; paid the expenses of American and European intellectuals to attend international conferences; and supported the foreign distribution of American literary and cultural journals such as Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, Hudson Review, and Sewanee Review. In the early 1960s, when the Kenyon Review was edited by Robie Macauley, its circulation jumped from two thousand to six thousand. Macauley had actually worked for the CIA before he took over the Review from its founding editor, John Crowe Ransom, and was later to boast that he had “found ways of making money that Mr. Ransom had never thought of.”

  This period of covert arts funding came to an end with the Soviets’ successful launch of the first earth-orbiting satellite, and with the election of John F. Kennedy as U.S. president. Ever since the end of the Second World War, the government had been supporting scientific research, largely through the universities, but that funding broadened significantly after Sputnik and became an overt part of the nation’s self-advertising, all of which eased the way for similar support to the arts and humanities. President Kennedy in turn was a politician disposed to support the kind of open cultural diplomacy that had disappeared a decade earlier. He invited Robert Frost to read at his inauguration and later, at the Frost Library in Amherst, defended American cultural freedoms in terms of the standard opposition to communist oppressions, extolling the artist as the “last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state.” After Pablo Casals played his cello at the White House, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., declared the event “of obvious importance… in transforming the world’s impression of the United States as a nation of money-grubbing materialists.”

  Such was the philosophy that guided the next quarter-century of public patronage, a period when Democrats and Republicans read from the same play book. Lyndon Johnson, impressed with the goodwill Kennedy received for supporting the arts, signed the law that brought the National Endowment for the Arts into being. Richard Nixon doubled its budget. All deployed the rhetoric of the cold war. Typical would be a remark by Gifford Phillips, trustee of the Phillips Collection in Washington: “The artist has a special need to live outside of society … Whenever there is an official attempt to destroy this detachment, as there has been in the Soviet Union, for example, art is likely to suffer.”

  Oddly, as the critic Michael Brenson points out in Visionaries and Outcasts, his history of the NEA visual arts program, it was always assumed that such detached and materially disinterested outsiders would never find themselves in conflict with America itself. It was as if the more “outside” the artist went, the more fully would he or she embody the transcendent values of capitalist democracy. The seemingly asocial eccentric in his cabin at the edge of town is not actually “outside” his country; quite the opposite: he inhabits the True America, the one the Soviets can never see if they focus only on the money-grubbing side of capitalism. “We are the last civilized nation on the earth to recognize that the arts and the humanities have a place in our national life,” declared a New Jersey congressman in 1965. Twenty years earlier, Georgia O’Keeffe’s work was sold as government surplus; now it could as easily be the emblem of civilization itself, and her studio at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico its last outpost.

  The ideological anomalies of this period aside, the institutions of overt democratic patronage arose from a
wisdom worth preserving. In the United States, the 1965 enabling legislation for the arts and humanities endowments spelled out worthy goals: “While no government can call a great artist or scholar into existence, it is necessary and appropriate for the federal government to help create and sustain not only a climate encouraging freedom of thought, imagination, and inquiry, but also the material conditions facilitating the release of this creative talent.” This seems exactly right; the problem lies in the context of its expression, the long season of democratic-propaganda patronage during which, despite the well-put ideal, the arts and sciences were not supported as ends in themselves, but as players in a larger political drama.

  Of that context one could say, to put it positively, that the Soviet Union turned out to provide a useful counterforce to the harsher realities of the West. It goaded Americans into provisioning those parts of social life not well served by market forces. To put it negatively, however, if Cold War rhetoric lay at the foundation, then the entire edifice was historically vulnerable. Thus after the Soviet Union fell in 1989 so did the bulk of public patronage in the West. Complaints about government support for the arts had begun in earnest during the Reagan presidency, but funding itself actually rose in all but one year of his two terms; however, in 1989––the first year of George H. W. Bush’s presidency––attacks on funding escalated, focused on particular artists and on the supposed elitism of the funding process. In the long run, inflammatory charges of obscenity in the arts proved especially effective when joined to the call for limited government and balanced budgets, so much so that by the time Bill Clinton left office a decade later, the NEA had lost 56 percent of its annual budget, its staff had been cut in half, and nearly all grants to individual artists had been eliminated. A similar if less publicized story played out in basic science. In a 1998 interview Leon Lederman, Nobel laureate in physics, said: “We always thought, naively, that here we are working in abstract, absolutely useless research and once the cold war ended, we wouldn’t have to fight for resources. Instead, we found, we were the cold war. We’d been getting all this money for quark research because our leaders decided that science, even useless science, was a component of the cold war. As soon as it was over, they didn’t need science.”

  In short, around 1990 the third phase of this history began, an era of market triumphalism in which not only has public support of the arts and sciences begun to dry up but those who stilled their voices during the cold war, those who have long believed in an unlimited market, have felt free to advance unselfconsciously.

  In instance after instance, public institutions have been encouraged to think of themselves as private businesses. The universities have set up “technology transfer offices” and tried to fund themselves by selling knowledge rather than creating, preserving, and disseminating it, as their old mission statements once asked them to do. Grammar schools have learned that they can sell exclusive rights to soft drink vendors intent on creating brand loyalty in the very young. Public radio and television are now cluttered with advertising. Even commercial television has become more so: in the United States, the networks once limited their ads to nine minutes an hour; they gave that up in the last decade and ads now run eighteen minutes in prime time.

  Natural abundance has been similarly commercialized, everywhere subject to the grid of artificial scarcity. Ancient aquifers, by rights belonging to all who live above them, are now pumped and packaged. Drinking water, once an essence of life, has become a resource to be sold in brand-differentiated packaging. Broadcast spectrum, one of nature’s richest gifts, has been parceled out to industry and then sold back to the public.

  Our cultural abundance suffers the same fate. The ever-expanding reach of copyright has removed more and more art and ideas from the public domain. The Walt Disney Company happily built its film empire out of folk culture (Snow White, Pinocchio) but any folk who try to build on Disney can expect a cease and desist order in the next mail. Patents are now used to create property rights in things once thought inalienable—facts of nature, seed lines, human genes, medicines long known to indigenous cultures. A company that makes jam recently got itself a patent on the crustless peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.

  This period of market triumphalism has, in sum, seen a successful move to commercialize a long list of things once thought to have no price, and to enclose common holdings, both natural and cultural, that we used to assume no one was allowed to take private. All of which seems quite grim, but only, I think, if we forget that history brought these changes and that history continues to unfold. As I said before, gift-institutions supporting the noncommercial portion of our lives will change as the times change. None of us wants to return to the days when a great scientist had to hope the king might make him Master of the Mint, nor—if we care for the arts and sciences as ends in themselves—should we pine for the days of patronage as propaganda. If we want our institutions to have the longevity they deserve, then the commercial side of our culture needs to be met with an indigenous counterforce, not a foreign one.

  To close this excursion into matters topical and practical, then, let me point to a necessarily limited sample of places where the commercial and the noncommercial are found in better balance. A good number may be seen on the Internet, itself a post-Soviet surprise of history if there ever was one. Numerous projects on the Web have the structures and fertility of gift communities. There are many examples, from the free software movement to the donated labor supporting political blogs to the “NASA Clickworkers,” a set of over eighty-five thousand anonymous, untrained volunteers who helped classify all the craters on maps of Mars.

  Or take the Public Library of Science. This Web-based publishing venture has protocols reminiscent of the scientific community as described in chapter 5. There I write that papers published in scientific journals are called “contributions” for good reason; “They are in fact, gifts,” as one theorist says, gifts to a community whose currency is the merit that a scientist acquires when her ideas are accepted and passed along.

  This gift ethic never extended, however, to the actual printing and distribution of scientific journals. On the contrary, the cost of subscribing to these journals has been a growing problem for many libraries (the price of publications in science rose by about 260 percent during the 1990s). A one-year subscription to The American Journal of Human Geneticsnow costs over $1,000 and a good science library needs scores of such subscriptions. At current rates, poorly endowed colleges and, more importantly, the poorer nations, literally cannot afford to enter the scientific community, no matter its internal ethic of generosity.

  Internet publication has provided a solution. In 2000 a group of biomedical scientists, including Nobel laureate Harold E. Varmus, began urging scientific publishers to make all research available for free distribution online. When the publishers resisted, the group simply worked around them and in 2003 launched a nonprofit Web publishing venture, the Public Library of Science. By now there are six online journals (PLoS Biology, PLoS Medicine, PLoS Genetics, and others). These are not Web logs or chat rooms or sites where people may post whatever they wish; they are well-edited, peer-reviewed journals publishing original research, as with traditional journals. The difference is that PLoS journals are “open access,” meaning that the authors grant to all users “a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access” to their work. “Everything we publish is freely available online throughout the world,” say the editors, “for you to read, download, copy, distribute, and use (with attribution) any way you wish. No permission required.”

  The Public Library of Science has added “publishing as gift-exchange” to the older idea of “research as gift-exchange.” Nor, I might add, is gift-exchange at odds with commerce in this case; the editors allow commercial reuse of their journals’ content. In the introduction to The Gift, I say that artworks exist in two economies, though one is primary; the same might be said of scientific knowledge in the Public Library model: commerce is not excl
uded, but it follows after contributions are made; it does not come first.

  To present my second example of a new noncommercial institution I need to back up and describe a little-known piece of the history of support for the arts. In modern times, young artists in need of help have traditionally received support either from public coffers or from private fortunes. The question is, might there be a third path? Might not the art world itself hold wealth sufficient to support emerging talents?

  An interesting experiment in that line was initiated shortly after the Second World War when musicians in the United States began to worry that the popularity of long-playing records would cut into their performance income. What if every time the band goes to the recording studio all they are doing is playing themselves out of half of next year’s jobs? Responsive to such concerns, the musicians’ union worked out an innovative agreement with the recording companies such that a small percentage of the sale of each recording would go into a trust fund, the fund then being used to augment the income of musicians playing live performances.

  After half a century this institution, the Music Performance Fund, still exists. It distributes millions of dollars annually, and supports thousands of concerts in the United States and Canada. It’s the largest sponsor of live, admission-free music in the world. In recent years it has also developed a Scholarship Fund to help pay for the training of young musicians.

  What I like especially about the Music Performance Fund is its recycling feature, the wealth moving in a circle. That small percentage of the commerce that goes into the Music Performance Fund is a kind of self-tithing that the community has accepted so as to support its members, and to support musical culture in general (most of the performances are given for young people in schools). As a result, the recording industry is not purely extractive; the business side itself agrees to support the cultural ecology that nurtures musicians in the first place.