Give the National Endowment for the Arts Back to the Public

For decades, Americans have become increasingly alienated from the American arts establishment. The main source for their discontent is clear: Academics and their allies have successfully insisted upon first modernism, then postmodernism, and finally identity politics—then celebrated the failures that resulted. 

A banana duct-taped to a wall recently sold for $6.2 million. English professors teach students that rhyme and meter are oppressive tools of the past, and hold up prosy and often incomprehensible screeds as “poems” that are their model for the future—even as Hamilton, and rap music more generally, demonstrate that the public still glories in rhythm, rhyme, and interesting narratives. Hollywood has also run out of fresh ideas, so the public has to settle for boring sequels, boring prequels, and inane stories taken from comic books.  

The cancerous impact of the academy is clearest in architecture. While modernist architecture has produced many types of dysfunctional buildings, nothing has been worse than “brutalist” architecture. I worked in one of brutalism’s more celebrated buildings for six years—the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services headquarters—and, like most of my colleagues, found that the concrete walls and lack of natural light created something close to a prison experience. 

Even if we set aside my subjective experiences and those of my colleagues at the HHS headquarters, brutalist buildings are a poor investment of taxpayer dollars. Cement is not flexible or adaptable when agencies want to adopt new technologies or methods of working, and as it ages, it crumbles in dangerous ways that are often extraordinarily expensive to fix. For example, the subway parking garage closest to my house opened in 1985; in recent years, large chunks of concrete keep dropping from its ceilings. Moreover, just to tear it down will cost over $150 million.

One of President Trump’s best appointments in his first term was Justin Shubow, who revitalized the semi-dormant U.S. Commission on Fine Arts. He provided alternatives to overblown and poorly conceived new monuments for the Washington Mall, and he made significant inroads toward changing the philosophy at the General Services Administration, which builds and renovates federal buildings. 

Shubow’s advocacy for more traditional architecture, from classical to Art Deco, brought blistering criticism from defenders of brutalism; both the New York Times and National Public Radio grudgingly called him “one of modern architecture’s biggest critics.” Despite nearly universal opposition to Shubow’s reforms from the nation’s leading architects, a 2020 Harris poll found that 72 percent of the public preferred traditional architecture in federal buildings.

Architecture is only one of the arts, but Shubow, who is reportedly under consideration by the Trump administration for the NEA Chair nomination, would be a compelling advocate for all of them. The battle lines for literature, music, theatre and the fine arts are essentially the same as they are for architecture. Entrenched academics and their allies keep doggedly inflicting the same old travesties on the public. These people are the same types who defended the most notorious NEA misadventures, such as the infamous Piss Christ episode where a plastic crucifix in a bottle of urine won an NEA-sponsored competition. 

The odds are that the NEA will be on the DOGE list for elimination of agencies, but the Trump administration tried to accomplish that goal in its first term and was unsuccessful. In the meantime, letting the bureaucracy rally around the status quo would be a disservice to the public. If public money is going to be spent on the arts, it should not just be a piggy bank for well-connected insiders who are contemptuous of what most Americans actually want.