Identity Politics is a column written by veteran journalist Susan Milligan, covering the big issues in the socio-political ether as they intersect with design, art, and other modes of visual communication.
There are the Culture Wars. And then there is the war on culture, which carries the dual impact of dividing communities while doing long-term damage to art and the critical thinking it provokes.
America has long put a socio-economic value judgment on art, whether it’s on canvas (hotel room pastorals vs Impressionist pastels, on stage (Swan Lake at Lincoln Center vs a community theater performance of Our Town), or fashion (T-shirts vs tuxes). And the division was often aspirational. People went to the movies during Hollywood’s golden age in the 30s and 40s to see actors in their finery; getting tickets to an opera or symphony performance suggested refined taste and financial success, since the price of entry is often higher for such productions.
The idea of culture has been assigned a negative, sneering quality of late, with politicians complaining that public money is wrongly spent to subsidize art that “regular people” don’t like, don’t understand, or even find offensive.
And yet the idea of culture has been assigned a negative, sneering quality of late, with politicians complaining that public money is wrongly spent to subsidize art that “regular people” don’t like, don’t understand, or even find offensive. Several decades after Andres Serrano’s photograph, Piss Christ, and Robert Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic retrospective The Perfect Moment sent social and religious conservatives into paroxysms of outrage, the attacks on public funding of art — any art, whether it’s to support local artists and art education in Ohio, or art at the Smithsonian Institution that examines race relations in America — are escalating.
President Trump, decrying the “woke” programming at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, fired much of the board. The new board elected Trump (who skipped the Kennedy Center Honors during his first term) as chairman, driving away such luminaries as Renee Fleming, the superstar soprano, as artistic adviser, and Emmy-winning producer and writer Shonda Rhimes as treasurer of the center. He’s issued an ominous executive order to “restore truth and sanity to American history,” and accused the venerated Smithsonian Institution of falling victim to “divisive, race-centered ideology.” It’s unclear what that means for the future of the National Museum of African American History and Culture or myriad exhibits at the other federal government-financed museums in the Smithsonian, but the threat was clear.
Meanwhile, Trump (with enthusiastic backing from conservatives in Congress) has zeroed out funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in his proposed 2026 budget. The NEA has informed dozens of institutions that the grants they were already awarded (but have not yet received) have been rescinded.
The premise of the war on culture is both paradoxical, looking down on people for being “elitist,” and untrue. Great art is not confined to the coasts or big cities. Indeed, NEA grants go to all 50 states, including rural areas. Notably, 2024 grants to support opera went to such locales as Juneau, Alaska; Bozeman, Montana; Boise, Idaho; Nashville, Tennessee; and Cooperstown, New York. A chamber music grant was given to a music society in Detroit, while money for a Motown Tribute band went to an organization in Marysville, Kansas.
Such government support for the arts is minuscule compared to the commitment made in other countries. And it amplifies a self-fulfilling prophecy: if only well-to-do people can experience art, then it’s against the interests of the socio-economic rank-and-file. Just as having a beer with a candidate is somehow considered more down-to-earth than sharing a glass of Scotch, viewing a modern art exhibition at a Tribeca gallery is seen as out-of-touch, compared to making the obligatory visit to Grant Wood’s American Gothic at the Art Institute of Chicago.
It matters now if art can be experienced by all, because going to a gallery or theater is a political act.
We don’t make it easy, here, to expand our cultural and artistic horizons. Major museums are pricey (the aforementioned Art Institute has a $27 adult admission ticket), as are theater and musical performances. Meanwhile, world-class European museums make their offerings accessible: the Louvre, in Paris, extends free admission to the jobless, those getting public income support, and people with disabilities at all times, and no-fee entry one Sunday a month for all. Madrid’s Prado museum is free to students and unemployed people, and for two hours every day to the general public. And in Latin America, Buenos Aires’ legendary Teatro Colón is stunningly inexpensive (and discounts are available to locals, retired people, and people with disabilities and their companions).
It matters now if art can be experienced by all, because going to a gallery or theater is a political act. Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, illustrating the Nazi bombing of the Northern Spanish town in 1937, remains to this day a haunting reminder of the barbarism and cruelty of war. Picasso declared that the painting not be hung in Spain until democracy was restored there. It is now on display at Madrid’s Reina Sofia museum (and free to the public for two hours, six days a week).
Art leads to critical thinking, accountability, and ultimately, as some elected officials fear, to dissent.
“Everything is art. Everything is politics,” the brilliant Chinese artist and champion of free expression Ai Weiwei says in his book of quotes, Weiwei-isms. And it’s not in the way the anti-NEA/NEH crowd would have us believe, wherein a small, snooty group of intellectuals in New York and Los Angeles demands subsidies for art hardly anyone wants to see. It’s because art leads to critical thinking, accountability, and ultimately, as some elected officials fear, to dissent. Weiwei’s work, now on exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum, is a testament to that truth. His bronze middle finger sculpture, or the photo of himself with the word “Fuck” sunburned onto his chest as he stands on Tiananmen Square, might make conservatives howl with outrage over the visual obscenity. But the real obscenity Weiwei protests through his art is the oppression and denial of human rights. Starving art by denying financial support isn’t democratizing culture. It destroys democracy itself.
Susan Milligan is an award-winning veteran journalist covering politics, culture, foreign affairs, and business in Washington, DC, New York, and Eastern Europe. A former writer for the New York Daily News, the Boston Globe, and US News & World Report, she was among a team of authors of the New York Times bestseller Last Lion: The Rise and Fall of Ted Kennedy. A proud Buffalo native, Milligan lives in northern Virginia.
Header image composition by Debbie Millman; background frame: Overmantel Mirror c. 1740 James Pascall (British, c. 1697–1746) England, 18th century Carved giltwood and glass, Photo by The Cleveland Museum of Art on Unsplash.
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