Modern Age editor Daniel McCarthy sits down with the poet Dana Gioia, who delivered the keynote address at ISI’s recent 18th Annual Gala for Western Civilization. Gioia is the former California Poet Laureate and the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the author of multiple books of prose and poetry, including, most recently, Poetry as Enchantment.
In the edited excerpt below, McCarthy and Gioia discuss conservative influence in the arts.
McCarthy: Right now there is a lot of anxiety among conservatives that there’s not enough conservative culture in our country, and there are many approaches to trying to fill this gap. Many of them are unsuccessful simply as art. How should conservatives think about approaching the creation of poetry and other forms of art? Are conservatives temperamentally either philistines or so devoted to fighting the left that they are incapable of the sort of greatness of spirit that’s needed to create great art?
Gioia: You’re asking a big question but it’s an important one. Let me just go back twenty, fifteen years ago when I was in Washington. Here’s the situation that I found: conservatives had declared themselves at war with the arts. You’d get a variety of articulations: “well I don’t like the art world because they’re our enemies,” or “I like the arts but we’re going to leave it to the marketplace,” or “this is not the concern of government.” None of those statements are 100 percent untrue. But it struck me as odd. If you’re conservative, what is it that you want to conserve? If you’re not interested in conserving the great works of the human mind and imagination, I’m not sure that I’m a conservative then.
But that’s where the Newt Gingrich Contract with America ended up. I remember having dinner once with Gingrich when he was at the height of his power and I was a nobody, and he said “well all the great art in the past was done through the marketplace,” and I said, “No it wasn’t, none of it was done that way.” Was St. Peter’s built in the marketplace? Was the Parthenon? What we see about the great art of the past was that it was financed in very complicated ways. Let’s just start with Shakespeare: Shakespeare had a license from the queen and the king of England so he had royal protection; he then had a theater which was civically governed and had some sponsors—we don’t know precisely the books—and then he opened it up to the marketplace. So he had a public-private partnership. For Handel—I just finished reading a biography of Handel—we have all the numbers: we know exactly how much King George gave him in working capital which he basically supplemented through the audience; it was a public-private partnership. I think it’s bad when art cuts itself off from the marketplace but if we want the marketplace to determine what kind of art we’re doing, we’re going to get TikTok and PornHub—and these are not the best that has been thought and created by the human mind.
I am a pragmatist and I would first of all say that conservatism is not primarily a political philosophy; it’s a mindset, it’s a temperament, it’s a worldview, which believes that we must conserve the best of the past, we need to be skeptical about sudden changes and improvements, we honor traditional institutions while trying to improve them, we honor the the rights of the individual, the property of the individual, free speech and freedom of worship for the individual, and all of those things strike me as deeply consistent with a cultural worldview. Conservativism in America has I think failed to make lasting changes because it believed that it could rule by policy and ignore culture. Until the conservative worldview—which is a huge range from libertarianism to a kind of anti-intellectualist traditionalism—until it has a cultural vision, it’s going to be temporary and tactical. So I believe in a conservativism that is anchored in the best of tradition, not just politically or economically, but artistically and culturally.
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