FOR ART’S SAKE The worst effect of the contemporary art scene may be the way it turns even those who love art into howling philistines. There’s something irresistible about reporting, as The Weekly Standard did back in November, that a cleaning man had swept up and bagged as trash an expensive installation by Damien Hirst in a London art gallery. Meanwhile, in Colorado, the Aspen Art Museum hung a piece of conceptual art called “I Dare You to Steal This $100”–and someone took the dare, smashing the acrylic and replacing the $100 bill with five $20 bills. “It ruined the whole aesthetics for me,” artist Rick Magnuson complained. “I don’t think it’s a valuable piece now.” Trouble is, Rick, it wasn’t that valuable before; we’d guess it was worth around $100. And the fact it was passed off as a great concept for a work of art makes even art lovers–who aren’t, after all, the usual applauders of vandalism–laugh when someone applies to it a wittier concept. Still, we have hopes that things might get better. But the death, at age 69, of Michael Hammond on Jan. 29–one week after taking office as the new chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts–was a blow. Dean of the School of Music at Rice University, a conductor and composer who also taught neuro-anatomy and physiology in medical schools, he was a serious man of serious purpose, and he might have helped move American art toward something more closely resembling genuine art. The sheer existence of the NEA remains a problem for some Republicans, and its effect on art–its permanent establishment through federal subsidies of an art world at something near its nadir–troubles thoughtful commentators and theorists. But the moment for dismantling the arts endowment has passed, at least for now. Certainly, the Republican-controlled Congress lacks any will to undertake the project. And so the only question now is what can be made of it. David Gelernter–painter, Yale computer-science professor, and Weekly Standard contributing editor–is someone with ideas for improving contemporary art, and his nomination last week to the National Council on the Arts, the advisory board for the NEA, is a step in the right direction. He is one of the few thinkers in the conservative world who has managed to reject the idiocies of much of what passes for art these days, without falling into the philistine despair that threatens the rest of us. If the Bush administration can pick someone like Gelernter–or what about Gelernter himself?–to replace Michael Hammond as head of the NEA, there’s a chance we won’t have to report the comedy of contemporary art vandalism on the pages we ought to be using to talk about art. BOOKS IN BRIEF On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs; Teaching, Writing, Playing, Believing, Lecturing, Philosophizing, Singing, Dancing by James V. Schall (ISI, 250 pp., $24.95) Georgetown University’s James Schall happily cuts across the contemporary cultural grain. Among other claims, he holds that modern civilization owes its existence to both Greek philosophy and Judeo-Christian religion–and a world that has forgotten these foundations is blind to the essential, inherent worth of each human being. Through a dozen or so finely crafted essays, Schall explains that the deep human need for song, dance, and philosophy is not a form of escapism from the serious things of life. Rather, it is evidence of the true freedom for which human beings are created. –Elizabeth Royal A Government of Laws: Political Theory, Religion, and the American Founding by Ellis Sandoz (University of Missouri Press, 240 pp., $45) The ambition of Ellis Sandoz’s project is impressive. In his “A Government of Laws” he argues that the American founding grew out of a providential harmony of ancient philosophy, Christianity, the English republican and common-law traditions, and the thought of John Locke. And he suggests that the common strand in all these sources is a notion of man as an “in-between being,” neither god nor beast, and therefore both in need of law and capable of liberty. One wonders, of course, if the views Sandoz draws together aren’t really more at odds than he suggests. Is the right to the “pursuit of happiness” enunciated in the Declaration of Independence really founded on the premodern concept of the summum bonum? Encouraging people to pursue happiness wherever they believe it lies sounds rather like the denial of a genuine highest good. Still, Sandoz engages and provokes even when one disagrees with him. Particularly interesting are his discussion of Edward Coke, the great English lawyer, and his examination of the “civil theology” of Locke’s Second Treatise, which draws on Leo Strauss’s reading of Locke. –Peter J. Hansen Uncivil Wars: The Controversy over Reparations for Slavery by David Horowitz (Encounter, 147 pp., $21.95) David Horowitz has a knack for getting under the skin of his former soulmates on the left, particularly campus radicals. The latest example occurred last spring, when he tried to place in college newspapers nationwide an ad offering “Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery Is a Bad Idea–And Racist Too.” The response from student journalists, administrators, and faculty–the refusal of most papers to run the ad, the theft of copies of those that did, and the denunciations of Horowitz as a racist–served as a reminder of the hypocrisy, intolerance, and cowardice entrenched on American campuses. In “Uncivil Wars,” Horowitz recounts this episode as part of a larger examination of the reparations controversy. As a reformed leftist, he sees better than most that the reparations movement is motivated not primarily by a concern for justice. It exists instead to denigrate America’s founding ideals–ideals that contributed to slavery’s end–and to perpetuate a sense of race-based entitlement and victimhood that harms blacks today far more than does the legacy of slavery. One can take issue, as many do, with Horowitz’s pugnacious methods, but the force of his argument is impossible to deny. –Lee Bockhorn BOOK OF THE WEEK American Cassandra Stephen Emerson’s prophetic warning. By J. Bottum American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us by Steven Emerson (Free Press, 261 pp., $26) Among the terrorist groups that President Bush explicitly named in his Jan. 29 State of the Union address were Hamas, al Qaeda, and Islamic Jihad. These are also some of the groups that Steven Emerson shows, in his new book “American Jihad,” have reached deep into America to find money, organization, and recruits. That’s one of the astonishing pieces of information to come to public notice since the attacks of Sept. 11–but the most astonishing part may be that Emerson has been saying it since 1992. Like Daniel Pipes and a few others who’ve been prophesying for years about imminent assaults from radical Islamic terrorists, Emerson must be tired of being dubbed an “American Cassandra.” He must be even more tired of being called a racist, a bigot, and a monomaniacal hater of Muslims. A chance encounter with a radical Islamic group in Oklahoma City while he was a reporter for CNN led Emerson to make a documentary called “Jihad in America,” which PBS aired late in 1994. From then on, the denunciations have been unrelenting. He reported the hate spewed forth against Israel and America at meetings of various Islamic youth groups, charities, and theological discussion centers–and, as a result, his own name was routinely chanted at such meetings, joining the Jews and American politicians as another who must be destroyed. In a recent column in the Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby reported that National Public Radio in 1998 banned Emerson from appearing as an expert on Islamic groups. “You have my promise he won’t be used again,” producer Ellen Silva wrote to Ali Abunimah of the American Arab Action Network. “It is NPR policy.” The FBI warned him that a Muslim group from South Africa may have been sent to the United States to kill him. At last, however, America seems to be listening to him. The key information in “American Jihad” concerns the use of organizations in the United States that have clear philanthropic and religious purposes. Emerson insists that most Islamic agencies are what they seem to be–just as he insists, despite the accusations hurled against him, that the vast majority of American Muslims are law-abiding opponents of terrorism. But the American Islamic establishment has provided what he calls a “zone of legitimacy” within which terrorist groups can work. An organization like the Muslim Arab Youth Association doesn’t practice terrorism, but it espouses radical Islam–and thereby, wittingly or unwittingly, provides cover for fund-raising and recruiting by the groups that do practice terrorism. WORSE may be the way the legitimizing groups gained their own legitimacy through being embraced by mainline American universities and religious organizations, always in the name of diversity and multiculturalism. (The struggle of Judy Genshaft, president of the University of South Florida, to disembarrass her school of its associations with Palestinian radical Sami Al-Arian is a case in point.) All of which means that there were a large number of people with a vested interest in believing Steven Emerson wrong in 1992, and there remain nearly as many today. Cassandra had the same problem back in Troy.
