Three decades of federal funding for the arts is chronicled in this revealing look at the NEA and its controversial role in promoting American art.

Outsider art has exploded onto the international art scene, gaining widespread attention for its startling originality and visual power. As an expression of raw creativity, outsider art remains associated with self-taught visionaries, psychiatric patients, trance mediums, eccentric outcasts, and unschooled artistic geniuses who create things outside of mainstream artistic trends and styles. Outsider Art: Visionary Worlds and Trauma provides a comprehensive guide through the contested terrain of outsider art and the related domains of art brut, visionary art, “art of the insane,” and folk art. The book examines the history and primary issues of the field as well as explores the intersection between culture and individual creativity that is at the very heart of outsider art definitions and debates. Daniel Wojcik's interdisciplinary study challenges prevailing assumptions about the idiosyncratic status of outsider artists. This wide-ranging investigation of the art and lives of those labeled outsiders focuses on the ways that personal tragedies and suffering have inspired the art-making process. In some cases, trauma has triggered a creative transformation that has helped artists confront otherwise overwhelming life events. Additionally, Wojcik's study illustrates how vernacular traditions, religious worldviews, ethnic heritage, and popular culture have influenced such art. With its detailed consideration of personal motivations, cultural milieu, and the potentially therapeutic aspects of art making, this volume provides a deeper understanding of the artistic impulse and human creativity.

Drawing upon his experiences as both a Christian and an artist, Cameron J. Anderson traces the relationship between the evangelical church and modern art in postwar America. While acknowledging the tensions between faith and visual art, he casts a vision for how Christian artists can faithfully pursue their vocational calling in contemporary culture.

As Americans flocked to the movies during the first part of the twentieth century, the guardians of culture grew worried about their diminishing influence on American art, education, and American identity itself. Meanwhile, Hollywood studio heads were eager to stabilize their industry, solidify their place in mainstream society, and expand their new but tenuous hold on American popular culture. Peter Decherney explores how these needs coalesced and led to the development of a symbiotic relationship between the film industry and America's stewards of high culture. Formed during Hollywood's Golden Age (1915-1960), this unlikely partnership ultimately insured prominent places in American culture for both the movie industry and elite cultural institutions. It redefined Hollywood as an ideal American industry; it made movies an art form instead of simply entertainment for the masses; and it made moviegoing a vital civic institution. For their part, museums and universities used films to maintain their position as quintessential American institutions. As the book delves into the ties between Hollywood bigwigs and various cultural leaders, an intriguing cast of characters emerges, including the poet Vachel Lindsay, film producers Adolph Zukor and Joseph Kennedy, Hollywood flak and censor extraordinaire Will Hays, and philanthropist turned politician Nelson Rockefeller. Decherney considers how Columbia University's film studies program helped integrate Jewish students into American culture while also professionalizing screenwriting. He examines MoMA's career-savvy film curator Iris Barry, a British feminist once dedicated to stemming the tide of U.S. cultural imperialism, who ultimately worked with Hollywood and the U.S. government to fight fascism and communism and promote American values abroad. Other chapters explore Vachel Lindsay's progressive vision of movies as reinvigorating the public sphere through film libraries and museums; the promotion of movie connoisseurship at Harvard and other universities; and how the heir of a railroad magnate bankrolled the American avant-garde film movement. Amid ethnic diversity, the rise of mass entertainment, world war, and the global spread of American culture, Hollywood and cultural institutions worked together to insure their own survival and profitability and to provide a coherent, though shifting, American identity.

b”A COMPANION TO JOHN F. KENNEDYA COMPANION TO JOHN F. KENNEDY “Marc J. Selverstone has compiled an indispensable volume of essays on John F. Kennedy and his presidency, written by a stellar cast of scholars. What stands out in sharp relief in this wide-ranging and authoritative book is how consequential were Kennedy’s thousand days for the United States and for the world, and how controversial is his legacy. Fredrik Logevall, Stephen and Madeline Anbinder Professor of History, Cornell University “Marc J. Selverstone has brought together a remarkable group of scholars who illuminate the many important ideas of, and events that occurred during, this brief administration. This book is the best record of the Kennedy years.” Alan Brinkley, Allan Nevins Professor of American History, Columbia University “This collection of talented scholars and their research and thoughts on John F. Kennedy is an invaluable resource: a deeply informed conversation for the ages.’ Richard Reeves, writer, syndicated columnist, and senior lecturer at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California

In this impassioned and persuasive book, Bill Ivey, the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, assesses the current state of the arts in America and finds cause for alarm. Even as he celebrates our ever-emerging culture and the way it enriches our lives here at home while spreading the dream of democracy around the world, he points to a looming crisis. The expanding footprint of copyright, an unconstrained arts industry marketplace, and a government unwilling to engage culture as a serious arena for public policy have come together to undermine art, artistry, and cultural heritage—the expressive life of America. In eight succinct chapters, Ivey blends personal and professional memoir, policy analysis, and deeply held convictions to explore and define a coordinated vision for art, culture, and expression in American life.

The Getty Research Journal features the work of art historians, museum curators, and conservators from around the world as part of the Getty’s mission to promote the presentation, conservation, and interpretation of the world’s artistic legacy. Articles present original scholarship related to the Getty’s collections, initiatives, and research. This issue features essays on the culture of display in eighteenth-century Venetian palaces, the influence of prehistoric cave paintings on American abstract artists, the life and writings of Pauline Gibling Schindler, an unrealized project by Sam Francis and Walter Hopps for a contemporary art venue in 1960s Los Angeles, Harald Szeemann’s early plans for the documenta 5 exhibition, and the notebooks and manuscripts that led to Aldo Rossi’s Scientific Autobiography. Shorter texts include notices on Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s illustrations accompanying a tale in Martín de Murúa’s Historia general del Piru, copperplate prints depicting the Qing army’s invasion of Nepal in 1792, the Nazi-era business records of the Gustav Cramer gallery in The Hague, Netherlands, and a proposal for the integration of provenance research into all aspects of museum activities, including a call for cross-institutional databases and international collaborations.

This book demonstrates how and why a majority of US artists must now function as producers of their original works, as well as creators. The author shows how, over the span of 20 years, the USA's cultural policy sector radically redefined US artists' practices without cohesively articulating the expectations of artists' new role.

What is the role of the arts in American culture? Is art an essential element? If so, how should we support it? Today, as in the past, artists need the funding, approval, and friendship of patrons whether they are individuals, corporations, governments, or nonprofit foundations. But as Patronizing the Arts shows, these relationships can be problematic, leaving artists "patronized"--both supported with funds and personal interest, while being condescended to for vocations misperceived as play rather than serious work. In this provocative book, Marjorie Garber looks at the history of patronage, explains how patronage has elevated and damaged the arts in modern culture, and argues for the university as a serious patron of the arts. With clarity and wit, Garber supports rethinking prejudices that oppose art's role in higher education, rejects assumptions of inequality between the sciences and humanities, and points to similarities between the making of fine art and the making of good science. She examines issues of artistic and monetary value, and transactions between high and popular culture. She even asks how college sports could provide a new way of thinking about arts funding. Using vivid anecdotes and telling details, Garber calls passionately for an increased attention to the arts, not just through government and private support, but as a core aspect of higher education. Compulsively readable, Patronizing the Arts challenges all who value the survival of artistic creation both in the present and future.

During the middle decades of the twentieth century, the production of America's consumer culture was centralized in midtown Manhattan to an extent unparalleled in the history of the modern United States. Within a few square miles of skyscrapers were the headquarters of networks like NBC and CBS, the editorial offices of book publishers and mass circulation magazines such as Time and Life, numerous influential newspapers, and major advertising agencies on Madison Avenue. Every day tens of thousands of writers, editors, artists, performers, technicians, secretaries, and other white-collar workers made advertisements, produced media content, and enhanced the appearance of goods in order to boost sales. While this center of creativity has often been portrayed as a smoothly running machine, within these offices many white-collar workers challenged the managers and executives who directed their labors. In this definitive history, The Making of the American Creative Class examines these workers and their industries throughout the twentieth century. As manufacturers and retailers competed to attract consumers' attention, their advertising expenditures financed the growth of enterprises engaged in the production of culture, which in turn provided employment for an increasing number of clerical, technical, professional, and creative workers. The book explores employees' efforts to improve their working conditions by forming unions, experimenting with alternative media and cultural endeavors supported by public, labor, or cooperative patronage, and expanding their opportunities for creative autonomy. As blacklisting and attacks on militant unions left them destroyed or weakened, workers in advertising, design, publishing, and broadcasting in the late twentieth century were constrained in their ability to respond to economic dislocations and to combat discrimination in the culture industries. At once a portrait of a city and the national culture of consumer capitalism it has produced, The Making of the American Creative Class is an innovative narrative of modern American history that addresses issues of earnings and status still experienced by today's culture workers.