Budweiser beer "e pluribus unum" can image from; a favorite of USA beer drinkers, Budweiser is -- ironically enough -- now the product of a Belgian-Brazilian beverage and brewing company
Excerpts from the above-cited article [does not include footnotes in the 2006 original article]:
“Why doesn’t your embassy sponsor more exhibits and concerts?”
“The French, the Germans, the Japanese, other countries: they organize artistic events—why don’t you have as many as they do?”
“Doesn’t your government have any interest in showing American art abroad?”
Such are the questions that host country nationals constantly peppered me with in my twenty-some years practicing public diplomacy during the Cold War and its aftermath in eastern Europe. This essay is an effort to answer their questions, which I am rephrasing in two ways: (1) Why does the U.S. government’s cultural diplomacy neglect the presentation of American art abroad, which I am calling, in this essay, “arts diplomacy”? (2) Is arts diplomacy important, and should the U.S. government support it?
But first, an attempt at definitions. By art, I mean the high arts: painting, music, literature, architecture. Whether certain works of high art should be considered universally accepted artistic achievements is, I would suggest, intrinsic to their even being considered “high art.” Of course, it is on occasion hard to distinguish between high and low art or “popular culture.” But most of us do sense a difference between, say, a classic American film (you name it) and a television commercial for beer, even if they are not as unconnected as some purists might think. Finally, when I write about cultural diplomacy, I am focusing on the U.S. government’s support of it, although I am aware that much “cultural diplomacy” can take place without government involvement.
[The title of the article is adapted from Charles Frankel, The Neglected Aspect of Foreign Affairs: American Educational and Cultural Policy Abroad (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1966). ... ]
II.
The neglect of arts diplomacy by the U.S. government reflects certain long-term traits of the American national character: it is puritanical, democratic, void of a national culture, yet it influences the world through its mass entertainment. It is, of course, an oversimplification to reduce America’s national character to being “puritanical.” But it is undeniable, as the respected art historian Lloyd Goodrich noted, that in America, thanks to “a survival from our pioneer and puritan past,” art has been “considered a luxury and non-essential—an attitude that still persists.” Hard work, not arts appreciation, is the Puritan’s priority, even if he did tolerate church music.
A second element in our national character that makes our government historically disinclined towards arts diplomacy is the political—specifically, democratic—nature of American society, for which culture—specifically, the high arts—is far less important as a means of national self definition than in countries with older, more established cultures in continental Europe or Asia (France and China immediately come to mind). To be sure, from its very first days the Republic included citizens who had an admiration for the finer things in life (John Adams and Thomas Jefferson among them), and by the end of the nineteenth century wealthy American industrialists were well on their way to accumulating great art collections. But, despite this minority interest in the high arts, it was not artistic achievements or standards, but universal political ideals stressing the dignity of the common man, which made the United States what Americans consider it to be: “democratic,” not “cultured.” “We the people” see little need for a unique national high culture that should be promoted at home or abroad; as Sumner Welles, the under secretary of state during the Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration, remarked, “The concept of an ‘official culture’ is alien to us.” We are e pluribus unum, as reading Tocqueville’s Democracy in America suggests, by our sense of belonging to a community or communities, often local, ephemeral ones that do not have the range, permanence, or country-wide magnetism of a state-supported “national culture.” This is true today more than ever. “We live in a multicultural nation, and no scholar would think of writing as confidently about a single ‘American mind’ or ‘American culture’ as did the postwar historians,” Professor David S. Brown recently noted.
But if we Americans, like the British, do not feel we have a national culture that should be promoted abroad as France did with its mission civilisatrice or Germany with its Kultur, we certainly have a superficially ever-changing popular culture that has seduced (some critics of cultural imperialism would say violated) the world since World War I: our B-films, pop music, fashion, best-sellers.
This culture—essentially entertainment or “relaxation” that provides biological rather than aesthetic satisfaction— is the product of the profit-seeking private sector, and its global expansion provides intellectual ammunition to American citizens, both inside and outside of government, who see no reason to promote arts diplomacy abroad at the taxpayer’s expense. The planetary dominance of Hollywood— while increasingly under challenge—is a third long-term reason why the American government neglects arts diplomacy. ...
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