2018 by The Estate of Bruce Cole
Foreword 2018 by Roger Kimball
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Encounter Books, 900 Broadway, Suite 601, New York, New York, 10003.
First American edition published in 2018 by Encounter Books, an activity of Encounter for Culture and Education, Inc., a nonprofit, tax exempt corporation.
Encounter Books website address: www.encounterbooks.com
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.481992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).
Image credits:
1.3a & 1.3b: Images courtesy of the Eisenhower Memorial Commission; Memorial Design by Gehry Partners, LLP; Tapestry Design by Tomas Osinski; Sculpture by Sergey Eylanbekov.
1.4, 4.1, 4.2: Created by B. Cole and J. Studemeyer.
All other images are in the public domain.
FIRST AMERICAN EDITION
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Cole, Bruce, 1938 author.
Title: Art from the swamp: how Washington bureaucrats squander millions on awful art / by Bruce Cole.
Description: New York: Encounter Books, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018010777 (print) | LCCN 2018016433 (ebook) | ISBN 9781594039973 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Federal aid to the artsUnited States. | Waste in government spendingUnited States.
Classification: LCC N8837 (ebook) | LCC N8837 .C65 2018 (print) | DDC 701/.03dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018010777
Interior page design and composition: BooksByBruce.com
For my family
Special thanks to:
The Staff and Fellows at EPPC
The Achelis and Bodman Foundation
The Bradley Foundation
Michael Bekesha at Judicial Watch
Leslie Lenkowsky
J. Bradley Studemeyer
Contents
This is one foreword that I wish I did not have to write.
When my friend Bruce Cole died suddenly in January 2018, age 79, he left the manuscript of this book about Washingtons patronage of the arts almost complete. In a world in which the operations of Clotho, Lachesis, and Atroposthe three Fates who spin, measure out, and finally snip the skein of lifewere not so preemptory, it would have been Bruce himself who would have offered these few stage-setting words.
But it was not to be. Bruce, a historian of Renaissance art and of American civics, was also the longest-serving director of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a post he held from 2001 to 2009. He was also the author of fourteen books on various aspects of Renaissance art, American civic literacy, and related topics. In 2008, President George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Citizens Medal for his work to strengthen our national memory and ensure that our countrys heritage is passed on to future generations. The preservation of national memory and the preservation of our heritage were abiding leitmotifs in Bruces career, both in his voluminous writing and in his many administrative activities.
Bruces last official perch was as a scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. He was a potent commentator on a clutch of public controversies, weighing in most recently on the heated debate over the proposed Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, a controversy that looms large in this book.
The title Art from the Swamp suggests the spongey and enveloping nature of the phenomenon Bruce seeks to anatomize in this book. For what started in 1783 with an unrealized public commission by the Confederation Congress for an equestrian statue of George Washington has ballooned, like every bureaucracy that pulsates in the pullulating ground of Washington, into a sprawling and expensive congeries of programs, initiatives, grants, set-asides, commissions, and mandatory spending requirements overseen by the General Services Administrations Art in Architecture Program, the National Endowment for the Arts, and other swampy entities. The result, as Bruce catalogues in the following pages, is a corrupt process that disgorges a panoply of art and architecture at taxpayer expense but most often without regard to taxpayer taste or preference. Bruce shows just how vast the empire of government patronage has become in an Appendix which lists every known work of government funded art and architecture from 1975 to 2016. It is a long list.
I said that when Bruce died the manuscript for this book was almost complete. I have to emphasize the adverb: almost. Without the tireless and expert intervention of Bruces longtime assistant and EPPC colleague J. Bradley Studemeyer, Art from the Swamp would have remained a work in potentia. It was he who dotted the Is and crossed the Ts, filled in the lacunae, polished the rough edges, supplied the missing quotations, and checked and doubled the many sources that Bruce consulted in writing this book. Mr. Studemeyers work was the indispensable coping stone. I am grateful to have this opportunity to thank him for his labors.
Washington bureaucrats spend millions of dollars each year on artwork and do so without the knowledge or consent of most of the taxpayers who foot the bill. Commissioned by a labyrinthine thicket of unelected commissions, committees, boards, and panels, this government art is unwanted, unloved, and astronomically expensive. This book will explore, and often expose, how federal funds are used to produce awful art through an examination of the Eisenhower Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., the General Services Administrations Art in Architecture Program, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
The history of government-sponsored art is a long one. For millennia, public works of art and architecture have been commissioned, and paid for, by rulers. From ancient Egypt to our time, paintings, sculptures, monuments, memorials, and buildings furthered the aims of emperors, kings, popes, and dictators, among others. Pyramids, pagan temples, soaring cathedrals, and untold numbers of paintings, mosaics, and statues tell us as much about the character of those who made them as do words in books and manuscripts.
Our relationship with art and architecture is not merely a one-way street; as Winston Churchill said, We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us. Sometimes such shaping is evil, as with Albert Speers crushing designs for Hitlers Berlin, and sometimes it is good, as with the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall in Washington. This is also true of paintings and sculptures.
This book is about public art commissioned by the government of the United States, a country that has been commissioning works of art for almost as long as it has been independent. In 1783, the year the Revolutionary War ended and five years before the ratification of the Constitution, an equestrian statue of George Washington was commissioned by the Confederation Congress. Although the statue was never created, a precedent was set for federal patronage of art and architecture. The following year, the Virginia General Assembly also commissioned a statue of Washington (which was sculpted by Jean-Antoine Houdon between 1785 and 1791), an early example of state sponsorship of art.
