The Gulag Archipelago

Like everyone else driving along Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park last year, I couldn’t help but notice the now-iconic Shepard Fairey “Hope” poster of candidate Barack Obama emblazoned 20 feet high on the side of a building near Dodger Stadium.  As a piece of advocacy, it was tremendously effective – Obama the visionary, gazing bravely into the middle distance and the distant future – even if it did turn out to be a shameless rip-off of an Associated Press photograph.

That image is now once again front and center in the wake of the revelations that the National Endowment for the Arts has apparently been colluding with the White House’s Office of Public Engagement and the president’s United We Serve “call to action” to enlist sympathetic artists in the furtherance of the administration’s political goals, in defiance of tradition and perhaps, as George Will has suggested, the law.  Having served myself on both the NEA’s Opera-Music Theater and Oversight panels in 1985, I find this news to be profoundly depressing. (more…)