Art and the General Welfare

Abstract

Our judgment of the level of civilization of any specific epoch in Western culture may well hinge upon the propositions which it takes for granted. That today one is forced to ask: Does art promote the general welfare? What, after all, does culture contribute to the common good or general enlightenment? indicates an aesthetic skepticism endemic to a narrowly pragmatic or commercial age, where the cash nexus reigns supreme and even the arts themselves have become corrupted by the values of mechanical efficiency and private profit. Le Corbusier thinks that a city street is a machine for traffic to pass through as efficiently as possible. Other urban architects are under the quaint delusion that a home is a housing project. And serious books are now written with the title Art as Investment to aid collectors whose collections perform the same role as portfolios of blue chip stocks and bonds. In other ages it was profoundly different. Cosimo de Medici, Sigismondo Malatesta, and Federigo da Montefeltro were also great collectors, and in some cases great businessmen, but they would have been scornful and contemptuous of a collector's passion guided by the principles of investment and tax deduction. The streets of the agora in Athens permitted rapid passage when necessary, but Alcibiades used them to meet and greet his friends, and Socrates lingered in them talking ethics and politics with sophists and young aristocrats as if they were a private club. And when Bess, Countess of Shrewsbury, commis-