Greener Grass in Milwaukee

 Does America need its own Malraux to save the arts? 

LeMonde previews an art exhibition at the Inova contemporary art museum in Milwaukee that was produced using money from a French program called FRAC, short for Fonds régionaux d'art contemporain. The exhibit, "Spatial City," features installations inspired by Utopian Franco-Hungarian artist Yona Friedman that examine the tensions inherent in planned, idealized architecture. The exhibit itself has gotten mixed reviews, but the LeMonde preview illustrates the challenges of providing subsidies for the arts. The FRAC fund is a state-sponsored effort to showcase mostly French artists' work in other countries. In France, the reporter says, the FRAC has been criticized (unfairly, in the reporter's and my opinion), as another instance of heavy-handed, state-sponsored meddling in creative expression, the kind that became notorious when André Malraux was culture minister under Charles De Gaulle in the 1960s. As the reporter points out, this contrasts sharply with the situation in the U.S., where art is almost exclusively funded through private foundations and businesses, and where the inherent instability in this arrangement is frequently lamented. Given the especially acute peril in which arts funding in the U.S. currently finds itself, Americans will undoubtedly welcome this and any other state-subsidized art exhibit, even if the state in question is an ocean away. As for the French -- habitually insecure as they are about their culture's declining value in the world -- they can take pride in the fact that their art is still in demand outside the Hexagon, even if it comes stamped with La Marianne.