I see that the Tribune has taken up the fashionable and shallow position that “Government-funded art will . . . inevitably be second-rate or degraded . . . .” (Editorial, July 13). This commonly held view is both ignorant of art and its history.
Do you truly mean to condemn Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel as second-rate work? Did the government of Athens get degraded goods in its Parthenon complex? Are the treasures of Imperial China, of Tutankhamen, of Angkor Wat, let alone the monuments and buildings of our own Washington, D.C., inevitably second rate? What on Earth, pray tell, would the staff of the Tribune consider first rate?
Most governing bodies in history went out of their way to fund art. Perhaps if museums labeled every piece of art that had been funded by a government, people might realize just how much of it there is and how good it can be.
