A few years ago I spoke at a conference at the old Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC entitled “Culture Wars: Then and Now” sponsored by the cutting-edge Transformer Gallery in DC. The program looked back at the controversies about publically-funded art back in the 1990s. Just a couple of months later I spoke in Cincinnati at a regional meeting of the Philadelphia Society—a conservative group founded in 1964 to talk about ideas, politics and culture—about publically funded art. I was easily the most conservative speaker on the topic at one event and the most liberal at the other. It was a curious sensation, not least of all because I said pretty much the same things at each, if in slightly different ways.

It reminded me of something that G.K. Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy….

“Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of by many men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness; some thought him too dark, and some too fair. One explanation (as has been already admitted) would be that he might be an odd shape. But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape. Outrageously tall men might feel him to be short. Very short men might feel him to be tall. Old bucks who are growing stout might consider him insufficiently filled out; old beaux who were growing thin might feel that he expanded beyond the narrow lines of elegance. …Perhaps (in short) this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the centre.”

It made me think that my stance on public funding for the arts might in some way be more sensible than either group thought.