Dear George,
Some of your minions shun Art because they fear its potentially destabilizing effect on the social order, and there are situations where this fear is justified.
However, they overlook another side of artistic expression. Art can be a powerful weapon in the hands of the State. I am not speaking of the social realism of Stalin’s Soviet Union. I am speaking of an Art that touts aesthetic absolutes. It is an Art that touches the face of God and reflects his glory. In doing so, Art fossilizes the status quo and loses its humanity.
The key is the “absolute”, especially when it is an expression of a religious absolute. Remember that it was the aristocracy that nurtured and gave life to Art as an expression of the absolute. Historically, the man who could appreciate a motet penned to the greater glory of God was the man who could dispassionately look on a disembowelment as a necessary instrument for the preservation of social control.
Of course, from the mid nineteenth century to the mid twentieth century, there was an abstract explosion that rebelled against this aesthetic and contributed to the destabilization of society. Nowhere was this more evident than in Weimar Germany, where abstraction expression was destroying German culture until a revolutionary conservatism stabilized society.
This abstract rebellion is now toothless and fragmented, its pieces dusty artifacts hidden away in a dank cabinet where they touch nobody and change nothing.
So, rethink your attitude towards the National Endowment for the Arts. Properly handled, it could increase your power and your influence.
Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones
6:53:57 AM 
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