Published by Brooklyn Rail
June 2025
Written by Chenoa Baker
June 2023 Cohort
The art of being subversive is, as Daphne A. Brooks reveals in her 2021 book Liner Notes for the Revolution “unfolding on other frequencies while the world adores them and yet mishears them.”But when artists have complete freedom and access, can they express their highest form of creativity, or are those inhibitions that demonstrate true creativity manifest despite the circumstances?
It’s no secret that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), is rolling back arts and culture funding for a host of institutions through drastic workforce reductions at the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the National Endowment for the Humanities; notices to rescind previously awarded National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grants were sent, and government bureaucrats are flagging certain words to guide what initiatives not to support financially. All of this is occurring in a country that, historically, has not had much government patronage compared to places in Europe, in which ministries of culture are the primary agents of funding. How would we have reacted to the news that the governments of Romania and Hungary, before the Eastern European revolutions of 1989, were halting support for artists who make radical and socially engaged art instead of work that fosters propagandist social realism?