In federal arts education policy, supporting special events means that the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) promotes visiting artists in the schools or partnerships between schools and professional presenting organizations. An ideal NEA, however, subordinates that to the larger task of promoting continuous local funding for sequential,…

In this article, the author opines that modernist and especially postmodernist irony has gone beyond its traditional satirical function of deflating falsehood and exposing pretense. Because of certain historical complexities, irony has evolved in such a way that it has become the enemy of genuine open-mindedness. Among some American intellectuals,…