The National Endowment for the Arts, a symbol of the aspirations of Camelot and the Great Society, has ever since its founding in 1965 endeavored to bankroll creativity in America. Four decades and $4 billion in subsidies later, its shortcomings are manifest. For all the hyperbole that greeted President Obama’s nomination of Broadway impresario Rocco Landesman to chair the endowment — “potentially the best news the arts community in the United States has had since the birth of Walt Whitman,” playwright Tony Kushner said — neither the appointment nor the $50 million in stimulus money the president is steering the endowment’s way is likely to bring about a change in its culture.

Conservatives have long sought to get rid of the NEA on the grounds that it is a dole for lazy aesthetes, an intrusion of the state into civil society, and a bureaucracy that has, in its day, funded a good deal of offensive rubbish. (It no longer makes grants to individual artists.) But the inadequacy of the NEA is deeper than all of that.

The organization owes its existence to August Heckscher, President Kennedy’s special consultant on the arts, who in 1963 proposed the establishment of a national arts foundation. But the agency has never lived up to the expectations of President Kennedy himself, who was possessed, Arthur Schlesinger said, of a “vision of the truly civilized community America might become.”

Put to one side the implication that America is less than truly civilized; all countries have room for improvement. Yet it is precisely as a civilizing force that the NEA has failed. Nearly half a century after Kennedy dreamt of a nation redeemed by art, we are no closer to having about us, in our daily life, the kinds of beautiful forms that the citizens of a provincial town circa 1300 could take for granted.

It is not that all the NEA’s programs are bad. As programs go, “Shakespeare in American Communities,” which brings the plays to audiences they would not otherwise reach, and “Poetry Out Loud,” which encourages children to recite verse, may be good ones. The difficulty is that the programs do not address the underlying crisis of art, the failure of communities today to produce the kinds of art that, until quite recently, the communities of the West produced spontaneously, joyously, almost as a matter of course.

The NEA, in “bringing,” as it professes to do, “great art to all 50 states, including rural areas, inner cities, and military bases,” is a $155-million-a-year import-export business. It exports art from places where it is made to places where it is not made, much as a businessman might export plastic toys from China to California or Connecticut. This is a palliative.

The NEA’s import-export approach to the arts derives from its flawed Romantic model of creativity. In the Romantic model the artist is an alienated, Byronic figure. He lives in a kind of artistic industrial zone, typically a bohemian neighborhood in a great city, and he mingles, for the most part, with other artists. He is not part of a larger community in the way Aeschylus and Sophocles were part of Athens; instead, the artist has, ever since the Romantic revolution, been estranged from civic life, his existence a kind of protest.

By trucking artists from their lofts in Tribeca or their garrets in San Francisco — a disproportionate amount of NEA money goes to California and New York — into “rural areas, inner cities, and military bases,” the NEA perpetuates the Romantic stereotype of the artist as alien, a circus performer who has only the slenderest relation to the non-artistic natives. Such an artist may be on closer terms with his metropolitan patrons: but they patronize him precisely because he is a weirdo, an expensive pet on par with a fancy type of poodle.

Looking at reproductions of the art the NEA has sponsored over the years, I was struck by the way the endowment’s Romantic culture has reinforced the idea of the artist as alienated freak, a prisoner of his grievance. What is most unsatisfactory in the outré modernism the NEA has so often favored is its limited emotional and stylistic range. It is only to be expected that the artist will be a misfit: His weirdness is a source of his creativity. But when the artist lives not in an artistic ghetto but in an ordinary community, he finds a greater fund of material and inspiration. He need not feed on his own disaffection. The spectacle of the petulant poet or painter dramatizing his revolt against the world through a kind of idolatry of the grotesque no longer has the power it did when Byron composed Manfred. The bohemian pose of alienation is now used by entrepreneurs to sell coffee to lawyers. Nor is it the merchant class alone that has bought, tamed, and trivialized Romanticism’s tropes of decadence and revolt. It is all but impossible to take seriously an art of rebellion crafted by pensioners of the state.

Consider an alternative to the NEA’s Romantic, import-export model of creativity. Anyone who cares for the art of the West must see how much of it is bound up with the adornment of the civic focal point. Go to the Place de la République in Arles, or the Piazza Navona in Rome, or the Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris, or the Piazza del Campo in Siena, or any of a thousand lesser forums, and you will find, in the buildings, the statues, the paintings, a sort of civic jewel box. And what you see today is but the remnant of a more comprehensive artistry: You see a skeleton that, in its prime, was clothed by music and poetry. The rhythms and harmonies of the plastic art of the civic focal point were reinforced by those of the festivals and liturgies, the choral hymnody and dramatic verse, the folk ballads and folk dances, which brought the civic space to life (and still do, in out-of-the-way places like Dalmatia and eastern Crete).

These civic focal points were the Sony IMAXes of their day. Their art was credited by the Greeks with lightening the burden of citizenship and permitting the harmless expurgation of pent-up passion. Scientists speculate that the music and poetry of the agora, the piazza, the market square met a need. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar supposes that music evolved to perform a civic “grooming” function in groups that, because of their size, made the tactile grooming of each member of the group by other members impracticable. Not least, the pride communities took in the refinement of their civic spaces meant that artists had a means of getting bread. They carved the stones, frescoed the walls, painted the ceilings, gilded the domes, composed the masques and harlequinades.

The NEA, it is true, has gestured in the direction of “new urbanist” architects devoted to reviving the civic focal points. But the endowment has undertaken no experiment in civic artistry comparable to Poundbury, the community the Prince of Wales commissioned the architect Léon Krier to build in Dorset. And Poundbury itself is only a beginning. Krier has there created the civic focal points; but these by themselves are no more than the casing of a piano, which comes to life only with the inclusion of the hammers and the strings.

The revival of the civic focal point — the recovery of the Parthenon-Chartres model of creativity that preceded the Romantic one — would not only encourage the kind of sustainable art that makes federal subsidies unnecessary, it would do something to relieve the creative frustration that is so remarkable a feature of modern life. The saints that smile in the niches of the cathedral, the figures that grace the pediment of the classical temple, exist not only because they satisfy the appetite for beauty, but also because a certain kind of person fulfills his nature in the ornamentation of a community. In a commercial republic like ours, such people are too often forced by necessity into uncongenial professions, even as our public spaces languish for want of their creative touch.

The NEA, if it is to make art a sustainable enterprise in American communities and not merely a bureaucratic fetish, should make the recovery of the civic focal point central to its mission. Rocco Landesman, with his Broadway experience of unsubsidized forms of art, might possibly be interested in an alternative to the worm-eaten Romanticism of the NEA. But even if he were to take up the cause of reform, it is unlikely that he would get very far. Were a sustainable art on the Parthenon-Chartres model to be reborn, the NEA would lose its raison d’être, and bureaucracies are by instinct loath to solve the problems that keep them in funds.

– Michael Knox Beran is a contributing editor of City Journal. His most recent book is Forge of Empires 1861–1871: Three Revolutionary Statesmen and the World They Made.