I have received grants from the NEA both as a photographer and a curator, and I share many of Joseph Epstein's anxieties ("W.C. Fields Was Wrong," June 3).
But it is hard to know what is important about the present and what about the present has enduring value. Epstein gives no examples of overlooked artists who deserve recognition, nor does he offer a sense of what should replace contemporay ways of thinking about culture. Postmodernism and multiculturalism are not great ideas (certainly not as good as modernism), but what else is new?
Meanwhile, for every grant to artists that offends elite sensibilities there are scores of NEA grants for exhibitions of work that Epstein would put into his pantheon of great art. For every trendy museum exhibition there is at least one with "impressionism" in the title. Like so many other high- culture institutions, art museums have refined the art of pandering to just the "public" that Epstein feels is being left out of the conversation. The problem is not the bad or small ideas that grate on me and Epstein and soon will be forgotten. The problem is a paucity of new and vital ways to inhabit the world.
OM BAMBERGER, MILWAUKEE, WI