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  3. Since World War II the French have been variously surprised, dismayed, irritated and outraged by the power of American culture a

Since World War II the French have been variously surprised, dismayed, irritated and outraged by the power of American culture a

admin2021-02-21  58
问题    Since World War II the French have been variously surprised, dismayed, irritated and outraged by the power of American culture and its effect on France and the world. Their only consolation has been the conviction that French culture is superior to anything that Walt Disney or Hollywood can offer. What France’s cultural elites have rarely done, however, is examine how both serious and pop culture actually work in the United States. Rather, in the view of Frederic Martel, a Frenchman and author of a recently released book on the topic, they have preferred to hide behind "a certain ideological anti-Americanism."
   Now Mr. Martel, 39, a former French cultural attache in Boston, has set out to change this. In Culture in America, a 622-page book weighty with information, he challenges the conventional view here that (French) culture financed and organized by the government is entirely good and that (American) culture shaped by market forces is necessarily bad. This book deals only with creativity and arts financing in the United States. But perhaps surprisingly, given the mixture of fear and contempt that American culture stirs among many French intellectuals, his approach is not disputative. He neither defends nor attacks the United States; he simply describes the American way of culture.
   The news media’s response to Culture in America suggests there is room for debate. One weekly, L’Express, said the book offered food for thought. Another, Le Nouvel Observateur, compared it favorably to Bernard-Henri Levy’s recent summarisation, "American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville," noting that Mr. Martel provides facts rather than impressions.
   The first half of Culture in America—the title echoes Tocqueville’s own "Democracy in America"— is built around a question that puzzles some French: Why doesn’t the United States have a Culture Ministry? One traditional answer is that culture ministries threaten artistic freedom. Yet Mr. Martel demonstrates that Washington does in fact have a record of cultural activism: through the Works Progress Administration, with its theater, writers and art projects, under President Franklin D. Roosevelt; through the Kennedy White House’s embrace of artists; and in the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in 1965.
   Mr. Martel then tracks the so-called culture wars, beginning with the cancellation of a Robert Map-plethorpe photography exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington in 1989 over concerns about its explicit content, which led to Congressional campaigning against the National Endowment for the Arts. Even today the endowment’s budget is far below mid-1980s levels and, at just under $125 million for 2006, is roughly what the French government gave the Paris National Opera this year.
   Still, what really intrigues Mr. Martel is how American culture flourishes despite the indifference or hostility of major government institutions. And that leads him to the crucial role played by non-profit foundations, corporate sponsors, universities and community organizations, which in practice do receive indirect government support in the form of tax incentives. "If the Culture Ministry is nowhere to be found," he writes, "cultural life is everywhere."
   [A] suggests that cultural life is everywhere if there is no Culture Ministry.
   [B] wrote the book in an argumentative way.
   [C] only concerns the question why America has no Culture Ministry.
   [D] has a much smaller budget than it got during mid-1980s.
   [E] talks only about creativity and arts financing in America.
   [F] said the book embraced some thought-provoking issues.
   [G] noted that Martel adhered to facts rather than impressions.
NEA
选项
答案D
解析 注意NEA是National Endowment for the Arts的缩写，而National Endowment for the Arts在第四、第五段均有出现，解题句在第五段最后一句。原文提到即使到今天，拨给基金会的预算仍远低于80年代中期的水平。该句的endowment指前一句提到的National Endowment for the Arts，即NEA。D项与原文意思相符，其中much smaller对应原文的far below，故D为正确答案。
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