If the Government Cuts the Funding Arts Program Whats the Affect on It

As the U.S. Congress struggles to balance the federal budget and cease the decades-long screw of arrears spending, few programs seem more worthy of outright elimination than the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Indeed, since its inception in 1965, few federal agencies accept been mired in more than controversy than the NEA. Nevertheless, steadfast partisans of "welfare for artists" continue to defend the Endowment, asserting that it promotes philanthropic giving, makes cultural programs accessible to those who tin least afford them, and protects America's cultural heritage.

In fact, the NEA is an unwarranted extension of the federal government into the voluntary sector. The Endowment, furthermore, does not promote charitable giving. Despite Endowment claims that its efforts bring art to the inner urban center, the agency offers lilliputian more than a directly subsidy to the cultured, upper-middle class. Finally, rather than promoting the all-time in art, the NEA continues to offer tax dollars and the federal seal of approval to subsidize "art" that is offensive to near Americans.

There are at to the lowest degree ten skilful reasons to eliminate funding for the NEA:

Reason #1: The Arts Volition Take More Than Enough Support without the NEA

The arts were flowering before the NEA came into being in 1965. Indeed, the Endowment was created partly because of the tremendous popular appeal of the arts at the time. Alvin Toffler's The Culture Consumers, published in 1964, surveyed the booming audience for art in the United States, a side benefit of a growing economy and low inflation.^two Toffler'south book recalls the arts prior to the creation of the NEA-the era of the great Georges Balanchine and Agnes de Mille ballets, for case, when 26 meg viewers would plough to CBS broadcasts of Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. In fact, nearly all of the major orchestras in the United States existed earlier 1965, and volition continue to exist later NEA subsidies are ended.

In spite of the vast splendor created past American artists prior to 1965, partisans of the NEA claim that the arts in the United States would face almost sure demise should the Endowment be abolished. Yet Endowment funding is just a drop in the bucket compared to giving to the arts by private citizens. For example, in 1996, the Metropolitan Opera of New York received $390,000 from the Endowment, a federal subsidy that totals only 0.29 percent of the Opera'due south annual income of $133 million-and amounts to less than the ticket revenue for a unmarried sold-out operation.³

The growth of individual-sector charitable giving in recent years has rendered NEA funding relatively insignificant to the arts customs. Overall giving to the arts concluding twelvemonth totaled almost $10 billion⁴-upward from $6.5 billion in 1991^v-dwarfing the NEA'southward federal subsidy. This 40 percent increase in private giving occurred during the same menses that the NEA budget was reduced by 40 per centum from approximately $170 million to $99.5 meg.^{half dozen} Thus, as conservatives had predicted, cutting the federal NEA subsidy coincided with increased individual support for the arts and culture.

That many major cultural institutions are in the midst of successful fundraising efforts belies the questionable claim of NEA supporters that individual giving, no matter how generous, could never compensate for the loss of public funds. As Chart 1 shows, many of these institutional campaigns have fundraising targets many times greater than the NEA's annual federal appropriation of $99.five million. In New York Metropolis, the geographic expanse which receives the largest relative share of NEA funding, the New York Public Library is raising some $430 meg (with seventy percent already completed), the Museum of Modern Art, $300 million-450 1000000 (with 30 pct raised), the Metropolitan Museum of Art some $300 one thousand thousand (with eighty pct already obtained).^vii In fact, philanthropist Frederick A. O. Schwartz, Jr., recently told The New York Times that "we've entered a menstruum of institutional excitement comparable only to that which occurred afterwards the Civil War until World War I when several of the urban center'due south great civic and cultural institutions were built."⁸

In Great britain, economist David Sawers's comparative report of subsidized and unsubsidized performing arts concluded that major cultural venues would continue to thrive were authorities subsidies to exist eliminated. According to Sawers'south calculation, 80 pct of all London theater box office receipts, including ballet and opera, went to unsubsidized theater.⁹ (Britain's renowned Glyndebourne opera, for case, relies entirely on private funding.)

Fifty-fifty smaller organizations can succeed without depending on the federal authorities. Equally Bradley Scholar William Craig Rice argues cogently in The Heritage Foundation's Policy Review, "The arts will bloom without the NEA." His survey shows that many arts venues tin easily supersede NEA funding, and suggests a number of alternative strategies for those who might find the disappearance of the federal agency problematic.¹⁰

Reason #2: The NEA Is Welfare for Cultural Elitists

Despite Endowment claims that federal funding permits underpriviledged individuals to gain access to the arts, NEA grants offer little more than a subsidy to the well-to-do. I-fifth of direct NEA grants go to multimillion-dollar arts organizations.^xi Harvard Academy Political Scientist Edward C. Banfield has noted that the "fine art public is now, as it has always been, overwhelmingly heart and upper middle class and above boilerplate in income-relatively prosperous people who would probably enjoy art about as much in the absence of subsidies."¹² The poor and the center class, thus, do good less from public fine art subsidies than does the museum- and orchestra-going upper-middle class. Sawers argues that "those who finance the subsidies through taxes are likely to be different from and poorer than those who do good from the subsidies."¹³ In fact, the $99.5 million that funds the NEA also represents the entire annual tax burden for over 436,000 working-class American families.^xiv

As part of the Endowment's effort to dispel its elitist image, Chairman Jane Alexander has led a nationwide campaign painting the NEA as a social welfare program that can assist underprivileged youth to fight violence and drugs. In congressional testimony, she has trumpeted her "American Sheet" initiative "to proceeds a meliorate agreement of how the arts can transform communities."¹⁵ But despite the heartwarming anecdotes, claims for the therapeutic utilize of the arts are not supported by empirical scientific evidence. Studies that claim to show the arts forestall crime are methodologically questionable, due to problems of self choice. And the arts offer no cure for alcoholism either: Tom Dardis devotes his 292-page scholarly work, The Thirsty Muse, precisely to the loftier occurrence of alcohol abuse among American writers.¹⁶

Reason #iii: The NEA Discourages Charitable Gifts to the Arts

Defenders of the NEA argue that the much of its benefit lies in its power to confer an imprimatur, similar to the "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval," necessary to encourage private back up of the arts. NEA officials have asserted often that by persuading donors who would otherwise non give, Endowment support can offer a financial "leverage" of up to ten times the amount of a federal grant award.¹⁷ At that place is little or no empirical evidence to back up such claims. The only available study of "matching grants"-those designed specifically to stimulate giving- concluded that matching grants did not increment total giving to the arts. Instead, "matching grants" appear to shift existing coin effectually from i recipient to another, "thereby reducing the private resource available to other arts organizations in a specific community."^eighteen Indeed, a study by the Clan of American Cultures (AAC) revealed that private funders found major museum exhibits, opera, ballet, symphony orchestras, and public television to exist "attractive" for donors without an official authorities postage.^nineteen

Economist Tyler Cowen also sees an ominous effect to authorities arts programs: "In one case donors believe that government has accepted the responsibleness for maintaining culture, they volition be less willing to give."²⁰ This analysis is consequent with recent public statements from foundation executives that the individual sector volition not brand upwards the gap resulting from decreases in NEA funding, despite record levels of private giving in recent years. Cowen's conclusion: "The government tin can best back up the arts by leaving them alone, offer groundwork assistance through the tax system and the enforcement of copyright."²¹

Reason #iv: The NEA Lowers the Quality of American Fine art

NEA funding also threatens the independence of art and of artists. Recognizing how government subsidies threaten artistic inspiration, Ralph Waldo Emerson declared that "Beauty will non come at the call of the legislature.... It will come, equally always, unannounced, and jump upwards between the feet of brave and earnest men."²² Recent critics echo Emerson'southward creed. McGill University Management Professor Reuven Brenner has declared: "The NEA's opponents have it right. Bureaucratic culture is not genuine culture.... Information technology was the unsubsidized writers, painters and musicians-imprisoned in their homes if they were lucky, in asylums or in gulags if they weren't-who created lasting culture."²³

Indeed, to many of the NEA'due south critics, the idea of a federal "seal of approval" on art may be the "greatest anathema of all."²⁴ Thus, to maintain its editorial independence, The New Benchmark, a journal edited by former New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer, has rejected NEA funding since its founding some xv years ago. In 1983, Kramer was a song, principled critic of an NEA program offering subsidies to fine art critics; his opposition forced the agency to scrap the grants.²⁵

When government gets in the business of subsidizing art, the impact upon art is oftentimes pernicious. According to Bruce Bustard, author of a catalogue for the current retrospective on art funded through President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Public Works of Art Project," notes that the "New Deal produced no truthful masterpieces." Instead, every bit Washington Post columnist James Glassman declared, the PWA "stifle[d] inventiveness," producing works "that are dreary, unimaginative condescending and political."²⁶

Cowen notes that the "NEA attempts to create a mini-industrial policy for the arts. But governments have a terrible record for choosing time to come winners and losers, whether in business or the arts."²⁷ Government subsidies often can hurt the quality of art by promoting a new cult of mediocrity. Rice has pointed out that the NEA helps the well-continued and the well-established at the expense of less sophisticated-and mayhap more talented-outsiders.²⁸ The NEA thereby reduces the importance of pop entreatment for the arts, substituting instead the demand to please a third-party government patron, and thus driving a wedge between artists and audiences.

In his major comparative report of subsidized and unsubsidized fine art in Britain, Sawers noted that regime subsidies actually work to reduce choice and diversity in the artistic market place by encouraging artists to emulate each other in order to achieve success in the grants procedure. Privately funded venues, thus, are more artistically flexible than publicly funded ones. (For example, it was private orchestras that introduced the "early music" motility into Uk.²⁹) In improver, such favoritism endangers funding for otherwise worthy arts organizations only considering "they do non receive a public arts agency matching grant."^thirty

The threat to quality art from federal subsidies was already crystal clear to Toffler in the 1960s: "Recognizing the reality of the danger of political or bureaucratic interference in the process of creative conclusion making, the principle should exist established that the Usa regime will make absolutely no grants to independent arts institutions-directly or through united states-to underwrite operating expenses or the costs of artistic production. Proposals for a national arts foundation that would distribute funds to foster experiment, innovation...are on the incorrect rails. They ask the government to make decisions in a field in which information technology has vested political interests."³¹

Reason #5: The NEA Will Proceed to Fund Pornography

In November 1996, in a 2-1 conclusion, the Ninth U.S. Excursion Court of Appeals upheld a 1992 ruling in the "NEA Four" instance of Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes-all "performance artists" whose grant requests were denied on grounds their art lacked merit.³² The Court ruled that the 1990 statutory requirement that the Endowment consider "full general standards of decency and respect" in application grants was unconstitutional.³³ The congressional reauthorization of the agency in 1990 had added this "decency provision" in keeping with recommendations of the Presidential Commission headed past John Brademas and Leonard Garment.

Without such a "decency" standard, the NEA can subsidize whatever type of fine art it chooses. Equally a upshot, attorney Bruce Fein called the Court of Appeals decision a recipe for "authorities subsidized depravity" that must (if not reversed by the Supreme Courtroom) strength Congress to "cancel the NEA, an ignoble experiment that, like Prohibition, has not improved with age."³⁴ Literary critic Jonathan Yardley, writing in the Washington Mail, alleged: "Only fools-of whom, alas, in the Ôarts community' there are many-would debate that the federal authorities is obliged to underwrite obscene, pornographic or otherwise offensive "art."³⁵

There is no shortage of examples of indecent fabric supported direct or indirectly past the NEA. Nevertheless, Jane Alexander has never criticized whatever of these NEA grantees publicly. And the Clinton Administration has yet to file an appeal of the 9th Circuit'due south decision. Moreover, no Member of Congress has all the same attempted to provide a legislative fix that would require NEA grant recipients to abide past full general standards of decency in their work.

On March 6, 1997, Congressman Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), Chairman of the Educational activity and Workforce Subcommittee that has oversight over the NEA, complained most books published by an NEA-funded press chosen "Fiction Collective ii," which he described every bit an "criminal offence to the senses." Hoekstra cited 4 Fiction Collective 2 books and noted that the publisher'south parent organization had received an additional $45,000 grant to institute a Globe Wide Spider web site. According to The Washington Times, the NEA granted $25,000 to Fiction Collective 2, which featured works containing sexual torture, incest, child sex, sadomasochism, and child sex; the "excerpts depict a scene in which a brother-sis squad rape their younger sister, the torture of a Mexican male prostitute and oral sex activity between two women."³⁶ Pat Trueman, former Chief of the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section of the United States Department of Justice Criminal Sectionalisation, characterized the works as "troubling" and said the NEA posed a "direct threat to the prosecution" of obscenity and child pornography because of its official stamp on such fabric.³⁷Incredibly, the NEA continues to defend such funding decisions publicly. "Fiction Collective 2 is a highly respected, pre-eminent publisher of innovative, quality fiction," NEA spokeswoman Cherie Simon said.³⁸

The current controversy is goose egg new for the NEA. In November 1996, Representative Hoekstra questioned NEA funding of a film benefactor treatment "patently offensive and perchance pornographic movies-several of which appear to deal with the sexuality of children."³⁹ He noted the NEA gave $112,700 over iii years to "Women Brand Movies," which subsidized distribution of films including:

• "X Cents a Dance," a three-vignette video in which "ii women awkwardly talk over their mutual attraction." It "depicts bearding bathroom sex betwixt two men" and includes an "ironic episode of heterosexual phone sex."
• "Sex Fish" portrays a "furious montage of oral sex, public residuum-room cruising and...tropical fish," the catalog says.
• "Coming Home" talks of the "sexy fun of trying to fit a lesbian couple in a bathtub!"
• "Seventeen Rooms" purports to answer the question, "What do lesbians exercise in bed?"
• "BloodSisters" reveals a "diverse cross-section of the lesbian [sadomasochistic] community."

Iii other films centre on the sexual or lesbian experiences of girls historic period 12 and under. "These listings have the appearance of a veritable taxpayer-funded peep show," said Hoekstra in a letter to NEA Chairman Alexander. He noted that the distributor was circulating films of Annie Sprinkle, a pornographic "performance artist" who appeared at "The Kitchen," a New York venue receiving NEA support.^xl In response, The New York Times launched an advertizement hominem attack on Hoekstra (while neglecting to mention that The New York Times Company Foundation had sponsored Sprinkle'south performance at 1 time).⁴¹

Another frequent response supporters of the NEA make to such criticism is to claim that instances of funding pornography and other indecent textile were simple mistakes. But such "mistakes" seem role of a regular design of back up for indecency, repeated yr after twelvemonth. This pattern is well-documented in the appendix to this newspaper.

Reason #six: The NEA Promotes Politically Correct Fine art

A radical virus of multiculturalism, moreover, has permanently infected the agency, causing artistic efforts to be evaluated by race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation instead of artistic merit.⁴² In 1993, Roger Kimball reported that an "effort to impose quotas and politically right thinking" was "taking precedence over mundane considerations of quality."⁴³ Maybe the almost prominent case of opposite discrimination was the cancellation of a grant to the Hudson Review, which based its selections on "literary merit."⁴⁴

More recently, Jan Breslauer wrote in The Washington Post that multiculturalism was now "systemic" at the agency.⁴⁵ Breslauer, theater critic for The Los Angeles Times, pointed out that "private grantees are required to arrange to the NEA'south specifications" and the "art world's version of affirmative activeness" has had "a profoundly corrosive event on the American arts-pigeonholing artists and pressuring them to produce work that satisfies a politically correct calendar rather than their best artistic instincts." NEA funding of "race-based politics" has encouraged ethnic separatism and Balkanization at the expense of a shared American civilization. Because of federal dollars, Breslauer discovered, "Artists were routinely placed on bills, in seasons, or in exhibits because of who they were rather than what kind of art they'd made" and "creative directors began to push artists toward `purer' (read: stereotypical) expressions of the ethnicity they were paying them to stand for."⁴⁶ The result, Breslauer concluded, is that "near people in the arts establishment continue to defer, at least publicly, to the demands of political correctness."⁴⁷

Aside from such blatant cultural applied science, the NEA also seems intent on pushing "art" that offers little more a decidedly left-wing calendar:

• Last summertime, the Phoenix Art Museum, a recipient of NEA funding, presented an showroom featuring: an American flag in a toilet, an American flag made out of homo skin, and a flag on the museum floor to be stepped upon. Fabian Montoya, an eleven-yr-old male child, picked upwards the American flag to rescue it. Museum curators replaced information technology, prompting Representative Matt Salmon (R-AZ) and the Phoenix American Legion to applaud the male child's patriotism past presenting him with a flag that had flown over the U.S. Capitol. Whereas the American Legion, Senator Bob Dole, and House Speaker Newt Gingrich condemned the exhibit, NEA Chairman Alexander remained conspicuously silent.
• Creative person Robbie Conal plastered "NEWTWIT" posters all over Washington, D.C., and sold them at the NEA-subsidized Washington Project for the Arts.⁴⁸
• And the NEA all the same has non fully answered a 1996 query from Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) for details of its back up to the (now defunct) Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco, which had received an estimated $xxx,000 per year from the NEA since the early on 1980s. The reason for the enquiry was to make up one's mind what the NEA knew nigh the activities of one of the leaders of the middle, Gilberto Osorio. Osorio co-founded the center in 1977, and since had been exposed as a commandante in the FMLN guerrilla command during the civil war in Republic of el salvador past San Francisco journalist Stephen Schwartz.⁴⁹ One of the FMLN missions undertaken while Osorio had been main of operations was a June xix, 1985, attack on a restaurant in San Salvador that killed 4 U.S. Marines and 2 civilian employees of the Wang Corporation. In 1982, Osorio reportedly had ordered that whatsoever American institute in San Vicente province be executed. Schwartz concluded, "some of their [NEA] grantees may exist guilty of more merely crimes confronting skillful taste."⁵⁰

Reason #seven: The NEA Wastes Resources

Like any federal bureaucracy, the NEA wastes tax dollars on authoritative overhead and hierarchy. Anecdotes of other forms of NEA waste are legion. The Cato Institute'due south Sheldon Richman and David Boaz annotation that "Thanks to an NEA grantee, the American taxpayers in one case paid $1,500 for a verse form, `lighght.' That wasn't the title or a typo. That was the unabridged poem."⁵¹ In addition to such frivolities, the Endowment diverts resources from creative activities equally artists are lured from producing art to courting federal grant dollars and even attending demonstrations in Washington, D.C.

There are other ways that the NEA wastes tax dollars: Author Alice Goldfarb Marquis estimates that approximately one-half of NEA funds go to organizations that lobby the government for more than coin.⁵² Not only has the NEA politicized art, but because federal grant dollars are fungible, they tin be used for other purposes besides the back up of quality art. In addition, approximately 19 percent of the NEA'southward total budget is spent on administrative expenses-an unusually high figure for a government program.⁵³

As noted above, Sawers's comparative report of British fine arts noted little difference in the quality of art between subsidized and unsubsidized venues. Sawers did uncover i major deviation, however, betwixt subsidized and unsubsidized companies: unsubsidized companies had fewer, if whatsoever, performers under contract, relying instead on freelance staff. Stock-still and total costs for unsubsidized companies were, therefore, substantially lower than those of the subsidized companies. Subsidized venues kept "more permanent staff on their payroll" instead of lowering ticket prices.⁵⁴ Subsidies, thus, result in higher ticket prices to force the public to subsidize swollen arts bureaucracies.

Reason #8: The NEA Is Across Reform

In 1990, the Presidential Commission on the NEA, headed by John Brademas and Leonard Garment, concluded that the NEA had an obligation to maintain a high standard of decency and respect because it distributed taxpayer dollars. The recent record of the agency, and the November 1996 appellate courtroom decision in the instance of the "NEA Four," make information technology unlikely that the Endowment will be able to ever honor that recommendation. NEA Chairman Alexander has non condemned the connected subsidies for indecent fine art nor explained how such grant requests managed to get through her "reorganization." Unfortunately, not a single Senator or Representative has asked her to exercise and then.

Recent history shows that despite cosmetic "reorganizations" at the NEA, the Endowment is impervious to genuine change because of the specific arts constituencies it serves. Every few years, whether information technology be by Nancy Hanks in the Nixon Assistants, Livingston Biddle in the Carter Administration, or Frank Hodsoll in the Reagan Assistants, NEA administrators promise that reorganization volition be bring massive modify to the bureau. All these efforts have failed. It was, in fact, under Mr. Hodsoll's tenure in the Reagan Administration that grants were awarded to Robert Mapplethorpe, known for his homerotic photography, and to Andres Serrano, infamous for creating the exhibit "Piss Christ."

Recent changes in the titles of NEA departments have had piffling result. In the words of Alice Goldfarb Marquis, "All Ms. Alexander has washed is, to money a phrase, re-accommodate the deckchairs on the Titanic."⁵⁵ Indeed, Alexander has retained veteran NEA executive Ana Steele in a top direction position to this date. Steele approved the payment of over $250,000 to the "NEA Iv" while serving as interim chairman in 1993.

The NEA claims to have inverse, no doubt in hopes of mollifying congressional critics. Yet the NEA has connected to fund organizations that accept subsidized materials offensive to ordinary citizens while attempting to recast its public image as a friend of children, families, and education. It is a "two-track" ploy, speaking of family values to the general public and privately of some other calendar to the arts entrance hall. For example, Chairman Alexander has dedicated NEA fellowships to individual artists, prohibited past Congress later on years of scandals. In her congressional testimony of March 13, 1997, she declared: "I inquire y'all over again in the strongest terms to lift the ban on support to individual artists."⁵⁶

To send its bespeak to the avant garde arts constituency, the NEA continues to fund a handful of "cutting-edge" organizations in each grantmaking cycle. The NEA has fifty-fifty maintained its peer-review panel procedure used to review grants, by changing its name to "bailiwick review"; The Heritage Foundation cited this procedure in 1991 as ridden with corruption and conflicts of interest, and as a major factor in the Endowment's selection of offensive and indecent proposals.⁵⁷

Despite the rhetoric of reform issuing from its lobbyists, and five years of reduced budgets, the reality remains defiantly unchanged at the NEA.

Reason #ix: Abolishing the NEA Will Prove to the American Public that Congress Is Willing to Eliminate Wasteful Spending

President Clinton proposes to spend $1.7 trillion in his FY 1998 upkeep. Over the next v years, the Assistants seeks to increase federal spending by $249 billion.⁵⁸ Further, Clinton also proposes to increase the NEA's funding to $119,240,000, a rise of 20 percent.⁵⁹ These dramatic increases in spending come in the age when the federal debt exceeded $v trillion for the kickoff time and on the heels of a 1996 federal deficit of $107 billion.

In this era of budgetary constraint, in which the need to reduce the federal deficit is forcing fundamental choices about vital needs-such every bit housing and medical care for the elderly-such boondoggles every bit the NEA should be among the starting time programs to be eliminated. Representative Wally Herger (R-CA), citing a recent NEA grant to his ain constituents (the California Indian Basket Weavers Association), pointedly said that he "does not believe that in an era of tight federal dollars, basket weaving should accept a top priority in Congress."^threescore Whenever American families take to cutting make cuts in their spending, nonessential spending-such as entertainment expenses-are the first to go. If Congress cannot stand up up and eliminate the $99.5 one thousand thousand FY 1997 appropriation for the NEA, how volition it exist able to make the case for far more than central upkeep cuts?

Reason #10: Funding the NEA Disturbs the U.South. Tradition of Limited Government

In retrospect, turmoil over the NEA was predictable, due to the long tradition in the U.s. of opposing the use of federal tax dollars to fund the arts. During the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, consul Charles Pinckney introduced a motion calling for the federal government to subsidize the arts in the United States. Although the Founding Fathers were cultured men who knew immediate of various European systems for public arts patronage, they overwhelmingly rejected Pickney'south suggestion because of their belief in express, ramble government. Accordingly, nowhere in its listing of powers enumerated and delegated to the federal government does the Constitution specify a power to subsidize the arts.

Moreover, as David Boaz of the Cato Plant argues, federal arts subsidies pose the danger of federal control over expression: "Regime funding of anything involves regime controlÉ. Every bit we should not want an established church, so we should not want established art."⁶¹ Every bit Cowen notes, "When the government promotes its favored art, the most innovative creators detect it more difficult to rise to the elevation.... Just the true costs of regime funding practice not evidence up on our taxation bill. The NEA and other regime arts agencies politicize art and jeopardize the principles of autonomous regime."⁶² The French government, for example, tried to suppress Impressionism through its command of the Academy.

The deep-seated American conventionalities confronting public support of artists continues today. Public opinion polls, moreover, testify that a majority of Americans favor elimination of the NEA when the agency is mentioned by name.⁶³ A June 1995 Wall Street Journal-Peter Hart poll showed 54 percent of Americans favored eliminating the NEA entirely versus 38 percent in favor of maintaining it at any level of funding. An earlier January 19, 1995, Los Angeles Times poll institute 69 pct of the American people favored cutting the NEA budget.⁶⁴ More recently, a poll performed by The Polling Visitor in March 1997 demonstrated that 57 percent of Americans favor the proposition that "Congress should terminate funding the NEA with federal taxpayer dollars and instead leave funding decisions with state government and private groups."

Determination

After more than three decades, the National Endowment for the Arts has failed in its mission to enhance cultural life in the U.s.a.. Despite numerous attempts to reinvent it, the NEA continues to promote the worst excesses of multiculturalism and political correctness, subsidizing fine art that demeans the values of ordinary Americans. Equally the federal debt soars to over $five trillion, it is time to terminate the NEA every bit a wasteful, unjustified, unnecessary, and unpopular federal expenditure. Ending the NEA would be skilful for the arts and good for America.

Appendix

The NEA has used taxation dollars to subsidize pornography, sadomasochism, and other forms of indecency. Hither are some selected examples:

• In 1995, the NEA-funded "Highways," a venue featuring a summertime "Ecco Lesbo/Ecco Human being" festival in Santa Monica, California. The festival featured a plan actually chosen "Not for Republicans" in which a performance artist ruminated on "Sex with Newt's Mom." The creative manager was Tim Miller (of the "NEA Four"). Sometime Clinton adviser Paul Begala agreed that items in the published schedule were obscene.⁶⁵
• NEA grants appear in December 1996 included $20,000 to the "Woolly Mammoth Theater" venue for Tim Miller, one of the "NEA Four" functioning artists. He had stripped twice, talked about picking up homosexual prostitutes, and asked members of the audience to blow on his genitals in a 1995 production entitled "Naked Breath." The NEA too awarded $25,000 to "Camera News, Inc.," also known every bit "Third Globe Newsreel," a New York benefactor of Marxist revolutionary propaganda films.⁶⁶
• In June 1996, Representative Hoekstra raised questions well-nigh "The Watermelon Woman." The movie was funded past a $31,500 NEA grant. It independent what one review described as the "hottest dyke sex scene ever recorded on celluloid." "I had loftier hopes that Jane Alexander would forbid further outrages by the NEA, but manifestly even she-prissy lady that she is-lacks the power and the volition to put an end to the NEA'south obsession with handing out the taxpayers' money to cocky-proclaimed `artists' whose mentality is merely then much flotsam floating around in a sewer," said Senator Jesse Helms.⁶⁷
• Hilton Kramer, in a March 1996 issue of The New York Observer, noted a new "disgusting" Whitney exhibition he characterized every bit a "jolly rape of the public sensibilities." The Whitney was showing the work of Edward Kienholz, and "it almost goes without saying that this America-equally-a merde [French for excrement] show is supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts." The Whitney Museum recently received the largest grant issued past the NEA thus far in 1997-$400,000.
• The Sunday Maine-Telegram, reported on March 3, 1996, that William L. Pope, a Professor at Bates College, received $twenty,000 grant in the final round of NEA grants to individual operation artists. He intended to utilise the money for at least 2 projects. In one, he would chain himself to an ATM auto in New York City wearing but his underwear. In the other, he "plans to walk the streets of New York wearing a six-pes-long white tube like a codpiece. He'south rigged it up so he can put an egg in ane stop, and it will roll out the imitation, white penis." The Maine-Telegram noted that the NEA individual fellowship plan "will become out with a bang, at to the lowest degree with this grant."
• "Sex Is," a pornographic video displaying the NEA credit, is notwithstanding in distribution.
• Bob Flanagan'southward "Super Masochist," featuring sexual torture, and an Andres Serrano exhibit featuring "Piss Christ" were shown at the NEA-funded New Museum in New York City. Flanagan (now deceased) was recently the star of a film at the Sundance Film Festival entitled "Ill," which showed him nailing his male organs to a wooden plank. "Sick" is also on the 1997 schedule of the New Directors/New Films series co-sponsored past the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and the Museum of Modern Fine art in New York City. Both institutions have been NEA grant recipients, and Lincoln Center chief Nathan Leventhal is i of President Clinton's nominees for the National Council on the Arts. His nomination is pending in the Senate.
• Ron Athey'due south video of his ritual torture and bloodletting, subsidized indirectly through tour promotion at NEA venues like Walker Art Gallery and PS 122 in New York. (Walker Art Center grants actually increased in the year after the museum booked Athey.)
• Joel-Peter Witkin, a four-time recipient of NEA private fellowships whose photograph of severed heads and chopped up bodies were displayed by Senator Helms on the Senate flooring two years agone equally bear witness of the moral corruption of the NEA (Helms discussed 1 featuring a man's head being used equally a flowerpot). Witkin was honored with a retrospective at New York's NEA-funded Guggenheim museum. Even The New York Times condemned the show as "gruesome."
• Karen Finley, also of the "NEA Four," brought her new "performance piece" to an NEA-funded venue in Boston.
• Holly Hughes, another of the "NEA Four" (and recipient of a 1994 individual fellowship), brought her human activity to an NEA-funded institution in suburban Virginia.
• New York City's New Museum, an NEA-funded operation, hosted a retrospective of the work of Andres Serrano, which again included an exhibit of "Piss Christ."
• New York'south Museum of Modern Art, funded by the NEA, hosted an NEA-funded showroom of Bruce Nauman's work, also displayed at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum, which included neon signs reading "S- and Die" and "F- and Die."
• The NEA literature programme subsidized the writer of a volume entitled The Gay 100, which claims that such historical figures equally Saint Augustine were homosexuals.

Endnotes

¹ Laurence Jarvik is an Adjunct Scholar at The Heritage Foundation, Editor of The National Endowments: A Disquisitional Symposium (Second Thoughts Books, 1995), and author of PBS: Behind the Screen (Prima, 1997).

² Alvin Toffler, The Culture Consumers: A Report of Art and Affluence in America (New York: Random House, 1973), p. 188.

^three A typical sold-out performance at the Met brings in nearly $485,000 in ticket acquirement, given the average ticket cost of $125 and a seating capacity of three,877.

⁴ Creative America: Written report of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, Washington, D.C., Feb 1997

⁵ Joseph Ziegler, Testimony before House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, March 5, 1997.

^{half dozen} Giving The states 1996 (New York: AAFRC Trust For Philanthropy, 1996).

^vii Judith Miller, "Large Arts Groups Starting Drives for New Funds," The New York Times, February 3, 1997, p. 1

^viii Ibid.

⁹ David Sawers, "Should the Taxpayer Support the Arts?" Current Controversies No. 7, Establish for Economical Affairs, London, 1993, p. 22

^ten William Craig Rice, "I Hear America Singing: The Arts Will Blossom Without the NEA," Policy Review, March/April 1997, pp. 37-45.

¹¹ Derrick Max, "Staff Conference on the National Endowment for the Arts," U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, p. 29.

¹² Edward C. Banfield, The Autonomous Muse (New York: Bones Books, 1984); equally cited in "Cultural Agencies," Cato Handbook for Congress: 105th Congress (Washington, D.C.: Cato Found, 1997).

¹³ Sawers, "Should the Taxpayer Back up the Arts?" p. 22.

¹⁴ Heritage Tabulations from 1993 IRS Public Apply File.

¹⁵ Jane Alexander, Testimony to the Business firm Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, March thirteen, 1997.

¹⁶ Tom Dardis, The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1982).

¹⁷ Run across Jane Alexander, Testimony to the Senate Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, May 8, 1996.

¹⁸ David B. Pankratz, Multiculturalism and Public Arts Policy (Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 1993), p. 55.

¹⁹ Ibid., p. 56.

^twenty Tyler Cowen, draft ms. for Affiliate vi, "Market Liberalization vs. Regime Reaction" in Enterprise and the Arts, forthcoming from Harvard Academy Printing, pp. 22-31.

²¹ Ibid.

²² Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Art," in Work (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1883), p. 342.

²³ Reuven Brenner, "Culture Past Committee," The Wall Street Journal, February 27, 1997.

²⁴ Laurence Jarvik and Nancy Strickland, "Forget the Speeches: The NEA Is a Racket," Baltimore Sun, Jan 22, 1995.

²⁵ Hilton Kramer, "Criticism Endowed: reflections on a debacle," The New Criterion, November 1983, pp. 1-5.

²⁶ James K. Glassman, "No Money for the Arts," The Washington Post, April one, 1997, p. A17.

²⁷ Cowen, "Market Liberalization vs. Authorities Reaction," pp. 2-22.

²⁸ William Craig Rice, The NewsHour, argue chastened by Elizabeth Farnsworth, March ten, 1997.

²⁹ Sawers, "Should the Taxpayer Back up the Arts?" p. 39.

^thirty Pankratz, Multiculturalism and Public Arts Policy, p. 55.

³¹ Toffler, The Civilisation Consumers, p. 200.

³² Diane Haithman, "Did NEA Win Battle, Lose War?" Los Angeles Times, November 13, 1996, p. F1.

³³ Affirming opinion of Judge James R. Browning, U.S. Ninth Excursion Court of Appeals, filed November five, 1996, in Karen Finley et al., v. National Endowment for the Arts.

³⁴ Bruce Fein, "Dollars for Depravity?" The Washington Times, November 19, 1996.

³⁵ Jonathan Yardley, "Art and the Handbag of the Beholder," The Washington Post, March 17, 1997, p. D2.

³⁶ Julia Duin, "NEA Funds `Offense to the Senses,' Lawmakers Lip Arts Agency for Aiding Prurient Publications," The Washington Times, March 8, 1997, p. A2.

³⁷ Patrick A. Trueman, Director of Governmental Diplomacy, American Family Association, Testimony before the Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, March five, 1997.

³⁸ Ibid.

³⁹ Representative Pete Hoekstra, letter to NEA Chairman Jane Alexander, November sixteen, 1996.

⁴⁰ Ibid.

⁴¹ Frank Rich, "Lesbian Lookout," The New York Times, March thirteen, 1997, p. A27.

⁴² Run across Pankratz, Multiculturalism and Public Arts Policy.

⁴³ Roger Kimball, "Diversity Quotas at NEA Skewer Magazine," The Wall Street Journal, June 24, 1993.

⁴⁴ Ibid.

⁴⁵ Jan Breslauer, "The NEA'due south Real Offense: Bureau Pigeonholes Artists by Ethnicity," The Washington Post, March 16, 1997, p. G1.

⁴⁶ Ibid.

⁴⁷ Ibid., p. G8.

⁴⁸ Laurence Jarvik, "Committing Suicide at the NEA," COMINT: A Journal About Public Media, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Spring 1996), p. 44.

⁴⁹ Ibid., p. 46

⁵⁰ Ibid.

⁵¹ "Cultural Agencies," in Cato Handbook for Congress, 105th Congress, (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 1997).

⁵² Alice Goldfarb Marquis, Art Lessons: Learning from the Rise and Fall of Public Arts Funding (New York: Basic Books, 1995).

⁵³ Max, "Staff Briefing on the National Endowment for the Arts," p. 27.

⁵⁴ Sawers, "Should the Taxpayer Support the Arts?" p. 33.

⁵⁵ Alice Goldfarb Marquis, letter of the alphabet to author, February 7, 1997.

⁵⁶ Jane Alexander, Testimony earlier the Subcommittee on Interior and Related Agencies, U.S. House of Representatives, March 13, 1997 .

⁵⁷ Robert Knight, "The National Endowment for the Arts: Misusing Taxpayer's Money," Heritage Foundation Backgrounder No. 803, January 18, 1991; Robert Knight, "The National Endowment: Information technology's Fourth dimension to Gratuitous the Arts," Family Research Quango Insight, January 1995, p. 1.

⁵⁸ "The Era of Big Authorities is Back: Talking Points on President Clinton'southward Fiscal Yr 1998 Budget," Heritage Foundation Talking Points No. 17, Feb 24, 1997, p. 1.

⁵⁹ Appendix to the Upkeep of the United States, p. 1080.

⁶⁰ Judith Miller, "Federal Arts Bureau Slices its Smaller Pie," The New York Times, April 10, 1997, p. B6.

⁶¹ David Boaz, "The Separation of Art and State: Who is going to make decisions?" Vital Speeches of the Day, Vol. LXI, No. 17 (June 15, 1995).

⁶² Cowen, "Marketplace Liberalization vs. Government Reaction," pp. 2-22.

⁶³ Pro-NEA pollsters tend to ask virtually "the arts," not the federal agency and its record.

⁶⁴ Jarvik, "Committing Suicide at the NEA," p. 44.

⁶⁵ Ibid.

⁶⁶ Julia Duin, "NEA makes grants as fight for life nears, Agency conducts `business concern every bit usual' with its selections," The Washington Times, December 19, 1996.

⁶⁷ Julia Duin, "Black lesbian film likely to rekindle arts-funding furor NEA defends graphic comedy," The Washington Times, June xiv, 1996.

wilsonmusection.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.heritage.org/report/ten-good-reasons-eliminate-funding-the-national-endowment-orthe-arts

Share this post