NRO Weekend, July 29-30, 2000
The Art of Corrupting Influence
Not only is government funding harmful to the arts, it's just plain wrong.

By Melissa Seckora, NR editorial associate

ward-winning actress turned Clinton appointee, and now author of An Actress in the Theater of Politics, Jane Alexander thinks she has something new to tell us about the National Endowment for the Arts and the politics surrounding its "fragile" survival. Fed up with the Gingrich-Republican Congress of her four-year tenure as chairman and a system "so corrupt it may never be fixed," Alexander called it quits in 1997. Her book is a memoir of her days as chairman of the NEA, battling a stubborn coalition of Democrats, Republicans, and special interests over the survival of the agency.

In a story earlier this week on NRO, Mike Potemra addressed the "largely reactive politics of the arts." In opposition to Jane Alexander, he questions whether it is good for the arts to be dependent on government, arguing that the problem with the NEA is that government funding of the arts is indeed harmful.

Not only is government funding harmful to the arts, it's just plain wrong and unproductive (not to mention unimaginative and un-American). In September of 1997, the House committee issued an investigative report titled A Creative and Generous America: The Healthy State of the Arts in America and the Continued Failure of the National Endowment for the Arts, concluding that that funding for the NEA is not justified constitutionally, economically.

Even the Founding Fathers rejected federal funding of the arts, the committee reported. The Constitution does not explicitly define the federal role in the arts, but the intention of the Founders is clear. The question came up at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, when Charles Pinckney of South Carolina rose to urge that the federal government be authorized to 'establish seminaries for the promotion of literature and the arts and the sciences.' According to the House report, Pinckney's proposal was resoundingly defeated, and the delegates to the convention moved instead to support the federal protection of patents — essentially, the right of artists to market their work freely and fairly. The report concludes: "The Founding Fathers understood a rich tradition of government support for the arts in Europe, and most were themselves well versed in classical literature and the arts. Despite this heritage, they chose limited government and freedom over government support of the arts. On this level alone it is hard to justify the funding for the NEA."

Among other things, the House committee concluded that art is not a public good, that one third of NEA funding goes to only six large cities (New York, Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and D.C.), and that the NEA fails to increase access to the arts. And yet, committee researchers found, art is flourishing in the United States: new venues continue to open, attendance is increasing, artist employment and income are up, ticket receipts are up, and private funding of the arts is approaching $11 billion per year, 100 times more than the NEA.

Without reservation, therefore, the House report concluded that the National Endowment for the Arts should be eliminated. Eliminating the NEA "will not negatively effect state, local and private efforts being carried out in support of the arts, nor will it negatively effect the arts community in general. In fact based on the evidence presented in this paper, the arts will flourish without the NEA, and its elimination will likely lead to renewed efforts in the private sector to support the arts."

The one thing the House report lacked was examples of some of the art the NEA's small budget funds, giving only passing mention to the fact that the NEA continues to fund art and art centers that display and present art that runs counter to common standards of decency. Recent grantees include organizations that subsidize and distribute sexually graphic videos and literature. Somehow, year after year, the NEA manages to get away with pretending that sexually graphic films and literature help fulfill their mission "to serve the public good by nurturing human creativity, supporting community spirit, and fostering appreciation for the excellence and diversity of our nation's artistic accomplishments".

According to the NEA's website, applicants must undergo a rigorous review by independent, national panels of experts and citizens. Before receiving final approval, applications are reviewed by the National Council of the Arts and the Endowment chairman. Two telling examples of eye-opening absurdity can be found in two projects receiving grants from the NEA this year — Haleakala, Inc. (The Kitchen) and Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc.

New York's Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc., received a $10,000 grant to support The Future of the Present 2000 — which, according to the NEA, is a series involving ten residences in live art netcasts to a worldwide audience in collaboration with Pseudo Online Network. According to Franklin Furnace, SEEMAN [one of the projects supported by the grant to Franklin Furnace] is "the effort of Kal Spelletich, an art drop-out and extreme technology inventor who enjoys exploring his taste for the dark side of technology. They see themselves as postindustrial folk artists. The actions of their robots poetically symbolize man's struggles and triumphs: life/death, endurance, military grade technology.... These machines have been inspired by a Buddhist sect that uses shock and violence to attain enlightenment."

Haleakala, Inc. or "The Kitchen" received a $25,000 grant to support a consortium project involving the commissioning and presentation of seven interdisciplinary projects. According to The Kitchen's website, one project supported by the grant includes a piece by Pat Hearn using "computer-generated graphics and voice to create an abstract canvas of repeated images which build on each other through the aural repetition. It creates an eerie universe of computer control and manipulation".

Another project is about "a new epidemic, Acquired Dread of Sex (ADS), [that] is sweeping the nation in this music video remake of Visconti's film version of Death In Venice. In this update, Aschenbach is a homophobic bigot who eventually succumbs to ADS, while Tadzio is a cute gay guy who overcomes his fear of AIDS (and ADS) by discovering that condoms are his favorite thing to wear. This tape was originally designed to play on multiple monitors in a Toronto shopping mall. Its perky lead song, music video format and pro-safe sex message make it a good introduction for young people to serious issues about AIDS and sexuality."

With no credible evidence supporting a notion that the NEA is responsible for the flourish of the arts, and with the NEA accounting for only five percent of total federal cultural support, it's pathetic to see who is receiving tax dollars — sex crazed photographers and pyro-techno deviants only seem to scratch the surface.

Mike Potemra is right, creativity in the arts involves freedom, and the arts are better off without politicians playing the "who gets to enjoy freedom card" or the "ha, ha, only we get to decide what art is" card. However, so long as the NEA exists, the American people should know when they are funding obscenity in the name of art. Many taxpayers would be quite outraged to learn just how clever the NEA's has been over recent decades, mixing a world of artistic treasures with an underworld of filth.