Does the National Endowment for the Arts Award Come With Money

Every bit the U.S. Congress struggles to residue the federal budget and end the decades-long screw of deficit 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 have been mired in more controversy than the NEA. However, steadfast partisans of "welfare for artists" continue to defend the Endowment, asserting that it promotes philanthropic giving, makes cultural programs accessible to those who can least afford them, and protects America'south cultural heritage.

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

There are at least ten adept reasons to eliminate funding for the NEA:

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

The arts were flowering before the NEA came into being in 1965. Indeed, the Endowment was created partly considering of the tremendous popular appeal of the arts at the time. Alvin Toffler's The Culture Consumers, published in 1964, surveyed the booming audition for fine art in the Usa, a side benefit of a growing economy and low inflation.² Toffler'southward book recalls the arts prior to the cosmos of the NEA-the era of the smashing Georges Balanchine and Agnes de Mille ballets, for example, when 26 one thousand thousand viewers would plow 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 will go on to exist after NEA subsidies are concluded.

In spite of the vast splendor created by American artists prior to 1965, partisans of the NEA claim that the arts in the United states of america 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 merely 0.29 percent of the Opera's annual income of $133 1000000-and amounts to less than the ticket revenue for a single sold-out performance.³

The growth of private-sector charitable giving in contempo years has rendered NEA funding relatively insignificant to the arts customs. Overall giving to the arts terminal year totaled near $x billion^four-upward from $6.5 billion in 1991^v-dwarfing the NEA's federal subsidy. This twoscore percent increment in private giving occurred during the same menstruation that the NEA budget was reduced past 40 percent from approximately $170 meg to $99.five 1000000.^{half dozen} Thus, as conservatives had predicted, cutting the federal NEA subsidy coincided with increased private 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 thing how generous, could never recoup for the loss of public funds. As Chart 1 shows, many of these institutional campaigns have fundraising targets many times greater than the NEA'south almanac federal cribbing of $99.5 million. In New York Urban center, the geographic area which receives the largest relative share of NEA funding, the New York Public Library is raising some $430 million (with 70 percent already completed), the Museum of Mod Art, $300 million-450 meg (with 30 per centum raised), the Metropolitan Museum of Art some $300 one thousand thousand (with 80 percent already obtained).⁷ In fact, philanthropist Frederick A. O. Schwartz, Jr., recently told The New York Times that "we've entered a period of institutional excitement comparable only to that which occurred afterward the Civil War until Earth War I when several of the city'south slap-up civic and cultural institutions were built."⁸

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

Even smaller organizations tin succeed without depending on the federal government. As Bradley Scholar William Craig Rice argues cogently in The Heritage Foundation's Policy Review, "The arts volition flower without the NEA." His survey shows that many arts venues can hands supersede NEA funding, and suggests a number of alternative strategies for those who might find the disappearance of the federal agency problematic.^ten

Reason #2: The NEA Is Welfare for Cultural Elitists

Despite Endowment claims that federal funding permits underpriviledged individuals to gain admission to the arts, NEA grants offering trivial more than a subsidy to the well-to-practice. Ane-fifth of directly NEA grants go to multimillion-dollar arts organizations.¹¹ Harvard University Political Scientist Edward C. Banfield has noted that the "fine art public is at present, every bit it has always been, overwhelmingly middle and upper middle form and to a higher place average in income-relatively prosperous people who would probably enjoy art about equally much in the absenteeism of subsidies."¹² The poor and the middle course, thus, benefit less from public art subsidies than does the museum- and orchestra-going upper-middle class. Sawers argues that "those who finance the subsidies through taxes are probable to exist different from and poorer than those who benefit from the subsidies."^xiii 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.¹⁴

Equally part of the Endowment'southward effort to dispel its elitist prototype, Chairman Jane Alexander has led a nationwide campaign painting the NEA equally a social welfare plan that tin can help underprivileged youth to fight violence and drugs. In congressional testimony, she has trumpeted her "American Canvas" initiative "to proceeds a better understanding of how the arts tin can transform communities."¹⁵ Just despite the heartwarming anecdotes, claims for the therapeutic use of the arts are not supported by empirical scientific evidence. Studies that claim to show the arts forbid crime are methodologically questionable, due to problems of self choice. And the arts offer no cure for alcoholism either: Tom Dardis devotes his 292-folio scholarly work, The Thirsty Muse, precisely to the loftier occurrence of alcohol abuse amidst American writers.^sixteen

Reason #3: The NEA Discourages Charitable Gifts to the Arts

Defenders of the NEA contend that the much of its do good lies in its power to confer an imprimatur, similar to the "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval," necessary to encourage private support of the arts. NEA officials take asserted ofttimes that past persuading donors who would otherwise non requite, Endowment back up tin can offer a financial "leverage" of up to ten times the corporeality of a federal grant honor.¹⁷ There is little or no empirical prove to support such claims. The merely 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 money effectually from one recipient to another, "thereby reducing the private resource available to other arts organizations in a specific community."^xviii Indeed, a study by the Clan of American Cultures (AAC) revealed that individual funders found major museum exhibits, opera, ballet, symphony orchestras, and public television to be "attractive" for donors without an official regime stamp.^xix

Economist Tyler Cowen also sees an ominous outcome to government arts programs: "Once donors believe that authorities has accustomed the responsibleness for maintaining culture, they will exist less willing to give."²⁰ This analysis is consistent with recent public statements from foundation executives that the private sector will not brand up the gap resulting from decreases in NEA funding, despite record levels of private giving in recent years. Cowen'due south conclusion: "The regime can all-time support the arts by leaving them solitary, offering background assistance through the tax arrangement and the enforcement of copyright."²¹

Reason #4: The NEA Lowers the Quality of American Fine art

NEA funding likewise threatens the independence of art and of artists. Recognizing how government subsidies threaten artistic inspiration, Ralph Waldo Emerson declared that "Dazzler will not come up at the call of the legislature.... It will come, as e'er, unannounced, and leap up between the feet of brave and earnest men."²² Recent critics echo Emerson's creed. McGill University Direction Professor Reuven Brenner has declared: "The NEA'southward opponents have it correct. Bureaucratic culture is not 18-carat culture.... It 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 fine art may be the "greatest anathema of all."²⁴ Thus, to maintain its editorial independence, The New Criterion, a journal edited by one-time New York Times fine art critic Hilton Kramer, has rejected NEA funding since its founding some 15 years agone. In 1983, Kramer was a vocal, principled critic of an NEA program offering subsidies to art critics; his opposition forced the agency to bit the grants.²⁵

When government gets in the business of subsidizing art, the impact upon art is often pernicious. Co-ordinate to Bruce Bustard, author of a catalogue for the current retrospective on art funded through President Franklin D. Roosevelt'south "Public Works of Art Project," notes that the "New Bargain produced no truthful masterpieces." Instead, equally Washington Post columnist James Glassman declared, the PWA "stifle[d] creativity," 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 accept a terrible record for choosing future winners and losers, whether in business or the arts."²⁷ Authorities subsidies frequently can hurt the quality of art by promoting a new cult of mediocrity. Rice has pointed out that the NEA helps the well-connected and the well-established at the expense of less sophisticated-and possibly more talented-outsiders.²⁸ The NEA thereby reduces the importance of pop appeal for the arts, substituting instead the demand to please a tertiary-political party government patron, and thus driving a wedge between artists and audiences.

In his major comparative study of subsidized and unsubsidized art in U.k., Sawers noted that government subsidies actually work to reduce choice and diversity in the creative market by encouraging artists to emulate each other in order to attain success in the grants process. Privately funded venues, thus, are more than artistically flexible than publicly funded ones. (For example, it was individual orchestras that introduced the "early on music" movement into United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland.²⁹) In add-on, such favoritism endangers funding for otherwise worthy arts organizations merely considering "they do not receive a public arts bureau matching grant."^thirty

The threat to quality fine 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 artistic decision making, the principle should be established that the United States government volition brand admittedly no grants to contained arts institutions-straight or through u.s.-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 wrong runway. They ask the authorities to brand decisions in a field in which it has vested political interests."³¹

Reason #5: The NEA Volition Proceed to Fund Pornography

In Nov 1996, in a ii-1 determination, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a 1992 ruling in the "NEA 4" example 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 "general standards of decency and respect" in awarding 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 by John Brademas and Leonard Garment.

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

At that place is no shortage of examples of indecent material supported straight or indirectly by the NEA. Nevertheless, Jane Alexander has never criticized any of these NEA grantees publicly. And the Clinton Administration has yet to file an appeal of the Ninth Circuit'southward determination. Moreover, no Member of Congress has nonetheless attempted to provide a legislative fix that would require NEA grant recipients to bide past general standards of decency in their work.

On March half-dozen, 1997, Congressman Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), Chairman of the Teaching and Workforce Subcommittee that has oversight over the NEA, complained virtually books published by an NEA-funded press chosen "Fiction Collective 2," which he described every bit an "offense to the senses." Hoekstra cited four Fiction Collective ii books and noted that the publisher'south parent organization had received an additional $45,000 grant to establish a World Broad Web site. According to The Washington Times, the NEA granted $25,000 to Fiction Collective ii, which featured works containing sexual torture, incest, kid sexual activity, sadomasochism, and kid sexual activity; the "excerpts depict a scene in which a blood brother-sis team rape their younger sister, the torture of a Mexican male prostitute and oral sex activity betwixt two women."³⁶ Pat Trueman, old Master of the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section of the United states Department of Justice Criminal Sectionalization, 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 cloth.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 nothing new for the NEA. In November 1996, Representative Hoekstra questioned NEA funding of a film distributor handling "plain offensive and peradventure pornographic movies-several of which appear to deal with the sexuality of children."³⁹ He noted the NEA gave $112,700 over three years to "Women Make Movies," which subsidized distribution of films including:

• "Ten Cents a Dance," a three-vignette video in which "two women awkwardly discuss their common attraction." It "depicts anonymous bath sexual activity between two men" and includes an "ironic episode of heterosexual phone sexual practice."
• "Sex Fish" portrays a "furious montage of oral sex, public remainder-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 do in bed?"
• "BloodSisters" reveals a "various cross-section of the lesbian [sadomasochistic] customs."

Three other films center on the sexual or lesbian experiences of girls age 12 and under. "These listings accept 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 "functioning artist" who appeared at "The Kitchen," a New York venue receiving NEA support.^forty In response, The New York Times launched an advertizing hominem attack on Hoekstra (while neglecting to mention that The New York Times Company Foundation had sponsored Sprinkle's performance at one 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. Merely such "mistakes" seem role of a regular pattern of support for indecency, repeated yr afterward year. This pattern is well-documented in the appendix to this newspaper.

Reason #6: The NEA Promotes Politically Correct Art

A radical virus of multiculturalism, moreover, has permanently infected the agency, causing artistic efforts to exist evaluated by race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation instead of artistic merit.⁴² In 1993, Roger Kimball reported that an "try to impose quotas and politically correct thinking" was "taking precedence over mundane considerations of quality."⁴³ Perhaps the most prominent case of contrary 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 Postal service that multiculturalism was at present "systemic" at the agency.⁴⁵ Breslauer, theater critic for The Los Angeles Times, pointed out that "private grantees are required to conform to the NEA'due south specifications" and the "art world's version of affirmative activeness" has had "a greatly corrosive effect on the American arts-pigeonholing artists and pressuring them to produce piece of work that satisfies a politically correct calendar rather than their best creative instincts." NEA funding of "race-based politics" has encouraged indigenous separatism and Balkanization at the expense of a shared American culture. 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 fine art they'd made" and "creative directors began to push artists toward `purer' (read: stereotypical) expressions of the ethnicity they were paying them to represent."⁴⁶ The result, Breslauer concluded, is that "most people in the arts institution go on to defer, at least publicly, to the demands of political correctness."⁴⁷

Aside from such blatant cultural engineering, the NEA besides seems intent on pushing "fine art" that offers piddling more than a decidedly left-wing calendar:

• Terminal summertime, the Phoenix Art Museum, a recipient of NEA funding, presented an exhibit featuring: an American flag in a toilet, an American flag made out of human peel, and a flag on the museum flooring to be stepped upon. Fabian Montoya, an 11-twelvemonth-old boy, picked up 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 boy'south patriotism by presenting him with a flag that had flown over the U.S. Capitol. Whereas the American Legion, Senator Bob Dole, and Firm Speaker Newt Gingrich condemned the showroom, NEA Chairman Alexander remained conspicuously silent.
• Artist 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 withal has not fully answered a 1996 query from Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) for details of its support to the (now defunct) Mission Cultural Eye for Latino Arts in San Francisco, which had received an estimated $xxx,000 per year from the NEA since the early 1980s. The reason for the research was to determine what the NEA knew about the activities of one of the leaders of the center, Gilberto Osorio. Osorio co-founded the eye in 1977, and since had been exposed as a commandante in the FMLN guerrilla command during the civil war in Republic of el salvador by San Francisco announcer Stephen Schwartz.⁴⁹ One of the FMLN missions undertaken while Osorio had been primary of operations was a June 19, 1985, attack on a restaurant in San Salvador that killed 4 U.S. Marines and ii civilian employees of the Wang Corporation. In 1982, Osorio reportedly had ordered that any American institute in San Vicente province exist executed. Schwartz concluded, "some of their [NEA] grantees may exist guilty of more than merely crimes confronting good taste."⁵⁰

Reason #seven: The NEA Wastes Resource

Like any federal hierarchy, the NEA wastes taxation dollars on authoritative overhead and bureaucracy. Anecdotes of other forms of NEA waste product are legion. The Cato Plant's Sheldon Richman and David Boaz note that "Thank you to an NEA grantee, the American taxpayers in one case paid $ane,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.

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

As noted above, Sawers'due south comparative study of British fine arts noted petty difference in the quality of art between subsidized and unsubsidized venues. Sawers did uncover 1 major difference, however, betwixt subsidized and unsubsidized companies: unsubsidized companies had fewer, if any, performers under contract, relying instead on freelance staff. Fixed and total costs for unsubsidized companies were, therefore, essentially lower than those of the subsidized companies. Subsidized venues kept "more than permanent staff on their payroll" instead of lowering ticket prices.⁵⁴ Subsidies, thus, result in higher ticket prices to force the public to subsidize bloated arts bureaucracies.

Reason #8: The NEA Is Beyond Reform

In 1990, the Presidential Commission on the NEA, headed by John Brademas and Leonard Garment, ended that the NEA had an obligation to maintain a high standard of decency and respect considering it distributed taxpayer dollars. The contempo record of the bureau, and the November 1996 appellate court conclusion in the case of the "NEA Four," make it unlikely that the Endowment will be able to ever award that recommendation. NEA Chairman Alexander has non condemned the continued subsidies for indecent fine art nor explained how such grant requests managed to become through her "reorganization." Unfortunately, non a single Senator or Representative has asked her to practise so.

Recent history shows that despite cosmetic "reorganizations" at the NEA, the Endowment is impervious to genuine modify because of the specific arts constituencies it serves. Every few years, whether it exist by Nancy Hanks in the Nixon Administration, Livingston Biddle in the Carter Administration, or Frank Hodsoll in the Reagan Administration, NEA administrators promise that reorganization will exist bring massive change to the bureau. All these efforts have failed. It was, in fact, under Mr. Hodsoll'due south 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 little effect. In the words of Alice Goldfarb Marquis, "All Ms. Alexander has washed is, to coin a phrase, re-arrange the deckchairs on the Titanic."⁵⁵ Indeed, Alexander has retained veteran NEA executive Ana Steele in a top management position to this date. Steele approved the payment of over $250,000 to the "NEA Iv" while serving equally acting chairman in 1993.

The NEA claims to have changed, no doubt in hopes of mollifying congressional critics. Yet the NEA has continued to fund organizations that have subsidized materials offensive to ordinary citizens while attempting to recast its public image every bit a friend of children, families, and education. It is a "two-runway" ploy, speaking of family values to the general public and privately of another agenda to the arts antechamber. For example, Chairman Alexander has dedicated NEA fellowships to private artists, prohibited by Congress afterwards years of scandals. In her congressional testimony of March 13, 1997, she alleged: "I ask you lot again in the strongest terms to elevator the ban on support to individual artists."⁵⁶

To send its signal to the avant garde arts constituency, the NEA continues to fund a scattering of "cutting-edge" organizations in each grantmaking cycle. The NEA has fifty-fifty maintained its peer-review panel process used to review grants, by irresolute its name to "field of study review"; The Heritage Foundation cited this procedure in 1991 as ridden with abuse and conflicts of involvement, and as a major gene in the Endowment'southward selection of offensive and indecent proposals.⁵⁷

Despite the rhetoric of reform issuing from its lobbyists, and 5 years of reduced budgets, the reality remains defiantly unchanged at the NEA.

Reason #ix: Abolishing the NEA Volition 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 budget. Over the next five years, the Administration seeks to increase federal spending by $249 billion.⁵⁸ Further, Clinton also proposes to increase the NEA'south funding to $119,240,000, a rise of 20 per centum.⁵⁹ These dramatic increases in spending come in the age when the federal debt exceeded $five trillion for the first time and on the heels of a 1996 federal deficit of $107 billion.

In this era of monetary constraint, in which the demand to reduce the federal arrears is forcing fundamental choices about vital needs-such as housing and medical treat the elderly-such boondoggles as the NEA should be among the showtime programs to be eliminated. Representative Wally Herger (R-CA), citing a recent NEA grant to his own constituents (the California Indian Basket Weavers Association), pointedly said that he "does non believe that in an era of tight federal dollars, basket weaving should accept a top priority in Congress."⁶⁰ Whenever American families take to cutting make cuts in their spending, nonessential spending-such as amusement expenses-are the first to go. If Congress cannot stand upward and eliminate the $99.5 1000000 FY 1997 appropriation for the NEA, how will it be able to brand the instance for far more key budget cuts?

Reason #x: Funding the NEA Disturbs the U.S. Tradition of Limited Authorities

In retrospect, turmoil over the NEA was predictable, due to the long tradition in the The states of opposing the use of federal tax dollars to fund the arts. During the Ramble Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, delegate Charles Pinckney introduced a motion calling for the federal regime to subsidize the arts in the Us. Although the Founding Fathers were cultured men who knew firsthand of diverse European systems for public arts patronage, they overwhelmingly rejected Pickney's suggestion considering of their belief in express, constitutional government. Accordingly, nowhere in its list of powers enumerated and delegated to the federal authorities does the Constitution specify a power to subsidize the arts.

Moreover, as David Boaz of the Cato Found argues, federal arts subsidies pose the danger of federal control over expression: "Regime funding of anything involves government controlÉ. As we should not want an established church, so we should non desire established art."⁶¹ As Cowen notes, "When the government promotes its favored fine art, the most innovative creators detect it more difficult to ascent to the acme.... But the true costs of government funding exercise not prove up on our tax pecker. The NEA and other government arts agencies politicize art and jeopardize the principles of democratic regime."⁶² The French authorities, for case, tried to suppress Impressionism through its control of the Academy.

The deep-seated American conventionalities against public back up of artists continues today. Public opinion polls, moreover, bear witness 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 whatsoever level of funding. An earlier January 19, 1995, Los Angeles Times poll establish 69 percent of the American people favored cutting the NEA budget.⁶⁴ More than recently, a poll performed by The Polling Company in March 1997 demonstrated that 57 percent of Americans favor the suggestion that "Congress should stop funding the NEA with federal taxpayer dollars and instead exit funding decisions with land government and individual groups."

Conclusion

Afterward more than than three decades, the National Endowment for the Arts has failed in its mission to heighten cultural life in the United States. 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. As the federal debt soars to over $five trillion, information technology is time to terminate the NEA as a wasteful, unjustified, unnecessary, and unpopular federal expenditure. Ending the NEA would be practiced for the arts and skilful for America.

Appendix

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

• In 1995, the NEA-funded "Highways," a venue featuring a summer "Ecco Lesbo/Ecco Homo" festival in Santa Monica, California. The festival featured a program really chosen "Not for Republicans" in which a performance artist ruminated on "Sexual activity with Newt'southward Mom." The artistic manager was Tim Miller (of the "NEA Four"). Quondam Clinton adviser Paul Begala agreed that items in the published schedule were obscene.⁶⁵
• NEA grants appear in Dec 1996 included $20,000 to the "Woolly Mammoth Theater" venue for Tim Miller, one of the "NEA Four" performance 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 as well awarded $25,000 to "Photographic camera News, Inc.," also known as "Third Earth Newsreel," a New York distributor of Marxist revolutionary propaganda films.⁶⁶
• In June 1996, Representative Hoekstra raised questions nearly "The Watermelon Woman." The film was funded by a $31,500 NEA grant. Information technology independent what one review described equally the "hottest dyke sex scene e'er recorded on celluloid." "I had high hopes that Jane Alexander would forbid further outrages by the NEA, but apparently even she-overnice lady that she is-lacks the power and the will to put an end to the NEA'south obsession with handing out the taxpayers' money to cocky-proclaimed `artists' whose mentality is merely so much flotsam floating effectually in a sewer," said Senator Jesse Helms.⁶⁷
• Hilton Kramer, in a March 1996 consequence of The New York Observer, noted a new "icky" Whitney exhibition he characterized as a "jolly rape of the public sensibilities." The Whitney was showing the work of Edward Kienholz, and "information technology almost goes without proverb that this America-as-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 by the NEA thus far in 1997-$400,000.
• The Sunday Maine-Telegram, reported on March three, 1996, that William Fifty. Pope, a Professor at Bates College, received $twenty,000 grant in the last circular of NEA grants to individual performance artists. He intended to utilize the money for at least two projects. In one, he would concatenation himself to an ATM car in New York City wearing simply his underwear. In the other, he "plans to walk the streets of New York wearing a six-foot-long white tube like a codpiece. He's rigged it up so he tin put an egg in one end, and it volition roll out the fake, white penis." The Maine-Telegram noted that the NEA individual fellowship plan "will go out with a bang, at least 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 Urban center. Flanagan (at present deceased) was recently the star of a film at the Sundance Film Festival entitled "Sick," which showed him nailing his male person organs to a wooden plank. "Sick" is also on the 1997 schedule of the New Directors/New Films series co-sponsored by the Lincoln Middle for the Performing Arts and the Museum of Mod Fine art in New York Metropolis. Both institutions accept 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 awaiting in the Senate.
• Ron Athey's 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 really increased in the year after the museum booked Athey.)
• Joel-Peter Witkin, a four-time recipient of NEA individual fellowships whose photograph of severed heads and chopped upwardly bodies were displayed by Senator Helms on the Senate floor two years ago every bit show of the moral abuse of the NEA (Helms discussed 1 featuring a man'southward caput being used as a flowerpot). Witkin was honored with a retrospective at New York's NEA-funded Guggenheim museum. Fifty-fifty The New York Times condemned the show every bit "gruesome."
• Karen Finley, also of the "NEA 4," brought her new "performance piece" to an NEA-funded venue in Boston.
• Holly Hughes, another of the "NEA Iv" (and recipient of a 1994 individual fellowship), brought her deed to an NEA-funded institution in suburban Virginia.
• New York City'due south New Museum, an NEA-funded performance, hosted a retrospective of the work of Andres Serrano, which once more included an showroom of "Piss Christ."
• New York's Museum of Modern Art, funded past the NEA, hosted an NEA-funded exhibit of Bruce Nauman's work, likewise displayed at the Smithsonian'southward Hirshhorn Museum, which included neon signs reading "S- and Die" and "F- and Die."
• The NEA literature program subsidized the author of a volume entitled The Gay 100, which claims that such historical figures as Saint Augustine were homosexuals.

Endnotes

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

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

³ A typical sold-out performance at the Met brings in nearly $485,000 in ticket revenue, given the boilerplate ticket price of $125 and a seating capacity of 3,877.

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

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

⁶ Giving U.s.a. 1996 (New York: AAFRC Trust For Philanthropy, 1996).

⁷ Judith Miller, "Big Arts Groups Starting Drives for New Funds," The New York Times, Feb 3, 1997, p. ane

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ David Sawers, "Should the Taxpayer Back up the Arts?" Electric current Controversies No. 7, Institute for Economic Affairs, London, 1993, p. 22

¹⁰ William Craig Rice, "I Hear America Singing: The Arts Volition Flower Without the NEA," Policy Review, March/Apr 1997, pp. 37-45.

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

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

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

^fourteen Heritage Tabulations from 1993 IRS Public Employ File.

^fifteen Jane Alexander, Testimony to the Business firm Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, March 13, 1997.

^xvi Tom Dardis, The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Author (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1982).

¹⁷ Encounter Jane Alexander, Testimony to the Senate Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, May viii, 1996.

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

^nineteen Ibid., p. 56.

²⁰ Tyler Cowen, draft ms. for Chapter half dozen, "Marketplace Liberalization vs. Government Reaction" in Enterprise and the Arts, forthcoming from Harvard University Press, pp. 22-31.

²¹ Ibid.

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

²³ Reuven Brenner, "Civilisation By Commission," The Wall Street Periodical, 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-v.

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

²⁷ Cowen, "Market Liberalization vs. Government Reaction," pp. two-22.

²⁸ William Craig Rice, The NewsHour, debate moderated by Elizabeth Farnsworth, March x, 1997.

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

³⁰ Pankratz, Multiculturalism and Public Arts Policy, p. 55.

³¹ Toffler, The Civilization Consumers, p. 200.

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

³³ Affirming opinion of Judge James R. Browning, U.S. Ninth Circuit Courtroom of Appeals, filed November five, 1996, in Karen Finley et al., 5. National Endowment for the Arts.

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

³⁵ Jonathan Yardley, "Art and the Pocketbook of the Beholder," The Washington Mail service, 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, Managing director of Governmental Affairs, 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 16, 1996.

⁴⁰ Ibid.

⁴¹ Frank Rich, "Lesbian Lookout," The New York Times, March 13, 1997, p. A27.

⁴² See 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 January Breslauer, "The NEA's Real Offense: Agency Pigeonholes Artists past Ethnicity," The Washington Mail, March 16, 1997, p. G1.

⁴⁶ Ibid.

⁴⁷ Ibid., p. G8.

⁴⁸ Laurence Jarvik, "Committing Suicide at the NEA," COMINT: A Journal Near Public Media, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Jump 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 Ascent 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 Back up the Arts?" p. 33.

⁵⁵ Alice Goldfarb Marquis, letter of the alphabet to author, Feb seven, 1997.

⁵⁶ Jane Alexander, Testimony before the Subcommittee on Interior and Related Agencies, U.Southward. House of Representatives, March thirteen, 1997 .

⁵⁷ Robert Knight, "The National Endowment for the Arts: Misusing Taxpayer's Money," Heritage Foundation Backgrounder No. 803, January eighteen, 1991; Robert Knight, "The National Endowment: It'southward Time to Costless the Arts," Family Research Council Insight, Jan 1995, p. 1.

⁵⁸ "The Era of Big Regime is Dorsum: Talking Points on President Clinton's Fiscal Year 1998 Upkeep," Heritage Foundation Talking Points No. 17, February 24, 1997, p. ane.

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

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

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

⁶² Cowen, "Market Liberalization vs. Regime Reaction," pp. ii-22.

⁶³ Pro-NEA pollsters tend to inquire about "the arts," not the federal bureau 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 organization as usual' with its selections," The Washington Times, Dec 19, 1996.

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

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

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