Pros and Cons of Public Funding for Art and Music

As the U.S. Congress struggles to balance the federal budget and end 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 have been mired in more controversy than the NEA. Nevertheless, steadfast partisans of "welfare for artists" continue to defend the Endowment, asserting that information technology promotes philanthropic giving, makes cultural programs accessible to those who can to the lowest degree afford them, and protects America'south cultural heritage.

In fact, the NEA is an unwarranted extension of the federal regime into the voluntary sector. The Endowment, furthermore, does non promote charitable giving. Despite Endowment claims that its efforts bring art to the inner city, the agency offers little more than than a direct subsidy to the cultured, upper-middle form. Finally, rather than promoting the best in art, the NEA continues to offer tax dollars and the federal seal of approval to subsidize "art" that is offensive to most Americans.

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

Reason #1: The Arts Volition Accept 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 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 fine art in the United States, a side do good of a growing economy and low inflation.² Toffler's volume recalls the arts prior to the cosmos of the NEA-the era of the neat Georges Balanchine and Agnes de Mille ballets, for instance, when 26 one thousand thousand viewers would turn to CBS broadcasts of Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. In fact, nearly all of the major orchestras in the U.s.a. existed before 1965, and will proceed to exist after NEA subsidies are ended.

In spite of the vast splendor created by American artists prior to 1965, partisans of the NEA merits that the arts in the United states would face nearly certain demise should the Endowment be abolished. Yet Endowment funding is just a drop in the bucket compared to giving to the arts by individual citizens. For case, 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's annual income of $133 meg-and amounts to less than the ticket revenue for a single sold-out performance.^three

The growth of private-sector charitable giving in recent years has rendered NEA funding relatively insignificant to the arts community. Overall giving to the arts last year totaled virtually $10 billion⁴-up from $6.5 billion in 1991⁵-dwarfing the NEA'due south federal subsidy. This 40 per centum increment in private giving occurred during the aforementioned period that the NEA budget was reduced by 40 percent from approximately $170 one thousand thousand to $99.v million.^half-dozen Thus, as conservatives had predicted, cut the federal NEA subsidy coincided with increased private support for the arts and civilisation.

That many major cultural institutions are in the midst of successful fundraising efforts belies the questionable claim of NEA supporters that private giving, no matter how generous, could never compensate for the loss of public funds. As Chart 1 shows, many of these institutional campaigns accept fundraising targets many times greater than the NEA's annual 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 Modernistic Art, $300 million-450 meg (with 30 percent raised), the Metropolitan Museum of Art some $300 million (with 80 percent already obtained).^vii In fact, philanthropist Frederick A. O. Schwartz, Jr., recently told The New York Times that "nosotros've entered a period of institutional excitement comparable just to that which occurred after the Civil State of war until World War I when several of the urban center'south bang-up borough and cultural institutions were built."^viii

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

Even smaller organizations can succeed without depending on the federal regime. 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 easily supervene upon NEA funding, and suggests a number of alternative strategies for those who might discover the disappearance of the federal bureau problematic.¹⁰

Reason #ii: The NEA Is Welfare for Cultural Elitists

Despite Endowment claims that federal funding permits underpriviledged individuals to proceeds access to the arts, NEA grants offering little more than a subsidy to the well-to-exercise. Ane-5th of straight NEA grants go to multimillion-dollar arts organizations.¹¹ Harvard University Political Scientist Edward C. Banfield has noted that the "art public is now, every bit it has ever been, overwhelmingly center and upper middle form and higher up average in income-relatively prosperous people who would probably relish fine art nearly as much in the absence of subsidies."¹² The poor and the middle grade, thus, benefit less from public art subsidies than does the museum- and orchestra-going upper-centre form. Sawers argues that "those who finance the subsidies through taxes are likely to be different from and poorer than those who benefit from the subsidies."^xiii In fact, the $99.v million that funds the NEA likewise represents the entire annual tax burden for over 436,000 working-form American families.¹⁴

Equally role of the Endowment's effort to dispel its elitist prototype, Chairman Jane Alexander has led a nationwide campaign painting the NEA equally a social welfare programme that can assist underprivileged youth to fight violence and drugs. In congressional testimony, she has trumpeted her "American Canvas" initiative "to gain a better understanding of how the arts tin transform communities."¹⁵ But 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 foreclose law-breaking 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 high occurrence of alcohol abuse among American writers.^sixteen

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

Defenders of the NEA argue that the much of its do good lies in its power to confer an imprimatur, like to the "Practiced Housekeeping Seal of Approval," necessary to encourage private support of the arts. NEA officials have asserted frequently that by persuading donors who would otherwise not give, Endowment back up can offer a financial "leverage" of up to x times the corporeality of a federal grant award.¹⁷ There is little or no empirical evidence to support such claims. The only available written report of "matching grants"-those designed specifically to stimulate giving- concluded that matching grants did non increase total giving to the arts. Instead, "matching grants" appear to shift existing money effectually from i recipient to some other, "thereby reducing the private resources bachelor to other arts organizations in a specific community."¹⁸ Indeed, a report by the Association of American Cultures (AAC) revealed that private funders found major museum exhibits, opera, ballet, symphony orchestras, and public television receiver to be "bonny" for donors without an official authorities stamp.¹⁹

Economist Tyler Cowen also sees an ominous effect to authorities arts programs: "Once donors believe that government has accepted the responsibility for maintaining culture, they will be less willing to give."²⁰ This analysis is consistent with recent public statements from foundation executives that the private sector will not make up the gap resulting from decreases in NEA funding, despite record levels of individual giving in recent years. Cowen's decision: "The regime can best support the arts past leaving them alone, offering background help through the taxation system and the enforcement of copyright."²¹

Reason #4: The NEA Lowers the Quality of American Art

NEA funding likewise threatens the independence of art and of artists. Recognizing how regime subsidies threaten artistic inspiration, Ralph Waldo Emerson declared that "Beauty will not come at the call of the legislature.... It will come, as e'er, unannounced, and spring up betwixt the feet of dauntless and earnest men."²² Contempo critics echo Emerson'south creed. McGill University Management Professor Reuven Brenner has declared: "The NEA's opponents have it right. Bureaucratic culture is non genuine civilization.... 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's critics, the idea of a federal "seal of approval" on art may be the "greatest abomination of all."²⁴ Thus, to maintain its editorial independence, The New Criterion, a journal edited by former New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer, has rejected NEA funding since its founding some 15 years ago. In 1983, Kramer was a vocal, principled critic of an NEA program offering subsidies to art critics; his opposition forced the agency to scrap the grants.²⁵

When regime gets in the business of subsidizing art, the impact upon art is oft pernicious. According to Bruce Bustard, writer of a catalogue for the current retrospective on art funded through President Franklin D. Roosevelt'south "Public Works of Fine art Projection," notes that the "New Bargain produced no truthful masterpieces." Instead, as Washington Post columnist James Glassman alleged, 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. Only governments have a terrible record for choosing future winners and losers, whether in business concern 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-connected and the well-established at the expense of less sophisticated-and peradventure more talented-outsiders.²⁸ The NEA thereby reduces the importance of popular entreatment for the arts, substituting instead the need to please a third-party authorities patron, and thus driving a wedge between artists and audiences.

In his major comparative study of subsidized and unsubsidized art in Great Britain, Sawers noted that government subsidies actually piece of work to reduce pick and multifariousness in the creative marketplace past encouraging artists to emulate each other in order to accomplish success in the grants process. Privately funded venues, thus, are more artistically flexible than publicly funded ones. (For case, it was individual orchestras that introduced the "early music" movement into United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland.²⁹) In addition, such favoritism endangers funding for otherwise worthy arts organizations merely because "they do non receive a public arts agency matching grant."³⁰

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 artistic decision making, the principle should be established that the U.s.a. government will brand admittedly no grants to independent arts institutions-directly or through the states-to underwrite operating expenses or the costs of creative production. Proposals for a national arts foundation that would distribute funds to foster experiment, innovation...are on the incorrect track. They ask the government to make decisions in a field in which it has vested political interests."³¹

Reason #five: The NEA Will Continue to Fund Pornography

In November 1996, in a 2-1 decision, the 9th U.Southward. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a 1992 ruling in the "NEA 4" example of Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes-all "functioning 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 awarding grants was unconstitutional.³³ The congressional reauthorization of the bureau in 1990 had added this "decency provision" in keeping with recommendations of the Presidential Committee headed by John Brademas and Leonard Garment.

Without such a "decency" standard, the NEA tin can subsidize whatever type of art it chooses. Every bit a result, attorney Bruce Fein called the Courtroom of Appeals determination a recipe for "authorities subsidized depravity" that must (if non reversed by the Supreme Court) force Congress to "abolish the NEA, an ignoble experiment that, similar Prohibition, has not improved with age."³⁴ Literary critic Jonathan Yardley, writing in the Washington Postal service, alleged: "But fools-of whom, alas, in the Ôarts community' at that place are many-would argue that the federal government is obliged to underwrite obscene, pornographic or otherwise offensive "art."³⁵

In that location is no shortage of examples of indecent material supported direct 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's conclusion. Moreover, no Member of Congress has yet attempted to provide a legislative fix that would require NEA grant recipients to abide by general standards of decency in their work.

On March 6, 1997, Congressman Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), Chairman of the Pedagogy and Workforce Subcommittee that has oversight over the NEA, complained about books published by an NEA-funded press chosen "Fiction Collective 2," which he described every bit an "law-breaking to the senses." Hoekstra cited four Fiction Collective 2 books and noted that the publisher's parent arrangement had received an boosted $45,000 grant to establish a World 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 sexual practice; the "excerpts draw a scene in which a brother-sis team rape their younger sis, the torture of a Mexican male prostitute and oral sexual practice betwixt two women."³⁶ Pat Trueman, former Chief of the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section of the United States Department of Justice Criminal Segmentation, characterized the works equally "troubling" and said the NEA posed a "directly threat to the prosecution" of obscenity and child pornography because of its official stamp on such material.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 zip new for the NEA. In November 1996, Representative Hoekstra questioned NEA funding of a moving-picture show distributor handling "patently offensive and possibly pornographic movies-several of which announced to bargain with the sexuality of children."³⁹ He noted the NEA gave $112,700 over 3 years to "Women Make Movies," which subsidized distribution of films including:

• "Ten Cents a Trip the light fantastic toe," a three-vignette video in which "ii women awkwardly discuss their mutual attraction." It "depicts bearding bathroom sex between ii men" and includes an "ironic episode of heterosexual phone sex."
• "Sexual activity Fish" portrays a "furious montage of oral sex activity, public rest-room cruising and...tropical fish," the itemize says.
• "Coming Domicile" talks of the "sexy fun of trying to fit a lesbian couple in a bathtub!"
• "Seventeen Rooms" purports to answer the question, "What practise lesbians do in bed?"
• "BloodSisters" reveals a "diverse cantankerous-section of the lesbian [sadomasochistic] community."

Iii other films center on the sexual or lesbian experiences of girls age 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 back up.^forty In response, The New York Times launched an ad 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 material were simple mistakes. But such "mistakes" seem part of a regular blueprint of support for indecency, repeated year later on yr. This pattern is well-documented in the appendix to this paper.

Reason #6: The NEA Promotes Politically Right Art

A radical virus of multiculturalism, moreover, has permanently infected the agency, causing artistic efforts to exist evaluated past 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 Peradventure the most 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 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'southward version of affirmative action" has had "a profoundly corrosive effect on the American arts-pigeonholing artists and pressuring them to produce work that satisfies a politically correct agenda rather than their all-time artistic instincts." NEA funding of "race-based politics" has encouraged ethnic 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 "artistic directors began to push artists toward `purer' (read: stereotypical) expressions of the ethnicity they were paying them to represent."⁴⁶ The issue, Breslauer concluded, is that "most people in the arts institution continue to defer, at least publicly, to the demands of political definiteness."⁴⁷

Aside from such breathy cultural engineering, the NEA too seems intent on pushing "art" that offers little more than a decidedly left-fly calendar:

• Last summertime, the Phoenix Fine 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 floor to exist stepped upon. Fabian Montoya, an 11-year-onetime male child, picked up the American flag to rescue information technology. Museum curators replaced information technology, prompting Representative Matt Salmon (R-AZ) and the Phoenix American Legion to applaud the boy'southward patriotism by presenting him with a flag that had flown over the U.Due south. Capitol. Whereas the American Legion, Senator Bob Dole, and Business firm Speaker Newt Gingrich condemned the exhibit, 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 nevertheless has not fully answered a 1996 query from Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) for details of its support to the (at present defunct) Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco, which had received an estimated $30,000 per twelvemonth from the NEA since the early 1980s. The reason for the inquiry was to determine what the NEA knew about the activities of one of the leaders of the middle, Gilberto Osorio. Osorio co-founded the heart in 1977, and since had been exposed as a commandante in the FMLN guerrilla control during the civil war in Republic of el salvador by San Francisco announcer Stephen Schwartz.⁴⁹ Ane of the FMLN missions undertaken while Osorio had been chief of operations was a June 19, 1985, attack on a eating place in San Salvador that killed iv U.South. Marines and two civilian employees of the Wang Corporation. In 1982, Osorio reportedly had ordered that any American plant in San Vicente province be executed. Schwartz concluded, "some of their [NEA] grantees may be guilty of more just crimes confronting good taste."^l

Reason #seven: The NEA Wastes Resources

Like whatsoever federal hierarchy, the NEA wastes tax dollars on administrative overhead and bureaucracy. Anecdotes of other forms of NEA waste matter are legion. The Cato Institute's Sheldon Richman and David Boaz note that "Thank you 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 entire poem."⁵¹ In addition to such frivolities, the Endowment diverts resources from creative activities as artists are lured from producing fine art to courting federal grant dollars and even attending demonstrations in Washington, D.C.

There are other ways that the NEA wastes taxation dollars: Author Alice Goldfarb Marquis estimates that approximately half of NEA funds get to organizations that lobby the government for more money.⁵² Not only has the NEA politicized art, but because federal grant dollars are fungible, they can be used for other purposes too the support of quality art. In add-on, approximately 19 percent of the NEA'due south total budget is spent on administrative expenses-an unusually loftier effigy for a government program.⁵³

Every bit noted above, Sawers's comparative study of British fine arts noted little difference in the quality of fine art between subsidized and unsubsidized venues. Sawers did uncover one major divergence, however, between 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 Committee on the NEA, headed past John Brademas and Leonard Garment, concluded 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 agency, and the November 1996 appellate court conclusion in the instance of the "NEA Four," make it unlikely that the Endowment will be able to ever honor that recommendation. NEA Chairman Alexander has non condemned the continued subsidies for indecent art nor explained how such grant requests managed to get through her "reorganization." Unfortunately, non a unmarried Senator or Representative has asked her to practice so.

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 it be by Nancy Hanks in the Nixon Assistants, Livingston Biddle in the Carter Administration, or Frank Hodsoll in the Reagan Administration, NEA administrators promise that reorganization volition be bring massive alter to the agency. All these efforts have failed. It was, in fact, nether 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 take had little consequence. In the words of Alice Goldfarb Marquis, "All Ms. Alexander has done is, to coin a phrase, re-adjust the deckchairs on the Titanic."⁵⁵ Indeed, Alexander has retained veteran NEA executive Ana Steele in a tiptop management position to this date. Steele approved the payment of over $250,000 to the "NEA Four" while serving as interim chairman in 1993.

The NEA claims to have changed, no doubtfulness in hopes of mollifying congressional critics. Nonetheless the NEA has continued to fund organizations that have subsidized materials offensive to ordinary citizens while attempting to recast its public epitome as a friend of children, families, and education. Information technology is a "2-rail" ploy, speaking of family values to the general public and privately of another calendar to the arts anteroom. For case, Chairman Alexander has dedicated NEA fellowships to private artists, prohibited by Congress afterward years of scandals. In her congressional testimony of March xiii, 1997, she alleged: "I enquire you again in the strongest terms to elevator the ban on back up to individual artists."⁵⁶

To send its signal to the avant garde arts constituency, the NEA continues to fund a handful of "cutting-edge" organizations in each grantmaking cycle. The NEA has even maintained its peer-review panel process used to review grants, by changing its name to "discipline review"; The Heritage Foundation cited this process in 1991 as ridden with corruption and conflicts of interest, and as a major factor in the Endowment's pick 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 Testify to the American Public that Congress Is Willing to Eliminate Wasteful Spending

President Clinton proposes to spend $1.vii trillion in his FY 1998 budget. Over the adjacent five years, the Administration seeks to increase federal spending by $249 billion.⁵⁸ Further, Clinton as well proposes to increase the NEA's funding to $119,240,000, a ascension of 20 pct.⁵⁹ These dramatic increases in spending come up in the historic period when the federal debt exceeded $5 trillion for the first 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 equally housing and medical care for the elderly-such boondoggles as the NEA should exist among the first programs to be eliminated. Representative Wally Herger (R-CA), citing a contempo NEA grant to his own 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 have a meridian priority in Congress."⁶⁰ Whenever American families have to cut make cuts in their spending, nonessential spending-such as entertainment expenses-are the first to go. If Congress cannot stand up and eliminate the $99.5 million FY 1997 appropriation for the NEA, how volition information technology be able to make the case for far more fundamental budget cuts?

Reason #ten: Funding the NEA Disturbs the U.S. Tradition of Express Government

In hindsight, turmoil over the NEA was predictable, due to the long tradition in the United 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 government to subsidize the arts in the United states of america. Although the Founding Fathers were cultured men who knew firsthand of various European systems for public arts patronage, they overwhelmingly rejected Pickney'southward proffer because of their belief in limited, ramble government. Accordingly, nowhere in its listing of powers enumerated and delegated to the federal authorities does the Constitution specify a power to subsidize the arts.

Moreover, every bit David Boaz of the Cato Found argues, federal arts subsidies pose the danger of federal command over expression: "Government funding of annihilation involves regime controlÉ. Equally we should not want an established church, and then we should non want established art."⁶¹ As Cowen notes, "When the government promotes its favored art, the most innovative creators find it more hard to rising to the top.... But the truthful costs of regime funding exercise not testify up on our tax bill. The NEA and other authorities arts agencies politicize art and jeopardize the principles of autonomous regime."⁶² The French authorities, for example, tried to suppress Impressionism through its control of the University.

The deep-seated American belief against public support of artists continues today. Public opinion polls, moreover, show that a bulk of Americans favor emptying of the NEA when the agency is mentioned by proper noun.⁶³ A June 1995 Wall Street Journal-Peter Hart poll showed 54 per centum of Americans favored eliminating the NEA entirely versus 38 percent in favor of maintaining it at any level of funding. An before Jan 19, 1995, Los Angeles Times poll found 69 per centum of the American people favored cut the NEA budget.⁶⁴ More recently, a poll performed by The Polling Company in March 1997 demonstrated that 57 pct of Americans favor the suggestion that "Congress should stop funding the NEA with federal taxpayer dollars and instead go out funding decisions with country authorities and private groups."

Decision

Afterwards more three decades, the National Endowment for the Arts has failed in its mission to raise cultural life in the United States. Despite numerous attempts to reinvent information technology, the NEA continues to promote the worst excesses of multiculturalism and political definiteness, subsidizing art that demeans the values of ordinary Americans. As the federal debt soars to over $5 trillion, it is fourth dimension to end the NEA as a wasteful, unjustified, unnecessary, and unpopular federal expenditure. Ending the NEA would exist good 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 plan actually called "Not for Republicans" in which a performance creative person ruminated on "Sex with Newt's Mom." The artistic manager was Tim Miller (of the "NEA Four"). Former Clinton adviser Paul Begala agreed that items in the published schedule were obscene.⁶⁵
• NEA grants announced in December 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 nigh picking upward homosexual prostitutes, and asked members of the audience to accident on his genitals in a 1995 production entitled "Naked Breath." The NEA besides awarded $25,000 to "Camera News, Inc.," also known as "Third Globe Newsreel," a New York distributor of Marxist revolutionary propaganda films.⁶⁶
• In June 1996, Representative Hoekstra raised questions well-nigh "The Watermelon Woman." The film was funded past a $31,500 NEA grant. It contained what one review described as the "hottest dyke sex activity scene ever recorded on celluloid." "I had loftier hopes that Jane Alexander would forestall farther outrages past the NEA, simply plain even she-nice lady that she is-lacks the power and the volition to put an terminate to the NEA'southward obsession with handing out the taxpayers' money to self-proclaimed `artists' whose mentality is just so 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-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 Lord's day Maine-Telegram, reported on March iii, 1996, that William L. Pope, a Professor at Bates Higher, received $20,000 grant in the final round of NEA grants to individual performance artists. He intended to use the money for at least two projects. In 1, he would chain himself to an ATM machine in New York Urban center wearing just his underwear. In the other, he "plans to walk the streets of New York wearing a half dozen-foot-long white tube like a codpiece. He's rigged it upwardly and so he can put an egg in ane end, and information technology will roll out the faux, white penis." The Maine-Telegram noted that the NEA individual fellowship program "will leave with a bang, at least with this grant."
• "Sex Is," a pornographic video displaying the NEA credit, is still in distribution.
• Bob Flanagan'south "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 "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 Center for the Performing Arts and the Museum of Modernistic Art in New York City. Both institutions have been NEA grant recipients, and Lincoln Center principal Nathan Leventhal is ane of President Clinton'southward nominees for the National Quango on the Arts. His nomination is pending 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 actually increased in the year after the museum booked Athey.)
• Joel-Peter Witkin, a four-time recipient of NEA individual fellowships whose photo of severed heads and chopped up bodies were displayed by Senator Helms on the Senate floor two years agone as prove of the moral corruption of the NEA (Helms discussed 1 featuring a man's caput being used as 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 4," brought her new "performance piece" to an NEA-funded venue in Boston.
• Holly Hughes, some other of the "NEA Iv" (and recipient of a 1994 individual fellowship), brought her human activity to an NEA-funded institution in suburban Virginia.
• New York City'southward New Museum, an NEA-funded operation, hosted a retrospective of the work of Andres Serrano, which once more included an exhibit of "Piss Christ."
• New York's Museum of Modern Art, funded by the NEA, hosted an NEA-funded exhibit of Bruce Nauman'south piece of work, also displayed at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum, which included neon signs reading "South- and Die" and "F- and Die."
• The NEA literature program subsidized the author of a book entitled The Gay 100, which claims that such historical figures every bit Saint Augustine were homosexuals.

Endnotes

¹ Laurence Jarvik is an Offshoot Scholar at The Heritage Foundation, Editor of The National Endowments: A Critical Symposium (2nd Thoughts Books, 1995), and writer of PBS: Backside the Screen (Prima, 1997).

ⁱⁱ Alvin Toffler, The Culture Consumers: A Report of Art and Abundance 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 acquirement, given the average ticket cost of $125 and a seating capacity of 3,877.

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

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

⁶ Giving United states of america 1996 (New York: AAFRC Trust For Philanthropy, 1996).

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

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ David Sawers, "Should the Taxpayer Support the Arts?" Current Controversies No. vii, Institute for Economic Diplomacy, London, 1993, p. 22

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

¹¹ Derrick Max, "Staff Briefing 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 Democratic Muse (New York: Basic Books, 1984); every bit cited in "Cultural Agencies," Cato Handbook for Congress: 105th Congress (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 1997).

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

¹⁴ Heritage Tabulations from 1993 IRS Public Use File.

¹⁵ Jane Alexander, Testimony to the House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, March 13, 1997.

^xvi 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 viii, 1996.

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

^xix Ibid., p. 56.

²⁰ Tyler Cowen, typhoon ms. for Chapter 6, "Market Liberalization vs. Government Reaction" in Enterprise and the Arts, forthcoming from Harvard University Printing, pp. 22-31.

²¹ Ibid.

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

²³ Reuven Brenner, "Culture By Committee," The Wall Street Periodical, Feb 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. one-v.

²⁶ James K. Glassman, "No Money for the Arts," The Washington Post, April 1, 1997, p. A17.

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

²⁸ William Craig Rice, The NewsHour, debate moderated past Elizabeth Farnsworth, March 10, 1997.

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

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

³¹ Toffler, The Culture Consumers, p. 200.

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

³³ Affirming stance of Judge James R. Browning, U.South. Ninth Excursion Court of Appeals, filed November 5, 1996, in Karen Finley et al., five. National Endowment for the Arts.

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

³⁵ Jonathan Yardley, "Fine art and the Pocketbook of the Beholder," The Washington Post, March 17, 1997, p. D2.

³⁶ Julia Duin, "NEA Funds `Criminal 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 Affairs, American Family unit Clan, Testimony before the Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, March 5, 1997.

³⁸ Ibid.

³⁹ Representative Pete Hoekstra, alphabetic character to NEA Chairman Jane Alexander, Nov 16, 1996.

⁴⁰ Ibid.

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

⁴² Come across Pankratz, Multiculturalism and Public Arts Policy.

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

⁴⁴ Ibid.

⁴⁵ January Breslauer, "The NEA's Real Offense: Agency 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. one (Leap 1996), p. 44.

⁴⁹ Ibid., p. 46

^fifty 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 Ascension and Fall of Public Arts Funding (New York: Basic Books, 1995).

⁵³ Max, "Staff Conference 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 to writer, Feb vii, 1997.

⁵⁶ Jane Alexander, Testimony before the Subcommittee on Interior and Related Agencies, U.S. Business firm of Representatives, March xiii, 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's Time to Costless the Arts," Family unit Research Council Insight, January 1995, p. 1.

⁵⁸ "The Era of Large Government is Dorsum: Talking Points on President Clinton's Fiscal Year 1998 Upkeep," Heritage Foundation Talking Points No. 17, February 24, 1997, p. 1.

⁵⁹ Appendix to the Budget of the United states of america, p. 1080.

⁶⁰ Judith Miller, "Federal Arts Agency 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 Twenty-four hour period, Vol. LXI, No. 17 (June xv, 1995).

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

⁶³ Pro-NEA pollsters tend to enquire 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 as usual' with its selections," The Washington Times, December 19, 1996.

⁶⁷ Julia Duin, "Black lesbian picture show probable 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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