By Patrick A. Trueman, AFA Director of Governmental Affairs
March 1995 – A powerful lobbying campaign to save the federal tax-funded National Endowment for the Arts is underway here in Washington, D.C.
The liberal media across America are driving the effort led by the ultraliberal New York Times, which seems consumed with the issue. It is devoting an excessive amount of ink and paper, but little convincing rhetoric, in a salvation effort for the agency.
One Times lead editorial recently, titled “Don’t Ax Federal Support for Art,” claimed that the NEA, a Great Society program which has grown 17-fold since 1965, has been a “brilliant though sometimes controversial success.”
That puts an interesting gloss on such NEA-funded works as the pornography of Robert Mapplethorp and the numerous homoerotic film festivals which the NEA found worthy of generous donations of your hard-earned tax dollars.
To eliminate the NEA now, the Times said in its editorial, would distort the Republican mandate of November’s election – as if any Republican Member of Congress was seeking the Times’ help in interpreting the mandate.
Those who have another understanding of the public mood were dismissed with this ad hominem attack: “(t)he zealous and small-minded are always willing to attack art and artists.”
To complain of pornographic, irreligious or homoerotic tax-funded “art” reduces one to a small-minded zealot? On the contrary, in this context a small-minded zealot is one who supports the NEA despite its abuses of the public trust, a pervasive rather than occasional problem for the Endowment.
Examples abound
The latest example is the Bruce Nauman exhibit recently on display at the Hirshhorn Museum which is part of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. NEA defenders, such as the small-minded zealots at the New York Times, should try to justify the “S--t in a Hat” work from the Nauman exhibit which was partially funded by the NEA. The work consisted of a video loop projected on a movie screen showing a woman mime who pretended to defecate in an imaginary hat, then put her hat on her head and then on her face.
Another work in the exhibit, titled “One Hundred Live and Die,” consisted of 50 pairs of three-word sentences, such as “F--k and die;” “P--s and die;” S--t and die.”
Still another work, formed with lighted colored neon tubing, depicts the outline of two men, including their genitalia, although substantially exaggerated in size. They shake hands and as they do each gets an erection. The action was repeated several times a minute.
A related work also constructed with neon tubing, depicted a man with an overactive and exaggerated genitalia hung on a gallows.
More NEA supporters
The New York Times is but one of the nation’s major publications flacking for the NEA and slamming those who would dare suggest the agency is out of bounds.
On the same day as the Times editorial, The Los Angeles Times published a piece by its art critic, Christopher Knight, with the intriguing and likely prophetic title “A Day in the Death of the NEA.” Knight sees nothing wrong with the NEA, and makes the claim that “without exception, every artist whose work has been assaulted by congressional conservatives has been either not white, not male, not heterosexual or some combination thereof.”
Is someone keeping score? It may interest Knight (but few others) that Nauman is a white, male heterosexual.
But the notion that NEA opposition is about such things as sexual orientation or color of artists and not about the art itself is absurd. Did those complaining of such NEA-funded art as Andres Serrano’s “P--s Christ,” a photograph of a crucifix immersed in the artist’s urine, or Ron Athey’s slicing the head of another man and then sending the man’s blood on towels reeling over the heads of the audience, object because the artists were not white, not male, or not homosexual (were they?). NEA defenders must do better than Knight, or the NEA is finished.
That is part of the NEA’s problem – it lacks defenders who can articulate a reasonable rationale for its existence while at the same time justifying to the taxpayers the need to fund pornographic, irreligious, or homoerotic art.
NEA chief Jane Alexander has been particularly inept in this regard during her tenure. Alexander inherited an agency held in low esteem and kept it there. She had to accomplish more than business as usual to save it. She did not. Before her confirmation she foreswore grants for obscenity and promised a continuing dialogue with the NEA’s main Congressional critics, most notably Senator Jesse Helms. Unanimous Senate confirmation was her reward.
Then, more of the same at the NEA. The Athey event gave her an opportunity to provide a break with the past – to show that the NEA had changed. If art is a reflection of culture, then condemnation would have been expected from the country’s arts czar.
The Athey performance was condemned across the political perspective even by a member of an underground homosexual group called the Knights of Leather, who attended the event in Minneapolis. But Alexander flippantly countered critics of the performance with “not all art is for everybody….” Nor are federal tax dollars!
It is possible that the NEA could survive, but if so it will be in spite of rather than because of Alexander.
The agency has key friends in high Republican places like Sen. Nancy Kassenbaum and Rep. Ralph Regula. Kassebaum is the chairman of the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee, and she recently held a hearing on the fate of the NEA with only one witness – Jane Alexander.
Regula, chairs the Interior Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, through which the reauthorization of NEA’s funding must first pass. A spokesperson for him said recently that the chairman has no intention of lessening his long-time support of funding the agency. Kassnbaum, Regula and numerous other NEA supporters in Congress will do what they can to save the NEA.
However the Chairman of the full Appropriations Committee, Rep. Bob Livingston, will likely be more influential than any other member of Congress on the fate of the NEA. Livingston was promoted over two more senior Appropriations Committee Republicans to the position of Chairman by House Speaker Newt Gingrich because of his staunch conservative credentials. He is unlikely to squish now on what is becoming, for conservatives, the bellwether cost cutting issue of the 104th Congress – the elimination of the NEA. Chairman Livingston, it should be noted, has voted in the past to eliminate the NEA.
The U.S. Senate is more problematic because of Sen. Kassenbaum and others, but if the NEA does not make it out of the House Appropriations Committee, it is doubtful the Senate could resurrect it.
The NEA must be eliminated, not just downsized. This was made crystal-clear at the hearing on NEA before Sen. Kassebaum’s commmittee recently. There, Jane Alexander, in an urgent plea to save her agency, said one of NEA’s most important functions is to place an “imprimatur of excellence” upon artists and art organizations. Art in America is defecation and urine. It is sacrilege and pornography. It is because the NEA says it is.
Members of Congress need to hear your views on whether the NEA should be abolished. Addresses for Senators and Congressmen are found pages 24-28 in this issue (March 1995) of AFA Journal. 
