Art Funds and Censorship

Actor and writer Eric Bogosian (“When Politics Campaigns in the Arts, Creativity Ends,” Opinion, Aug. 6) made a forceful case for getting politics out of NEA grants. Alas, he did not go far enough and demand total separation of arts and state.

Where did Bogosian go wrong? NEA grants are justified, he wrote, because “we voted for people who voted for it.” By Bogosian’s logic, he then apparently thinks a $300- billion defense budget is justified because “we voted for people who voted for it.”

His greatest fallacy is to beg the question of which “art” and “artists” will get endowment money and which will be denied it. Bogosian scorns the idea that the “Average Joe,” taxed to pay for this, should have any voice in the matter; no, this should be left to experts, to the NEA’s “jury of peers.” Who decides who these “peers” are? Political appointees. So politics was helping support art that turned the American flag into a floor mat, homoerotic art or an image of Christ in a jar of urine.

Where are tax dollars being spent by NEA to support artists whose work criticizes the ruling left-liberal Establishment ideology that dominates the intellectual and artistic community?

Where is the variety, balance, diversity of views? When one young Chicago artist did a painting that poked fun at the city’s late liberal mayor, Harold Washington, Chicago government officials illegally confiscated his artwork from the gallery and destroyed it. No Eric Bogosian spoke up to criticize this Nazi-like act of censorship by liberals.

We can call the NEA’s cynical leftward political manipulation of the arts many things, but let’s not pretend that it is healthy for artistic creativity, or that it is freedom. NEA’s purse strings have become a leash by which artists are trained to be good little lackeys for the left. The only way to liberate our artists is to end all government involvement in funding or otherwise controlling the arts.

LOWELL PONTE

Carlsbad