National Endowment : Arts Agency: Living Up to Its Billing?

One day in April, 1965, two dozen of the nation’s best known arts experts gathered in the White House for the first meeting of the cultural cornerstone of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.

There were superstars in abundance: conductor Leonard Bernstein and violinist Isaac Stern, choreographer Agnes de Mille, actor Gregory Peck and actress Elizabeth Ashley.

This new National Council on the Arts was to organize a tenuous experiment: a federal agency to parcel out grant money to increase geographic dispersal of the arts, broaden their audiences and identify American art forms that should be singled out for preservation.

The name Congress settled on: the National Endowment for the Arts. The first-year budget: $2.5 million.

‘Wonderful, Extraordinary’

“It was wonderful, extraordinary,” De Mille recalled. “In the beginning, nobody thought of anything but the good of whatever art (medium) was being discussed.”

Today, those heady early times are distant history. As the $171.4-million-a-year endowment nears its 25th anniversary, it is an agency under siege--caught in a political and ideological controversy over censorship and standards of artistic taste.

The immediate controversy has obscured the endowment’s original mission and the debate within the arts community over how well it has performed. Arts groups say the endowment gets high marks for broadening access to the arts nationwide and fulfilling other parts of its mandate. But, at the same time, critics contend the endowment has largely failed to break the lock of the East Coast arts Establishment on the arts in America and has failed to move quickly enough to broaden the ethnic diversity in projects and institutions it supports.

Various Amendments

A House-Senate conference committee is about to consider various amendments to a 1990 NEA funding bill that would prohibit the endowment from making grants for offensive or indecent artworks, would blacklist two private arts agencies--barring them from grants for five years because they organized shows that included such work--and would transfer $400,000 within the endowment’s budget, possibly crippling its visual arts division.

The protest--which nearly all observers say is the worst in the NEA’s history--has been driven by conservatives led by Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and Alfonse M. D’Amato (R-N.Y.) in the Senate and Dick Armey (R-Tex.) and Dana Rohrabacher (R-Lomita) in the House.

The situation is not without irony. When the endowment was first being debated--at the same time Congress was considering creation of the sister National Endowment for the Humanities--the two agencies were perceived as creatures of liberals whose potential for censorship was to be resisted by the right at all costs.

“You must remember the innocent times we were living in,” recalled opera singer Beverly Sills, who served on the national council from 1970 to 1976. “We all never dreamed there would be any interference from the government in terms of what kind of art our tax dollars would support.”

In articulating his objections to the NEA in a speech to the Senate the day he offered an amendment that would ban endowment funding of indecent or offensive artworks, Helms conceded that “I have fundamental questions about why the federal government is involved in supporting artists the taxpayers have refused to support in the marketplace.”

Helms said that “what they (arts advocates and news media) seem to be saying is that we in Congress must choose between absolutely no federal presence in the arts or granting artists the absolute freedom to use tax dollars as they wish, regardless of how vulgar, blasphemous or despicable their works may be. If we indeed must make this choice, then the federal government should get out of the arts.”

Immediately at issue is endowment support of images by two controversial photographers: the late Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano.

But the endowment has also been without a permanent chairman for nearly a year after eight years in which, many observers say, the agency’s last head, Frank Hodsoll, presided over a caretaker administration in which the endowment’s spending power eroded and its political clout atrophied. Hodsoll, now executive associate director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, refused to be interviewed.

Senate hearings on the nomination of a new head, Oregon lawyer John E. Frohnmayer, are tentatively scheduled for the last week of this month. Late this year or early next year, Congress will consider legislation to extend the endowment’s life by five years.

In 1965, conservatives in Congress waged a vigorous campaign against forming a national arts endowment, saying it would lead to government control of the content of art. At their insistence, the endowment was precluded from setting content standards.

Undeterred, sponsors Sen. Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.) and Rep. John Brademas (D-Ind.) guided legislation establishing the controversial new agency.

“I hoped that we would stimulate quality in the arts,” recalled Brademas, now president of New York University. “I’d hoped that we would stimulate greater support for the arts from the private sector and state and local governments and stimulate access to the arts.”

Pell said that, in a larger sense, the endowment has played the role of making the arts more a part of the American mainstream. “When we started out, the arts were not a very proud or accepted endeavor,” he said. “What’s happened in these 25 years is that your son becomes a dancer or a piano player and you’re very proud of it. Thirty years ago, it was thought you were a little bit odd if you were an artist.”

Advisory Panels

As insurance against censorship, the national endowment’s bureaucracy was to be isolated from decision-making power by an elaborate network of advisory panels, acting as referee-consultants. Each would include artists prominent in its medium.

Even among people sympathetic to the endowment and its goals, however, there are critics. One is Kevin Mulcahy, professor of political science at Louisiana State University, who conducted a study published last year by the American Council on the Arts in which he reviewed more than 8,000 pages of testimony, including the entire legislative history of the endowment.

Mulcahy and other observers say that, despite the intentions in the endowment’s enabling legislation, the agency has had difficulty in breaking the lock on the arts held by New York City, in particular, and cities of the Northeast Corridor, in general. And Mulcahy said the endowment’s peer review panel system has often tended to operate as a network serving the interests of well-connected artists that is hard for others to penetrate.

Mulcahy said he also believes that the endowment’s present political quagmire was inevitable--the result of inherent uncertainty over the government’s proper role in the arts in American society.

Adversarial Nature

“Given the adversarial nature of art and the modern era of art,” he said, “it was bound to happen because of the degree to which many artists are in opposition to conventional norms. If you want to outrage the bourgeoisie, well, it worked.”

Even some of the endowment’s most ardent supporters, including Milton Rhodes, director of the American Council for the Arts, agree that the Northeast has dominated the endowment’s view of the arts and that it has fallen short in broadening ethnic representation.

And even among artists and arts experts, the endowment may be misperceived, Rhodes said. “Like any federal program, it has the appearance of bureaucracy,” he said. “But . . . they’re streamlined to the bone.”

To get the greatest effect from each dollar, the endowment, from the beginning, required its grants to be matched by private contributions. Grants to individual artists generally do not require matching funds. The endowment says today that it has given out $2.1 billion in grants, which on average have been matched by $5 for each $1 of federal money. Of a total of about 84,000 grants, the endowment says, fewer than two dozen have precipitated controversy.

But, from the start, said actor Charlton Heston, who served on the national council from 1966 to 1972, the endowment’s attempt to stay on neutral ground has been tempered by considerations of equity and fairness--standards that can easily be called political.

“I think a national endowment funded by taxpayers’ money has two responsibilities,” said Heston, a political conservative who served on an arts commission formed by President Ronald Reagan early in his first term when Reagan proposed--unsuccessfully--to cut the endowment’s budget by 50%.”

Preserve, Expand

Heston continued: “First, it has to preserve and expand the appreciation of the great works of the past, which obviously are more extensive than the great works of the present,” Heston said. “You’re pretty safe with Michelangelo, Mozart and Shakespeare, but you must also encourage new work. It’s very hard to do, especially given the political considerations that you have to split (the money) up according to states.

“And that inevitably is a political consideration--along with ethnic background and religious background.”

Because it is a small agency, the endowment has remained a largely invisible part of the backdrop of the federal government. The endowment actually gets less than the $193 million the Defense Department says it spends on military bands.

The arts endowment has remained prominent within the arts community but not much beyond it except in times of trouble, which have, generally, come along every five years, at the junctures at which Congress is required to authorize the endowment to continue.

These episodes have ranged from the serious to the absurd. The endowment has been criticized for making grants, for instance, to an artist who tape-recorded sounds beneath the Brooklyn Bridge and a writer who produced a poem whose entire text was “lighght.”

The best known and perhaps most serious of the controversies occurred in 1974 after the NEA gave a $5,000 fellowship to author Erica Jong on the strength of her poetry. In her application, Jong said she would use the money to finish a novel, “Fear of Flying.”

As a condition of the grant, she agreed to acknowledge endowment support in the book--which subsequently became a best-seller. She did so, one page before the table of contents, which included a chapter title containing an obscenity. A deluge of protest mail descended on congressional offices.

Through all of these controversies, attempts to change the endowment’s mandate and insert content controls have failed. At the most recent reauthorization in 1985, congressional supporters thwarted an attempt to prohibit funding for work which “in the experts’ view, would be patently offensive to the average person and lack serious literary or artistic merit.”

The endowment has benefited from some shrewd political leadership--especially when Nancy Hanks headed the agency under the Administration of Richard M. Nixon.

Livingston Biddle, the NEA’s chairman from 1977 to 1981, contended that “the endowment has succeeded beyond the dreams of its most sanguine supporters from the early days. But I’m disappointed that, in the last eight or nine years, there has not been that same sense of commitment. It has been a kind of period of hiatus and into that has crept the recent controversy. (The last decade or so) created a kind of vacuum.”

“I think that, overall, the record is good. It was really a novel thing for the federal government to take on when they created the endowment,” said Milton Cummings, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University and an expert on arts politics.

Cummings and other observers say measuring the endowment’s performance is inevitably subjective. Some results can be identified. But he and Anne Murphy, executive director of the American Arts Alliance, agreed that the most measurable result is in the increase in both size and geographic diversity of audiences for dance in the United States.

In 1965, Cummings said, only about 1 million people attended live performances of modern or classical dance--three fourths in New York City. A decade later, Cummings said, dance audiences had increased to 14 million a year--80% of whom were in areas other than New York.

“I think that you would have had this incredible flowering with the arts that has occurred in the last 25 years if you had not had the NEA, but I do think they made a difference that justifies the expenditures,” said Cummings. “I think the symbolism of our country caring enough about the arts to spend modest amounts of money (on them) is good.”

Murphy said the endowment’s influence on access to the arts has been its strongest contribution. But she said limits on budget and what she perceives as bureaucratic inertia of the last 10 years have slowed its progress. “It has had its hands tied behind its back in having a diminished set of resources to accomplish more goals,” she said.

“The endowment was not created to create great art. That’s not its job. Its job was to find the best and put it in front of the American people so they would have exposure to it and be part of the judgment about whether it should go on to the next generation.”

To Sills, the endowment’s greatest success “has been the encouragement of the American artist, not just the American opera singer, but the American artist. The money has enabled the American artist to present his talent, like it or not.”

“We managed what I consider some very sane decisions regarding the arts,” said actor and singer Theodore Bikel, who served on the national council from 1978 to 1982. “We gave support to people with some kind of track record, but we wanted to branch out into new and uncharted waters.

“Everybody is going to go the safe way now, even if Congress backs off from this horrendous notion of prior restraint. We assume a 90% failure rate in the sciences. But in the arts, as a society, we want only success.”

But some observers, although praising the NEA’s overall record, fault the endowment for being too quick to support established cultural institutions while ignoring small, unknown organizations. One is Gordon Davidson, artistic producing director of the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and a member of more than a dozen NEA review panels.

“A big setback is that the endowment has tended to function more comfortably with the major institutions--large museums, large orchestras, large theaters, like ours,” Davidson said. “They have found some ways to deal with smaller and emerging ones, but there has been a great difficulty responding to individual artists.”

Despite “a great deal of success,” Mulcahy said, if the NEA were a student of his, he would give it only a C.

“I don’t think the NEA has ever had much of a vision of what the American cultural condition should look like and what its role should be,” he said. “Budget is not the issue necessarily. The endowment has pretty much accepted, on a leadership level, that the goals of cultural institutions should be the goals of public culture.

“It serves the purposes of institutional survival; that isn’t necessarily the public’s interest. And the future is still a problem. We are becoming a multicultural society and that has tremendous consequences for public culture and tremendous opportunities. I don’t think the endowment has been very much in the forefront of providing leadership in some of these issues.”