Arts Supporters Expect Delay on Endowment Funding Bill

Congressional arts supporters and officials of the National Endowment for the Arts are considering a one-year delay--until sometime in 1991--in legislation scheduled for action early next year to extend the life of the agency for three to five more years.

The tactical decision to try to put off what is officially called reauthorization of the arts endowment emerged as a consensus late last week after meetings between NEA officials and Rep. Pat Williams (D-Mont.), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee’s postsecondary education subcommittee.

The subcommittee is scheduled to originate the NEA extension bill. Williams has scheduled a preliminary hearing on some reauthorization issues for Nov. 15.

But Williams and John E. Frohnmayer, the NEA’s new chairman, concluded that it may be politically impossible, in an election year, to produce an NEA extension bill that did not include permanent subject matter controls amounting to regulation of government-funded arts projects.

The delaying tactic would require bipartisan support in the House and Senate to place the NEA renewal issue on the so-called “suspense calendar” in Congress, meaning that the arts endowment would continue to operate under existing legislation pending renewal in 1991. The NEA is scheduled to expire next year--its 25th anniversary.

It was not certain whether congressional conservatives would go along with the delaying tactic. The decision to explore a one-year delay was reached, Frohnmayer and Williams said in separate interviews here, because a bruising censorship controversy that enveloped the NEA between April and last month have left the arts endowment weakened and politically vulnerable.

In a speech in Los Angeles two weeks ago, in fact, Williams surprised board members of the American Council for the Arts, a leading advocacy group, with a prediction that a reauthorization bill next year could not resist a conservative move to amend it with content controls limiting the subject matter federally-supported art may include.

Williams reiterated his doubts in an interview here. Frohnmayer outlined possible plans to seek the delay to members of the National Council on the Arts, the NEA’s advisory board.

“It seems to me that one chore in front of us is to try to remove, as best we can, this consideration (of the reauthorization) from election politics, which is different from (just) politics, “ Williams said. “The closer we are to campaign time, the more difficult it becomes to bring rationality to this discussion.

“If the NEA is reauthorized in the tumult of a political campaign, then my judgment would be that the resulting language would be at least as strict as the current language,” he said, alluding to provisions in the NEA’s 1990 appropriation bill that ban funding of obscene artworks that do not also meet high standards of artistic excellence.

Meanwhile over the weekend, National Council on the Arts members were told that House Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.) has named the first four members of a 12-person commission that will make a new study of the operations of the arts endowment and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The review, scheduled to take six months, is intended to recommend changes in procedures to prevent controversial grants from dragging either of the two agencies into protracted political warfare.

Foley named New York University president and former Rep. John Brademas, one of the authors of the original NEA establishing legislation in 1965; Kitty Carlisle Hall, former television personality and chairman of the New York State Council on the Arts; Joan Harris, director of cultural affairs for the city of Chicago, and David Connor, former chairman of the Illinois Arts Council.

Four other members of the 12-person commission will be named by Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell (D-Maine) and four by President Bush. The White House said its nominees will be identified later this week.

Disclosure of the pursuit of delaying tactics came as members of the national council, clearly shaken by the magnitude and intensity of the summer of controversy over the NEA complained that the advisory group’s role in setting national arts policy has undergone severe erosion in recent years.

“I’m really concerned about what’s happened to our beloved country,” said Roy M. Goodman, a Republican member of the New York State Senate who was President Bush’s first appointee to the arts council. “Despite the longest uninterrupted economic expansion (in American history), we see a noticeable constriction on interest in expending our cultural horizons.” Goodman warned that the climate could “potentially accelerate decline of the state of the arts in America,” risking creation of a national “culture gap.”