COMMENTARY : The NEA Hearing: Haven’t We Heard This Song Before? : The arts: Proponents of the arts endowment have been using the same script for 25 years. Perhaps that means the doctrine is closely held by relatively few.

The congressional subcommittee hearing on the fate of the National Endowment for the Arts, which was held Monday morning at the J. Paul Getty Museum, was a revealingly paradoxical affair. The three-hour public event began the formal process by which the endowment may (or may not) be authorized by Congress to continue its activities for another five years. And its most fascinating, absorbing feature emerged from the stunningly dull, droning repetitiousness of the remarks made in the agency’s defense.

I don’t mean that the panelists convened for the hearing were unenlightened or ill-informed. To the contrary. Ably chaired by Rep. Pat Williams (D-Mont.), and featuring the invited testimony of six visual artists, one writer and one artistic director of a regional theater, the proceedings frequently were the site of articulate, clever and insightful comments.

Occasionally, those comments were even flavored by details unique to the endowment’s present crisis: More than once, the now-notorious efforts to replace the NEA’s pluralist processes of artistic decision-making with a politically conservative, religiously fundamentalist agenda were forthrightly acknowledged. For the most part, however, the hearing was a cavalcade of deja vu .

The National Endowment for the Arts came into being a quarter-century ago. Yet, nearly every question asked by the chairman of the congressional subcommittee, every explanation offered in reply by the invited respondents, every word of testimony given in prepared remarks, has been repeated, in one form or another, hundreds, even thousands of times since then. In a quiet, decidedly low-key way, the familiarity of this litany was shocking. Platitude was piled atop platitude in a breathtakingly high wall of received wisdom concerning the necessity of support for the arts, and for the endowment’s role within American cultural life.

We heard about the value of art as a vessel for the human spirit, and about the need for risk-taking in aesthetic development. We heard about the NEA’s decisive role as an economic lever, prying private dollars out of corporate pockets to match the modest seed-money provided by federal grants. We heard about the value of visual literacy in an increasingly media-dominated world, and about the central significance of the arts to a serious education for all American students.

We heard about multicultural diversity, the venerable jury system of peer-panel review, the benefits of international cultural exchange. We heard about the oil-and-water incompatibility of creativity and conformity, about the fundamental right of free expression and about the status associated with the NEA’s metaphoric seal-of-approval. We heard it all--again.

Much of the play-it-again-Sam recitation made perfect sense, just as it has for decades. And some of it was sheer bunkum--condescending nonsense wearing a high-minded veneer. (The claim that drives me craziest is the endowment’s supposedly crucial role as an agent for fostering creativity--as if art, including art of the highest achievement, would simply not get made if the NEA vanished overnight.) What interests me in all this is the clear and present need, in 1990, to repeat the standard litany yet again. With minor alterations in vernacular decor, Monday’s hearing could have taken place in 1985. Or in 1975. Or 1965. What does it mean that a full generation has been endlessly repeating the very same song, over and over again?

Perhaps it means that the doctrine is closely held by relatively few. Consider:

If American society at large really believed in the value of art as a central component of a serious education, would we continue to ax the arts first whenever fiscal austerity became a pressing issue? Would we expect a tiny federal agency such as the NEA to assume a Gargantuan task barely attempted by the public schools?

If American society at large really believed the First Amendment is inviolable, would we stand quietly by while Congress passed so-called “compromise legislation” that restricts artistic content acceptable for NEA grants? (Odd that free speech is now guaranteed except when it’s undertaken publicly, with public funds.) Would we be content to sigh with relief that “it could have been worse”?

If American society at large really believed in art as a spiritual vessel or economic lever, would we have a grotesquely under-funded NEA whose per capita expenditure averages a paltry 64 cents? Whose share of the annual federal budget is a feeble 1/200th of 1%? Whose total outlay over a quarter-century would barely buy a single Trident submarine?

Typically, the National Endowment for the Arts gets held up as a shining symbol of an American conviction for the deep and lasting value of the arts. In fact, the paradoxical revelation of Monday’s hearing was that we’ve sent the NEA aloft as a luminous sign of our culture’s dis belief in art’s primacy.

In its bid for reauthorization, the National Endowment for the Arts is “running on its record”--and a remarkable record of accomplishment it is. I hope the strategy works, for the agency deserves not merely reauthorization; it actually merits significant expansion. Yet, it isn’t 1965 anymore, or even 1985. Monday’s repetition of the standard doctrine is troubling, because it speaks of a certain exhaustion.