Cheap Way to Make Hay at Expense of Culture : Arts: When comment or criticism comes before a grant can be made, it is not censure but censorship. Perhaps Jesse Helms really did win.

I am writing these comments out of deep concern for the future of the National Endowment for the Arts.

As a past member of that body’s National Council on the Arts, I have more than a passing interest in the continuation of a process that has served the arts community--and through it the nation--admirably well in the comparatively short years of its existence. As an artist, I have an even more abiding interest in the compact between the arts and government.

That compact, which has recently come under fire by some elements both in and out of Washington, constitutes perhaps the only tangible evidence that this nation values its cultural goods at least as highly as its material ones. However, its value is not merely symbolic; while being truly a measure of our nation’s self-esteem, it has also become an economic necessity for our artists and art institutions. Not that the financial help can be said to be much more than seed funding at best, yet it furnishes the stimulus for the private sector in its support.

The way the funding process worked until the recent crisis was eminently fair, equitable and devoid of political overtones. The decisions were made by the National Council on the Arts after applications had been sifted through by peer panels--private citizens with demonstrated expertise in their respective fields. The decisions were based on the sole criteria of artistic merit and excellence and, in the case of arts institutions, fiscal probity in past years. The question of content with respect to future work was not a factor; merely the track record of the past to determine whether an artist or an institution was deemed worthy of support. Congress and the executive branch were never involved in any assessment of artistic merit; indeed, they were--and are--precluded by the original legislation from being so involved.

What changed all that? Two controversial photographic works and some crusading ultra-conservatives who perceived a cheap way of making political hay in and out of the halls of Congress. The works in question are to some blasphemous, to others merely in questionable taste, to others shocking yet acceptable when taken in the context of the whole. Some serious damage has been inflicted on the artistic community and on the National Endowment for the Arts, whose entire decision-making mechanism is now in turmoil. While the initiative of Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.)--to deny funds if the works in question were deemed offensive to any segment of society--did not prevail, the compromise language adopted as a means to avert the onslaught of House and Senate reactionaries will, to my mind, have far-reaching and most onerous consequences. For the grant-making process that served the arts so well in the past can no longer remain in place. If the national endowment must assure itself--before funding anything-- that the grantees will remain within the boundaries of the permissible, then prospective grantees can no longer rely on track record alone--they must in the future submit either a whole work or at least a blueprint. How does one reconcile that with a process that, in the past, has given grants to poets to permit them to quit driving taxicabs so they could be free to create yet unwritten works in peace and in a conducive setting? Must poems now be quickly dashed off and set down on paper to satisfy a grant process? Must sculptures and paintings be created before the grant, must theaters submit all plays to be produced? Can a season no longer be funded that contains one or two slots named “to be announced”?

All this raises questions of prior restraint, an impermissible notion in our “free” society. Is it not precisely that freedom that we so proudly contrasted with government-funded art behind the Iron Curtain, all of which had to be submitted before any funding took place? Is it not ironic that when the Soviets and their satellites are doing away with many such measures, we seek to introduce them into our mechanisms of government funding?

I do not assert that the process is perfect and that no mistakes are possible. No process is. Nor do I mean to suggest that when mistakes are made they remain unacknowledged or accepted without comment and criticism. But such comment or criticism is proper only when it comes after the work has been created and viewed. At its most severe it is called censure. However, when it comes before the grant can be made, then it is not censure but censorship. And that is what the new rules under the seemingly mild “compromise language” threaten to put in place.

What of the argument that says “by all means, make your mistakes but not with the people’s money?” This contains both a fallacy and a double standard. The U.S. government funds a great many things in a great many fields without demanding--or expecting--a success rate of 100%. Research in medicine, physics, space and computer technology as well as research in pure sciences all receive heavy public funding.

Do we then assume that in all other publicly funded enterprises we acknowledge an expected failure rate, sometimes as high as 90%, but in the arts there can be none and, unless there is a 100% success, the funding becomes endangered? Is it perhaps that lawmakers fear to tread in those other fields because of their freely acknowledged lack of expertise but have shamelessly decided that in the arts anybody is an expert? Will colorblind congressmen render judgment on paintings, will tone-deaf senators turn music critics?

Of course not, they will say, the endowment will still make the decisions but we shall look closely at what they do, much more closely than we look at other fields, and woe betide them if they stray. We shall then punish them by withholding the exact amount of money given in objectionable grants.

I am convinced that the harm is already done. There is no doubt in my mind that, as a result of what has happened, all grant-making in the arts has fallen prey to a pall of timidity. Even if all the initiatives--from Helms on down to the pallid “compromise”--had failed, the result would still be that local, state and federal arts bodies, yes, even up to the National Council on the Arts, will now be looking over their shoulders in fear not of artistic but of political mistakes. That process in which, until now, grants were given without fear or favor has been compromised. And so, perhaps, Helms has won after all.