Heightened Visibility for the Endowment Controversy : Arts: NEA chairman clashes with fundamentalist on TV; coalition runs newspaper ads appealing for endowment support.

The chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts clashed on a television show Thursday with a fundamentalist antagonist, while two key congressmen disagreed at a hearing on restrictions even more drastic than anti-obscenity provisions that govern NEA grants this year.

And at the same time, a newly formed group of businessmen and influential clergymen calling itself the Emergency Committee for the Arts ran full-page advertisements in two East Coast newspapers appealing for support for the beleaguered arts endowment.

“Misrepresentation and misunderstanding threaten its integrity, perhaps even its survival,” said the ad, which ran in the New York Times and Washington Post and was signed by 31 individuals. The group was organized by New York financier David Rockefeller and Winton Blount, an Alabama businessman who served as postmaster general in the Nixon Administration.

Signatories ranged from television journalist Walter Cronkite and Notre Dame University President Theodore Hesburgh to Michael Ovitz, chairman of the Creative Artists Agency, and Los Angeles lawyer-developer and art collector Frederick Nicholas.

Blount said the group decided to act in part to correct what he characterized as false and damaging misimpressions about the endowment that have resulted from the arts agency’s censorship and obscenity crisis that began in April of 1989.

“I believe there is a very legitimate place for public support for the arts,” Blount said in a telephone interview. “It’s just not right to let remain in the public mind ideas about the endowment that are absolutely false.”

The confrontation between NEA Chairman John E. Frohnmayer and Donald Wildmon, executive director of the American Family Assn., based in Tupelo., Miss., came during a lunch break in a hearing on the NEA’s 1990 appropriations bill before a House subcommittee chaired by Rep. Sidney Yates (D-Ill.). Frohnmayer had appeared as a witness all morning.

The Frohnmayer-Wildmon exchange became so heated that Yates even delayed resumption of the NEA budget hearing for 20 minutes until the broadcast concluded. In the interlude, Yates and about 40 people--including hearing witnesses and spectators--clustered around a television monitor in the Rayburn House Office Building.

At one point, Frohnmayer cut Wildmon off after an exchange in which the two quarreled over whether the American Family Assn. had falsely characterized a series of NEA grants, with Frohnmayer declaring angrily, “My question for you is: What has your association done for the family lately?”

Frohnmayer and Wildmon were broadcasting live from a Cable News Network studio here, responding to questions posed by Los Angeles-based interviewer Sonya Friedman. Wildmon has been one of the key conservative antagonists of NEA. Last week, his organization distributed a mailing to congressional offices, Christian broadcast outlets and churches accusing the NEA of funding pornography. The mailing turned out to base its contention on severely cropped photographs showing only small sections of the disputed works.

About 20 minutes after the broadcast ended, when Frohnmayer returned to the hearing--which Yates had resumed with other witnesses--his reappearance stopped the proceedings again with Yates and the spectators delivering a loud ovation. “Good job, John,” said Yates. “You did well in responding and beating off Rev. Wildmon.”

But earlier, Yates and Rep. Ralph Regula (R-Ohio), the ranking Republican on the House NEA appropriation subcommittee and a congressman usually identified as an arts supporter, sharply disagreed on the need for controls on the subject matter of arts projects the NEA can support. The disagreement underscored the seriousness of the year-old controversy over the propriety of works the NEA has funded, which have included several exhibits involving allegedly obscene or sacrilegious images.

Last year, in a compromise with congressional conservatives led by Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), Congress attached a provision to the NEA’s 1990 funding bill that bars the endowment from supporting art with content that could be considered obscene unless the work meets high standards for artistic excellence.

The degree to which Congress is willing to go in renewing the NEA’s legislative mandate in a process called reauthorization or in the arts agency’s 1991 budget bill is widely perceived as likely to determine whether the arts endowment continues to exist as it is now known.

The Bush Administration has proposed $175 million for the agency next year, an increase of $3.75 million from its 1990 level. But the money total still leaves the NEA short of the more than $225 it would need to have the same spending power it did 10 years ago, and Frohnmayer has said the NEA could require $300 million to maintain existing programs effectively.

But Regula underscored the dilemma of many members of Congress who have found it difficult to strongly support the NEA with conservative groups organizing mail campaigns that have kept the ratio of negative mail on the arts agency running at between 20- and 40-to-1 against the NEA. In a cordial yet intense interchange with Yates, Regula took issue with Frohnmayer’s key defense of the NEA--that the endowment has provoked controversy fewer than two dozen times in its nearly 25 years of existence, but has funded 85,000 grants in the process.

“I grew up on a farm and we had an orchard,” Regula said to Yates. “My father always cautioned us not to get a bad peach in the bushel.

“If we have that bad peach (in the form of a small number of objectionable NEA grants) in the center of that bushel, it’s going to have a debilitating effect.”

To Yates’ obvious distress, Regula told Frohnmayer he believes the situation in which the NEA finds itself may require lasting restrictions at least as strong as the controversial 1990 wording, which already has provoked controversy over whether it may serve as a chilling factor in artistic expression. “I want to continue that language--perhaps even make it a little bit stronger,” Regula told Yates.