NEA Support Is Eroding, Arts Panel Warned

The advisory board to the National Endowment for the Arts was warned here Friday that support for the NEA within the largest arts advocacy unit in Congress may have been dangerously eroded.

The situation prompted members of the National Council on the Arts and key arts support groups to observe--many for the first time publicly--that the situation poses potentially fatal new political problems for the beleaguered arts agency.

The warning was issued to the council by Julie Davis, the NEA’s general counsel, who said she drew her conclusions about increased political risk for the endowment from a briefing last week conducted by four top NEA officials for members of the bipartisan Congressional Arts Caucus.

The caucus, with about 250 members in the House and Senate, has traditionally been a crucial source of support for the NEA. But Davis said the withering political controversy that has beset the arts agency has apparently taken its toll even among the NEA’s most important congressional advocates.

There is, said Davis, “a handful who are still solidly behind us,” but, even in the arts caucus, she said, “I don’t think there is very strong, broad-based support.”

The assessment caused serious new concern among the arts council over whether the agency can survive a running battle over its legislative renewal in anything close to its present form. NEA Chairman John E. Frohnmayer acknowledged the uncertainty of the situation, adding a warning of his own that the situation “is in a tremendous state of flux right now” and that, in terms of reliable support for the NEA in Congress, “there is not a lot of solid ground up there.”

At the same time, however, it was learned that Frohnmayer has asked officials of half a dozen key arts support groups to advise him on changes in the NEA structure under which the endowment would limit itself to making grants of $30,000 or more.

Frohnmayer reportedly made the request in a private, unscheduled meeting here Thursday night. It was learned that he has asked individual arts advisers for their opinions on limiting NEA support to $100,000 or more.

It was not clear, however, whether Frohnmayer was seeking to build a consensus for a last-ditch defensive position from which to make the NEA’s last stand or if he had some other reason for seeking the arts groups’ advice. Frohnmayer was not available to reporters during the daytime council meeting Friday.

The alteration in grant policy would turn over to state and local arts agencies the authority for awarding perhaps more than 90% of the total number of grants given by the NEA. The agency made 3,900 separate grants last year and endowment officials said Friday that a survey several days ago had found that 87.5% of all NEA grants are for $50,000 or less--indicating that the total below $30,000 would be significantly greater.

The NEA’s total budget for 1990 is about $171 million. Grant officials emphasized that, while the number of such individual grants is high, larger arts organizations receive the majority of the total money awarded.

The request by Frohnmayer was apparently linked to a plea for the private arts-support groups to consider in principle the concept of transferring to state arts councils authority to make direct spending decisions over greatly expanded portions of the NEA budget.

The proposal on which Frohnmayer sought the advice was said by sources to be nearly identical to a plan under discussion by a small group of Republican congressmen. The plan has already led to outraged reactions among a number of key arts support organizations, which see it as an abandonment of individual artists.

Such artists, on the cutting edges of a variety of media, receive many of the NEA’s comparatively small grants. Yet they are widely perceived as the most risky grant recipients since their work often is the most directly provocative and politically risky material the NEA supports.

Arts advocates were outraged by the role played in Republican analysis of the National Assn. of State Arts Agencies’ proposal to shift more than half of the NEA’s money back to the states. The association represents the state art councils and for several years has pursued its own agenda of trying to increase the political and financial clout of the state agencies.

It was learned that council member Lloyd Richards, dean of the Yale Drama School, had written to officials of the state arts council group castigating them for breaking ranks with the arts community at what many art advocates consider the most dangerous moment for the NEA since it was founded 25 years ago.

Peter Zeisler, director of the Theatre Communications Group, who a day before accused the National Assn. of State Arts Agencies of a “double-cross,” released a letter to Jonathan Katz, the association’s executive director, accusing it of attempting to engineer a self-interested coup under circumstances that are “inexcusable.”

The pessimistic analysis of the NEA’s political support base in the House and Senate touched off a new round of intense discussion within the arts council, whose members have discussed the agency’s crisis regularly for the last year but taken few forceful political or policy positions to back up their concern.

Council member Jacob Neusner complained of “a hot, dry wind that is melting support that we thought was solid.” And Neusner, for the first time in a public NEA council meeting, gave voice to the possibility that the agency might not survive in its present form--a prospect that observers familiar with the situation have said privately has become a far more realistic possibility than arts advocates would like.

Neusner posed a series of questions predicated on the contention that “if, by next November, there is no endowment, which is a possibility.”

New York State Sen. Roy Goodman, a Bush Administration Republican who has established himself as one of the most passionate advocates of an unfettered NEA in the country, said he was increasingly concerned about “an atmosphere of panic and hysteria of the type that is now evident in the Congress.”

He called the political imbroglio that arose from objections by conservative politicians and organizations to a handful of controversial work funded by the endowment “an outrage similar to things that happened during the McCarthy era” and concluded, “make no mistake--this endowment is being smeared.”