If Arts Groups Don’t Hang Tough, the NEA Can Hang It Up

Arts organizations that look to the National Endowment for the Arts for financial support have been yanked, largely against their wills, into the maelstrom surrounding the beleaguered agency.

Though the issue of permanent restrictions on the NEA is still being hotly debated in Washington, Congress is now requiring groups receiving endowment funds to sign pledges that they won’t use the money to produce or present “obscene” works. Exactly what constitutes “obscene” has yet to be defined.

So what’s an arts group to do? Refuse an NEA grant, as some individuals and organizations have, to protest the anti-”obscenity” pledge and to take a stand against further congressionally mandated content controls?

Or take the money, knowing that if you don’t accept it, there are hundreds of other applicants who would happily jump in and sign anything to get the financial support that so many need so desperately?

Besides, as some arts advocates point out, refusing the money just plays into the hands of those who want to abolish the NEA entirely and who’d be able to argue that the arts groups didn’t really need the money to begin with.

Officials for the Irvine-based Pacific Symphony recently voiced no qualms about signing the pledge before accepting a $45,000 NEA grant. The group has a deficit of several hundred thousand dollars and as executive director Louis G. Spisto put it quite bluntly: “We need the support. Our organization is not at the state in its development where it can afford to turn down a $45,000 grant.”

The Orange County Philharmonic Society, which recently received its first NEA grant, also found itself caught between the NEA and a hard place.

Last week, after learning that the NEA had approved a grant of $3,500 to the society, board members felt compelled to vote on whether to accept the money--a decision that apparently had less to do with the money itself, a relative drop in the bucket of the society’s $2.4 million annual budget, than with the issue of whether to take a formal stance in the fracas. (The vote was 14-6 to take the grant).

“Should we take a stance philosophically on a political issue?,” executive director Erich A. Vollmer asked this week. “As a nonprofit organization, we serve a very broad constituency. . . . We have 3,500 members. If we come out and say, ‘The Philharmonic Society believes this, this and this,’ 1,000 of our members might very well say, ‘To hell with that. I’m a member of the Philharmonic Society and that’s not what I believe.’ ”

Those are all legitimate arguments. What’s tough to stomach, though, are the further rationalizations such as Spisto’s “Our art form is not under fire” and Vollmer’s “This (anti-obscenity clause) doesn’t apply to us.”

That betrays a head-in-the-sand viewpoint that even Vollmer recognizes.

“Obviously the obscenity clause in NEA (pledge) could be the first step toward (wider censorship) and obviously that’s what’s bothering a lot of people,” Vollmer said.

Martin Niemoeller’s oft-repeated quote immediately comes to mind: “In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up.”

The NEA itself has neither applauded nor condemned the grass-roots protest, said Virginia Falck, the NEA’s public affairs specialist. Those who make it through the NEA’s application process “are very deserving of their grants. It’s unfortunate they feel they have to turn it down,” Falck said. “But the NEA hasn’t taken a position, which would amount to telling people what to do. I think it’s a good decision not to say anything.”

Could the whole issue be avoided by relying exclusively on the private sector for arts support, as Orange County Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-Lomita), among others, would like?

Not really. Most arts groups can’t raise enough from private contributions to meet expenses. Does that mean they don’t deserve to exist? Think of the Joffrey Ballet’s financial troubles.

Beyond that, corporations and other private donors increasingly are attaching their own strings to “philanthropic” donations.

Take Lexus, the upscale car manufacturer that recently announced it will not renew the $60,000 grant it gave the Philharmonic Society, largely because the company no longer can display one of its cars outside the Orange County Performing Arts Center during Society-sponsored concerts.

The trend in the ‘90s is for corporations to get “more bang for the buck,” as Vollmer put it. It’s not so far-fetched to envision arts presentations brimming with the same kind of commercial plugs that now litter movies, sports activities, rock concerts and virtually every other leisure-time pursuit.

The private sector’s vision of the arts seems increasingly to be that they’re just another marketing tool. And that’s why we need an unfettered national endowment. When President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the NEA into existence in 1965, he envisioned it as part of an effort “to make fresher the winds of art in our land.

“Art is a nation’s most precious heritage,” Johnson said, “for it is in our works of art that we reveal to ourselves, and to others, the inner vision which guides us as a nation. And where there is no vision, the people perish.”

The idea was not that government support should replace grants from private individuals or corporations, but that a federal program of arts support could give recognition and financial aid to a broader spectrum of artists than those who might find favor amid the ever-changing whims of the private sector.

As arts groups struggle to decide whether to pull their heads out of the sand and take a stand in the escalating battle over the NEA’s continued ability to award money based on merit, not content, they should remember the words of Benjamin Franklin:

“We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”