Politics Is No Work of Art : America Is Getting Far Off-Track in Its Arts Funding

Over the past year, a small but vocal coalition of religious fundamentalists and conservative ideologues has subjected the National Endowment for the Arts to a campaign of vilification so intense that it has put the program’s very existence in doubt.

According to these critics, the question at the root of this controversy involves obscenity, blasphemy and the obligations they believe artists should assume when they accept public subsidies. In fact, the central question is rather different and, in important respects, more fundamental. What is at issue here is who will decide what sort of publicly supported art the American people will be allowed to see.

Under the NEA’s current system, that decision is made jointly by panels of artists, scholars and arts administrators--who allocate the endowment’s grants--and, most important, by the people, who now are free to decide for themselves which art they will view and which they will ignore. Under the system proposed by the NEA’s critics, that decision will be made by the politicians in Congress.

Those uncertain of what such a system might entail need look no further than last week’s disquieting decision by NEA Chairman John E. Frohnmayer to bar grants to four of the 18 performance artists selected by the endowment’s solo-performance fellowship panel. All four of the artists--John Fleck of Los Angeles, Tim Miller of Santa Monica and Holly Hughes and Karen Finley of New York--have produced bodies of work that may not be to everyone’s taste but that inarguably can be classified as art. However, because their art engages issues of politics, feminism and sexual orientation in a frank fashion, Finley, Hughes and Fleck have been attacked by some of the NEA’s critics. Miller appears to have been singled out simply because of a statement he made assailing conservative Jesse Helms, the endowment’s leading antagonist in the Senate.

Parallels with the unsavory practices of the not-too-distant past were inevitable, even if a touch melodramatic. As Finley said Friday, “I am being punished because I am a morally concerned artist. We as a nation are now in an era of blacklisting.”

Frohnmayer and his aides see things rather differently. They point to the fact that congressional action is imminent on a variety of bills that would renew the endowment’s funding only if it accepts statutory limits on the content of the art it funds. With congressional elections looming in the fall, even the NEA’s friends seem fearful of casting a vote that might be characterized as approving obscenity or irreligion. The Bush Administration, which initially supported a one-year renewal of the NEA’s appropriation without conditions, has decided the fight is not worth the ill-will it would engender on the Republican right.

In such an atmosphere, Frohnmayer has decided to do what he thinks necessary to salvage what he can. As one NEA official told The Times, “I would rather have to face the wrath of the arts community over turning down these four fellowships than to deal with the White House and Congress if we had gone ahead and made them.” In other words, the decision on the four grants had nothing to do with art and everything to do with bare-knuckle politics.

Over the past 20 years, the NEA--operating with no strictures save those imposed by its budget and the demands of artistic excellence--has made the benefits of elite culture available in communities across this country. It has afforded to many Americans the challenging, spiritually ennobling experience of an elevated leisure formerly reserved for the wealthy and the privileged. It has been a powerful engine of cultural democracy.

But it has been so precisely because it adhered to a set of principles Frohnmayer himself embraced when he assumed his post. “All points of view expressed in excellent art should be encouraged and supported,” he said. “Grants should not be proscribed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.”

It is fair to ask whether an endowment that surrenders such sentiments to squalid compromise really is worth saving after all.