Costa Mesa’s Plan to Restrict Arts Funding Scorned : Grants: Performing Arts Center president calls the city’s proposal ‘pre-censorship.’

The president of the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Thursday sharply criticized a Costa Mesa City Council proposal to attach broad content restrictions to city arts grants.

“I would not be in favor of any language that would constitute pre-censorship, and this language constitutes pre-censorship,” Thomas R. Kendrick said in response to proposed funding restrictions. The Center does not receive any government funds.

The council decided Monday to recommend to the city attorney language proposed by city resident John Feeney that arts-grant recipients promise not to “visually nor verbally, deliberately denigrate anyone’s race, religion, color, national origin, ancestry, physical handicap, marital status, sex or age.”

“The Center is flatly opposed to any form of religious, racial or sexual discrimination, which is what this language appears to be dealing with,” Kendrick said.

But, he added, “the use of the key word ‘denigrate’ opens a Pandora’s box, because that’s a matter of interpretation. One of the fundamental purposes of art is to examine issues in a provocative and stimulating way, which may be achieved through illustrating conflicting opinions in order to stimulate thoughtful analysis on the part of the audience. That is one of the key roles of art.”

While the Center was built and is operated with private funds, Kendrick said, “that doesn’t mean we’re not opposed to censorship.”

The language proposed by the city, he said, could conceivably have been used to block the Center’s presentation of the musical “Cabaret,” which is set in Nazi Germany. Characters in the play make “overtly anti-Semitic remarks,” but the play as a whole is “against discrimination in the deepest sense,” Kendrick said.

Louis G. Spisto, director of the Pacific Symphony (which will receive $4,000 from the city this year), declined to comment specifically on proposed restrictions until they are finalized. But he did question the city’s acquiescence to Feeney’s one-man crusade.

“It’s unfortunate that they’d be making such a stand based on one person’s demands,” said Spisto, who added that he hoped the city isn’t giving in to the “NEA hysteria.” Spisto’s concerns have been echoed by Kendrick and David Emmes, producing artistic director at South Coast Repertory.

Feeney and SCR have both been residents of the self-proclaimed “City of the Arts” for more than 20 years, but their paths hadn’t crossed until last month.

That’s when Feeney--who admits he’s never been to an SCR production--got wind of the Tony Award-winning theater company’s distribution of a flyer supporting the embattled National Endowment for the Arts.

“I got a copy of the flyer, and they give a full-fledged, unconditional endorsement to the NEA,” Feeney said this week. “In doing so, they gave an endorsement to things like submerging an image of Jesus Christ in vats of urine. It’s religious bigotry.”

Feeney’s reference is to a now-infamous photograph by Andres Serrano, “Piss Christ,” which helped set off a controversy over the content of a handful of NEA-funded works that some consider obscene or sacrilegious. The very future of the agency, which has come under persistent congressional attack, is now in doubt.

In mid-June, Feeney’s initial complaint about SCR prompted the council to delay distribution of $175,000 in arts grants. Mayor Peter F. Buffa wanted the extra time to verify that SCR had not used its grant to produce the flyer.

The funds, including $30,000 to SCR, were released Monday, but at the same time the council said it will now require all arts groups receiving city grants to provide strict accounting showing that none of the money is used for political activities, and that new limits will be placed on the types of activities recipients may present or produce.

Buffa said Monday that the city attorney, who will determine the language for the new limits, would be given a copy of Feeney’s letter as a guide. City Atty. Thomas Kathe has said that it is too soon to tell how closely Feeney’s proposed language would be followed, but he added that the new limits “will probably focus on what (grant recipients) can do rather than what they can’t do.”

After Monday’s meeting, Buffa added that a clause forbidding use of city funds to produce or present obscene artworks might also be included in the new limits, which must be approved by the council.

Feeney, who declined a request for a profile interview, did say he is a salesman who has lived in Costa Mesa for about 25 years. He has been involved in city politics for about seven years, he said.

He is not satisfied by SCR’s claim that it did not use city funds to produce and distribute the flyer. “That’s like the old three-shell game. . . . This is not about accounting procedures,” Feeney said. “They shouldn’t be giving money to people involved in politics.”