NEA Flap Seen as Threat to Private Funding : Censorship: The Rockefeller Foundation claims that regulated art may taint the relationship between public and private supporters.

One of the nation’s most influential foundations has filed court papers arguing that political turmoil that led to anti-obscenity restrictions on the National Endowment for the Arts risks poisoning the atmosphere that has led to billions of dollars in private support for the arts in the last 25 years.

The filing of papers by the New York-based Rockefeller Foundation--a friend-of-the-court brief in a lawsuit against the NEA--was made public Thursday. The foundation contended that the NEA political crisis that led up to enactment of statutory wording regulating the content of federally funded art in effect compels private arts supporters to participate in the possibly illegal abridgement of artistic freedom of expression.

“Although the NEA budget may appear small,” the foundation contended, “because of the closely integrated structure of public and private support which drives the art world, NEA funding decisions and NEA policy exercises a most powerful influence--an influence far beyond the dollar amounts involved.”

The foundation noted that the NEA’s 1988 grants, which totaled $119 million, generated $1.36 billion in private funds through requirements that most NEA grants be matched by private sources at a minimum ratio of 3-to-1.

The court documents were filed in a lawsuit brought against the endowment by the New School for Social Research, a New York City university that is the institutional parent of the Otis/Parsons Art Institute in Los Angeles. The New School sued the NEA after it rejected a $45,000 NEA architecture grant because it refused to sign an NEA-mandated anti-obscenity certification.

“The foundation has always placed special emphasis on supporting meritorious art that is so creative and daring that it may prove too controversial for commercial purposes or for more traditional . . . support,” the foundation argued. “In many cases . . . NEA and foundation officials actually sit together and jointly review proposed projects.

“The certification process will inevitably have a substantial indirect impact on the foundation. Artists and organizations forced to certify their compliance with the NEA’s grant terms and conditions will steer clear of controversial topics in order to avoid conflict with the NEA. Institutional sponsors will steer away from artists who have done controversial work.”

The Rockefeller Foundation has assets worth a total of $2.5 billion and expects to give out a total of more than $90 million in grants this year. The foundation said it has budgeted $15 million this year for arts and humanities grants. Since the NEA was founded in 1965, Rockefeller said, it has spent about $73 million on arts projects--many in cooperation with the NEA.

The Rockefeller Foundation legal brief also disclosed that, as a result of negotiations with the NEA--initiated by the foundation--the federal arts agency had agreed to allow grant recipients who get money from both the NEA and Rockefeller to sign a modified version of the controversial certification that has so far led to grant rejections by at least 10 artists and arts groups and two separate lawsuits challenging the requirement on constitutional grounds.

Under the agreement between the endowment and the Rockefeller Foundation, artists and arts groups that expect to get money from both the foundation and the NEA will be able to add wording to an NEA document that critics have charged amounts to an anti-obscenity loyalty oath. Rockefeller-NEA grantees will be able to indicate they accept the NEA obscenity restrictions only if they turn out to be “lawful under the Constitution and the laws of the United States.”

In Washington, the arts endowment confirmed that an agreement in principle had been reached between the NEA and the foundation, but a spokeswoman said the pact was not yet final. Last week, the NEA released guidelines intended to clarify the obscenity certification, but the Rockefeller Foundation legal brief argued that the guidelines had actually further confused the situation.

“Over the past year, artists and arts organizations (that receive both NEA and private support) have faced a complicated and difficult situation in their dealings with the NEA,” the foundation said in a statement. “They’re being required to sign a certificate that puts them in the impossible position of guessing how some faceless federal bureaucrat at some unknown future point will judge the content of their work--often art they have yet to create.”

The Rockefeller Foundation brief represented the first time that the intimate relationship between the NEA and private arts funders--who supply the vast majority of financial support to the arts in the United States--had been brought into the NEA political and legal controversy. The possibility that private arts support could be compromised by objections to possibly illegal restrictions on the subject matter of art appeared to represent an entirely new--and potentially crucial--dimension to the controversy.

In its legal brief, the foundation noted that it is one of three sources of private support that provide the bulk of the money for an NEA-funded project called Awards in the Visual Arts, organized by the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, N.C. The program included among its 1988 winners Andres Serrano, whose photograph of a crucifix immersed in urine touched off the NEA crisis in April of last year.

A spokesman for the privately-operated art center said that, since the Awards in the Visual Arts program began 10 years ago, 27% of its support has come from the NEA, and 73% from private sources--principally by three foundations of which Rockefeller is one.

Rockefeller identified two other influential programs linking it and the NEA as OPERA America, which has awarded more than 300 grants to opera companies to develop new work since 1983.