Debate Continues Over NEA Grants

In her July 11 commentary, Karen Finley does an admirable job of supporting the very position she sets out to dispute. In her own words, Finley feels that it is her responsibility to “record history and make my audience more sensitive to our country’s problems”; in other words, she is a political advocate for the groups that she feels are not getting a fair shake. That is a perfectly fine profession, but it is not art, nor is it something that one can legitimately apply public funds to, since it is a violation of individual liberty for people to be forced to support something to which they are morally opposed.

With the exception of the most bland art, it is nearly impossible to obtain approval from all of those in the tax base that supplies the NEA with its funds. It should be apparent, therefore, that the NEA should be disbanded, and let the market bring great art into being of its own free will, and not have art being degraded by its basis in the coercion of the many by the few who fancy themselves to be “artists.”

KENNETH GREEN

Los Angeles