NEA Panel Seeks Consensus as Time Pressure Builds : Hearing: Members of the bipartisan Independent Commission hear testimony on agency reforms. The group’s report must be finished by early September if it is to influence legislation on NEA measures.

National Endowment for the Arts reforms--ranging from altering grant-review panels to assuring that the NEA chairman is exposed to “salvos” but not “potshots” from critics--were proposed Wednesday to a commission searching for a consensus to save the federal agency.

The proposals by a panel of arts policy experts are expected to be the final testimony before the Independent Commission prepares its report to Congress. The 12-member body has until approximately Sept. 7 to deliver the report, commission officials said, if its work is to have any role in the arts agency’s struggle to avoid legislative emasculation.

The endowment faces political difficulty in negotiating simultaneous legislative actions to extend its life for another three to five years and to appropriate money for its operations in fiscal 1991. Its legal franchise expires on Sept. 30.

Bills in the House and Senate to extend the NEA probably must be acted on before Sept. 7 or face being put off until 1991, officials said. Delay is likely to make Congress skittish about voting on the controversial arts issue so close to election day, they said, and Congress will face a traffic jam of other bills before recess at the end of the month.

Appropriation bills to keep an expired NEA alive pending congressional action to renew it also will face crucial committee and floor action.

Legally, the endowment can expire but not die; it can be sustained almost indefinitely by appropriation bills or what Congress calls “continuing resolutions” that maintain funding at current levels. A continuing resolution strategy for defusing the NEA controversy has come up for discussion repeatedly over the last several months.

Commission members, staff and the panel’s co-chairmen agreed that the bipartisan, ideologically diverse group may find it difficult to reach a consensus that will carry weight with the arts endowment’s supporters and detractors.

The co-chairmen, New York University president and former Democratic Rep. John Brademas and Republican Washington attorney Leonard Garment, said Wednesday they hope to present a solidified position in which the entire panel presents a single set of recommendations--with minimal public dissent.

Some commission observers said that they were concerned about disharmony between the co-chairmen, but Brademas and Garment said Wednesday they have developed a productive and cordial working relationship.

Brademas and Garment made their remarks in a brief conversation before the meeting began here, in which both men agreed that a report ripped by dissenting views or from which some commission members disassociated themselves would risk doing further political damage to the NEA. But, they said, a consensus document could become a political rallying point--especially if the report contains a practical set of realistic changes in NEA procedures.

John T. Agresto, president of St. John’s College in Santa Fe, N.M., and the commission’s most doctrinaire conservative, indicated that he has no plans to propose abolition or surgery radical enough to alter the NEA’s fundamental mission and appearance. In an interview before the meeting Wednesday, however, Agresto indicated he will work for major changes in endowment grant-approval procedures.

In testimony Wednesday:

* Stephen Weil, a Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden official prominent in arts-policy analysis, proposed that the arts endowment’s function be clarified to establish that NEA funding/sponsorship of an exhibit or an artwork does not amount to endorsement of it.

Weil also proposed alteration of NEA legislation to make the agency’s chairman unable to reject individual grants--leaving him or her the alternative of turning down or endorsing entire categories of grants. Having turned down an entire category, the chairman would be required to reconvene a panel of outside reviewers to screen the applications again. Questioned skeptically by several commission members, Weil insisted that the change would have prevented the controversies that have befallen NEA Chairman John E. Frohnmayer when he canceled or rejected at least five individual grants since he took office in October.

“Unless this is done, there will be no end to the sniping” at the NEA head, Weil said. Weil said the policy was intended to make it more difficult to fire “potshots” at Frohnmayer, but, he said, “my remark about potshots doesn’t mean the chairman ought not to be subject to (higher-caliber) salvos” of broader criticism of his stewardship.

Kevin Mulcahy, a Louisiana State University political science professor, urged major restructuring of the NEA that would do away with the endowment’s traditional organization scheme, in which the NEA’s divisions mirror the major segments of the arts. Instead of separate dance, visual arts, music and theater programs, Mulcahy proposed NEA divisions organized on the concept of supplying multimedia support for a small number of broad arts-related missions, including arts education, fellowships, public programs and the like.

Mulcahy also called for opening NEA grant-review panels to non-artists. The proposal has been bandied about in public debate over the arts agency since its inception in 1965.

“The decision-making responsibility of a grant panel is not the same as that of a jury at a show at an art gallery,” Mulcahy said. “Artistic excellence should be important, but not controlling. It’s like saying war is too important a public policy to leave to the generals. To say public culture should be decided on by artists is like saying Pentagon policy should be turned over to defense contractors.”