Review Panel Members Resign Over NEA Flap : Arts funds: Protest appears to signal reopening of intensification of dissatisfaction over new legislation.

The National Endowment for the Arts was hit by defections of grant review panel members Tuesday in a new protest over legislation that bars NEA support of work that violates “general standards of decency” or defies traditional American values.

In two related developments, nine of the 11 outgoing members of an NEA panel that evaluated $1.3 million in 1990 grants to small literary publishing and distribution organizations quit, and at least one incoming member also resigned. As many as two other incoming members were reliably reported to be considering resignation, as well.

The outgoing panel completed its 1990 grant recommendations several months ago. Resignations of all but two if its members were characterized by Jennifer Moyer, a Mt. Kisco, N.Y., poet and arts administrator and one of the evaluators, as largely symbolic.

But the publicly announced defection of at least one of the members of the 1991 panel--which is scheduled to meet in two weeks to evaluate grants that will be made under the new NEA law that includes the so-called decency language--had immediate ramifications for grants not yet been awarded.

While only one panel member--Maryland literary book distributor Helaine Harris--confirmed her resignation Tuesday morning, it was learned that as many as two other 1991 panel members had decided to quit but have not yet informed the NEA of their decisions. Harris, who was also among the 1990 panelists resigning, said she had written separately to all 10 other members of the 1991 panel and urged a mass resignation.

“I feel that I can be a judge of artistic merit,” Harris said in her resignation letter to NEA Chairman John E. Frohnmayer, “but I don’t feel that I should pass judgment on decency. I refuse to be a part of this self-censorship process.”

In a statement Tuesday afternoon, Frohnmayer appealed for restraint by panel members. “This kind of premature reaction is unfortunate,” he said of the mass resignation. “The endowment is now engaged in an examination of the language to determine how it can be implemented in good faith . . . and without impeding artistic creativity. We are certain that reasonable people can arrive at the answer to this question.”

Earlier, Frohnmayer said he would not require artists getting NEA grants this year to sign a statement agreeing to comply with the decency language. A requirement by Frohnmayer that grantees acknowledge obscenity restrictions in last year’s NEA law touched off nationwide protests in the arts community.

Even though the resignations from the 1990 panel were perceived as largely symbolic, the number of panel members who quit to protest the decency language outstripped the total number of NEA panelists--two, according to an endowment spokesman--who resigned during the entire 1990 grant year to protest earlier anti-obscenity restrictions by Congress.

The new resignations appeared to signal a reopening--and perhaps intensification--of dissatisfaction within the arts community over new NEA legislation enacted by Congress last month. When it was passed, the new bill was characterized by backers as free of restrictions on the content of NEA-funded art. As wording of the bill has become broadly disseminated, critics have charged it may actually be more restrictive than the legislation it replaced.

In her letter to Frohnmayer, Harris accused the NEA chairman of allowing grant recommendations made by panels to “fall by the wayside” when political controversy threatened. Harris specifically cited Frohnmayer’s decision last summer to reject fellowship grants to performance artists Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, John Fleck and Tim Miller. The NEA’s advisory National Council on the Arts recommended new grants for Finley and Hughes two weeks ago. The NEA said there was no timetable for Frohnmayer’s decision on those grants, but that he was not expected to announce his ruling until at least mid-December.