The People, the Arts and the Message for the NEA

Christopher Knight calls the reallocation of an additional 15% of National Endowment for the Arts funding to the state arts councils (Oct. 29) a “foolish scheme” that “would make the arts Establishment more beholden to local interests.” He insists that the “NEA is important because it is national, not local.” But as Tip O’Neill, longtime Speaker of the House, is quoted as admonishing, “All politics are local.”

Knight views the 15% increase designated for rural areas and urban programs as a means of placating conservatives by shifting funds to the states where “local standards” would apply.

Similarly, reporter Allan Parachini has consistently explored the consequences--not the causes--of the controversy over censorship: restricted artists, self-censorship, threatened freedom of speech, “disarray in the arts community.”

On the contrary, the NEA is in trouble because it failed to develop a coherent public policy and planning mechanisms that thoughtfully laid out where it was headed and what it wanted to accomplish. As a consequence, power remained vested in individual discipline-based programs and panels, a stranglehold that inevitably promoted “fractures . . . in the art community,” according to the American Assembly report.

The NEA kept itself “aloof and standoffish,” as one congressional insider put it. In resolutely removing itself from the give and take of politics, it fell victim to its own insularity. Waiting in the wings and ready to pounce was a disaffected army of the disenfranchised who did not know how to break the codes possessed by the cognoscenti. We forgot that this was public money and that the people were entitled to understand the arts they were supporting.

In pursuing a definition of “excellence” that reflected a rarefied Eurocentric aesthetic, the endowment left vast numbers of Americans who did not live in the correct Zip codes alienated. The NEA had built a constituency that consisted of a fragment of the American people.

The Bipartisan Report to Congress on the NEA submitted by the Independent Commission emphasizes that the NEA “belongs not solely to those who receive its grants, but to all the people of the United States.” By analogy, the NEA has functioned as if its job were to serve the social workers, not the clients.

By promoting a limited view of culture and professionalism, the NEA also pushed artists and arts organizations into validating themselves and their work by escaping from their communities, not by remaining in them or relating to them. In effect it said, “We will fund you to tour the state, the nation in order for you to be recognized, but not to tour the church basements, recreational centers or homes for the aged in your own community.”

During the ‘70s, the NEA tried to correct growing opposition to its elitist posture with the phrase “access to the best” as the emblem for cultural betterment. However, it simply did not see that it was about to be hit broadside by an altered society discovering its diversity and individuality. Whether defined as women, gays, people of color, or the differently abled, a form of cultural democracy was emerging. “Access to the best” no longer can mean busing kids out of communities to cultural citadels, but instead it must mean adequately funding the organizations in the communities. Like politics, all arts are local. That an additional 15% of the NEA’s budget will ultimately be dispensed to the states for rural and urban programs is an acknowledgement of the need to decentralize decision-making and to raise the long-suppressed question: “Who do the arts serve?”

The importance of community has been imposed on a resistant NEA that still does not appear to have heard the message. Where is the national debate on public policy and the arts?

The arts Establishment to which the NEA had long been beholden for congressional support did manage to beat back the increase from 40% to 15%.

But both the NEA and the arts Establishment ignored the implications of decentralization reflected in the growth of the local arts agency movement--from three arts councils in 1947 to 3,000 today. Consequently, the NEA forfeited an opportunity to exert leadership on policy development and lost control of about $2.6 million out of an already meager budget of $174 million. Perhaps it needs to lose more before it gets the message.