States’ Arts Support Off $30 Million : Funding: The recession, political crisis at the NEA appear to be taking a toll. It is the first decline since at least 1979.

A nationwide crisis in public funding of the arts--caused jointly by the recession and fallout of the National Endowment for the Arts political crisis--has developed during the last few weeks, the NEA’s policy-making council was told here over the weekend.

A new survey of the financial situations of state arts councils distributed Saturday to members of the NEA’s National Council on the Arts showed that the agencies lost a combined total of $30 million last year--the first decline in arts support at the state level since at least 1979, an NEA official said.

“It has become clear in the last year that the arts are by no means immune” to devastating reductions in levels of support to which public arts agencies have been accustomed, said Ed Dickey, director of the NEA’s state arts agency program. “We’ve gone from a period of expansion to retrenchment” in state legislatures.

Roger Mandle, a National Council on the Arts member and deputy director of the National Gallery of Art, said that the public arts funding climate of early 1991 may prove that a trend toward massive financial contraction, of which many arts observers said they saw initial signs late last year, has intensified dramatically. The situation, Mandle said, makes it necessary to ask “whether the sniffles haven’t developed into a very serious virus.”

Randy McAusland, the NEA’s deputy chairman for programs, said: “When you take 10% to 12% (out of the grant budget across the board), you get to unhappy choices very quickly. It’s very difficult to satisfy everyone’s ambitions.”

Moreover, at a meeting where the national council voted to approve grants worth more than $26.8 million, it was told that cuts by Congress in the NEA’s grant budget have resulted in some programs eliminating all grant-making this year. Others are cutting down the number of grants and all remaining programs are instituting across-the-board cuts in the size of grants they do make.

After The Times last month detailed plans at the NEA to cut total numbers of grants in many of its key programs, the arts agency denied it intended to put that element of its overall financial plan--which the agency calls “reprogramming”--into effect. Over the weekend, however, wholesale cuts in numbers of grants were found in four programs.

In the NEA dance program, grants to organizations that present performances by touring companies dropped from 65 to 58. Grants for innovative projects by individual architects and design professionals dropped from 33 to 11. In theater, grants in one of the nation’s most prestigious playwright fellowship programs declined from 18 to 14, and two categories of the NEA’s literature program also showed cuts.

Discovery of the reductions in grant totals was made by reporters scrutinizing lists of proposed grants awaiting approval by the NEA council. The lists--which contained information previously kept secret by the NEA--were released in response to legal action by The Times, the Washington Post and the Philadelphia Inquirer. In the 2-day NEA meeting, all 941 grants awaiting action were approved by the National Council on the Arts by unanimous vote. The votes are not binding on NEA Chairman John E. Frohnmayer.

The grant situation has been exacerbated, according to officials of three arts endowment programs, by a trend toward fewer applications being filed in some categories. The decline, program directors said, is an apparent result of concern among artists about whether the NEA has been forced to step away from supporting controversial work. The trend may imply, said two of the directors, that some of the nation’s most talented artists have stopped seeking NEA assistance--at least temporarily.

The nationwide arts-funding crisis appeared to have its roots in two developments. Most important is the appearance of large state budget deficits across the country at the same time that the nation’s economy is in the grip of a worsening financial downturn. Several NEA officials speculated that state arts budgets--largely exempt from big cuts even in recession times during the 1980s--have been put into play now both by the severity of the economic situation and by morality and taste questions raised in state legislatures. Those controversies parallel complaints leveled at the NEA starting in 1989.

The NEA crisis began over an exhibition that included a photograph of a crucifix immersed in urine and grew to threaten abolition of the arts agency last summer. In a political armistice last fall, the agency came under new legislation that channels 35% of its budget to state arts councils--up from 20% before the controversy began.

But the new money to arts councils--nearly $13 million--is far less than cuts to budgets of the state agencies reported so far. Most arts financing experts have said that the new federal grants to the state councils will have almost no effect in remedying regional budget contractions. The updated state funding totals, distributed by the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, showed that support for state art councils dropped from $292.3 million to $262.2 million last year. A far larger decline appears likely in 1991, the organization said.

The California Arts Council appears better prepared to weather the budget storm than any other major state arts agency, however. The council absorbed just a 3.5% reduction last year and expects only a slight reduction this year in its $16 million budget, said the agency’s director, Robert Reid, although the agency’s purchasing power has been diminished significantly by inflation.

At least five states have learned that they may be targeted for huge funding reductions this year, the NEA council was told, including New York, Michigan, Virginia, Texas and Massachusetts. The threatened cuts--most of which are expected to be finally passed by state legislatures at nearly the amounts proposed--range from 40% for Texas to 75% for Virginia and perhaps Massachusetts, as well. Those reductions would be on top of large cuts absorbed by many states in 1990. For example, between 1989 and 1990, the New York arts agency funding was cut 22% and Michigan 46.8%, according to NASSA. Last year, the New York arts council got $46.4 million; Michigan, $6.5 million; Virginia, $4 million; Texas, $3.4 million, and Massachusetts, $12.6 million.

Michigan’s arts council, facing a new 55% reduction, may be forced to suspend its entire grant-making program, Dickey said. In New York, said Roy Goodman, a national council member who is also a New York state senator, a 56% cut in the budget of the New York State Council on the Arts would return the state agency to the spending power it had in 1970. Goodman, who opposed shifting the NEA budget toward greater allocations to the states last year, dismissed the effects of the new NEA states arts council money as “a pittance, basically.”

The NEA’s playwright fellowship program appeared to offer an example of other new problems, brought on by the mix of funding cuts and political turmoil within the arts endowment. Because the NEA is cutting nearly $13 million from its grant budget this year, said Ben Cameron, acting director of the endowment’s theater program, there was a 33% cut in playwright fellowship funds--from $300,000 last year to $200,000 for 1991.

The situation, Cameron said, was worsened by an apparent rebellion among the nation’s most promising dramatists upset by actions by both Congress and Frohnmayer, bringing allegations that the arts endowment has become far more willing than ever before to deny funding to politically controversial work. Last year, Cameron said, 242 playwrights applied for the fellowships, but this year only 203 did. He said that grant-reviewers found the quality of applications had dropped, implying that the nation’s best playwrights may have bypassed the NEA entirely. The 14 fellowships that will be awarded are to have an average value of $14,285 each.

In the NEA’s literature program, officials said that there were also major declines in the number and quality of applications as well as the number of grants and amount of grant money available. Assistance to small literary magazines dropped from 55 grants worth $472,678 last year to 37 grants worth $321,780 this year, said Joe David Bellamy, the literature program’s director. Bellamy said that, despite a major contraction in the financial health of the publishing industry--a situation, he said, that now makes it more difficult than ever for young, unknown fiction authors to be published--lingering effects of the NEA crisis reduced the number of grants from 36 last year to 29 this year, with a significant drop in the number of applications. Bellamy said that the application decline was clearly due to “some disgruntlement” with the NEA situation throughout the literature field nationwide.

“An obvious consideration,” said Anne Bourget, chairperson of the literature grant-review panel and program administrator for fellowships at the California Arts Council, “would be the current state of the endowment and trepidation of the field to involve itself with a funding agency that may be forced to act as a censorship-editorial board.”