THE ARTS & POLITICS : NEWS ANALYSIS : Divining the Shifting Sands at the NEA : Once a bully pulpit, the council overseeing the National Endowment for the Arts exerted little leadership in the agency’s struggle to survive.

Just after 9 a.m. Friday, Washington time, in a drab meeting room notorious for acoustics that are marginal and air conditioning that is worse, National Endowment for the Arts Chairman John E. Frohnmayer will gavel to order the 109th meeting of what he likes to call “the greatest deliberative body on arts policy in the world.”

Every three months since the NEA was founded in 1965, the 26--or thereabouts--members of the National Council on the Arts have gathered to play the role of advisers to the federal government’s most visible arts enterprise. At one time or another, the council has been serenaded by African-American fishermen trying to preserve a unique North Carolina sea chantey genre and confronted by a mob of angry AIDS protesters screaming, “We’re here! We’re queer! Get used to it!”

And in between these diversions, council members--who receive $135 in pay and $131 in expenses for each day they spend in Washington--have voted to recommend approval of 92,066 grants and reject 265,319. In the process, the council has voted to spend more than $2.49 billion. No grant can be given or rejected by the NEA until the council issues its recommendation.

The council is probably no more or less obscure than the dozens of federal advisory committees associated with agencies from the National Endowment for the Humanities to the Food and Drug Administration and the National Science Foundation. But even though it does not fully marshal its potential influence, the arts council is designed to be one of the most potentially powerful forces in United States arts and culture.

This situation has become more critical within the last two weeks in the aftermath of unprecedented action in a Senate committee to reject a nomination by President Bush for the council governing the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee voted down the nomination of New York University professor Carol Iannone to the humanities board on grounds her qualifications were profoundly lackluster. The action may signal new sensitivity in Congress to the strong role in policy advice that both the humanities and arts councils are supposed to play--but now don’t. Counting council seats currently occupied by members whose terms have technically lapsed, there are six vacancies on the arts council.

There is no record of any National Council on the Arts nominee ever being turned down. However, the Iannone affair briefly focused concern on Louise McClure, 63, who was confirmed by the Senate to the arts panel just weeks ago. McClure, observers familiar with the Senate process have noted within the last week, has credentials that are, comparatively, far thinner than Iannone’s.

Between 1936 and 1950, McClure gave private piano and voice lessons in a small town in Idaho. For 11 years, she was on an advisory board to the Boise Philharmonic. She received a bachelor’s degree in music in 1950 from a small college. She was a church choir director in Payette, Idaho, in the 1950s and 1960s. It is not the resume of a nationally prominent figure in the arts--in any context. Iannone, by contrast, held a doctorate, had taught at four colleges and universities and had at least modest scholarly journal publication credits.

But McClure is married to retired Republican Idaho Sen. James McClure and, because of sensitivities in the Senate to the feelings of colleagues and former colleagues, was assured of confirmation from the moment she was named by Bush.

For the last two years, in particular, the council has often appeared to look on helplessly as the NEA struggled to survive political assaults from conservative religious groups and politicians. Those disputes were fueled by stubborn controversies over the subject matter of NEA-supported projects. Most observers agree that the council did not exert strong leadership.

At times, the council appears to falter under the weight of paper. Wendy Luers, a New York City arts organization trustee, journalist and arts advocate, recalled recently that when she joined the council in 1988, she was overwhelmed by the workload and even measured the pile of documents she had to read before one of her first meetings. It was four feet high.

Luers said that as a result, the arts council’s deliberations on crucial issues is often secondary--and second rate. “I don’t think it’s terribly high,” she said of the quality of the debate. “I don’t think the present press of (grant review) business allows for a level of deliberative discourse in which we can take (up) a thorny issue of (freedom of) expression . . . or the role of large institutions versus the avant-garde. That discourse (shouldn’t be) about whether someone’s fanny is in a photograph.”

Like the humanities endowment, the NEA was established during the Great Society years of President Lyndon Johnson. In those days, the council included actors Helen Hayes, Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston, authors John Steinbeck and Ralph Ellison, dancer/choreographer Agnes de Mille, conductor Leonard Bernstein and violinist Isaac Stern. It became a bully pulpit for the arts, and the agency it advised had the close attention of three Presidents--Johnson, Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter. Their White House staffs included informal presidential arts advisers. The situation gave the NEA and the council a vital role in shaping the nation’s cultural landscape.

Then 12 years ago, all of that changed. Ronald Reagan was elected President and, despite being a former actor, Reagan first tried to strike the NEA from the federal budget. Reagan called in Heston to chair a commission to study the agency, expecting a recommendation to eliminate it. But Heston instead produced an emphatic recommendation to save the endowment.

In many respects, however, the damage had been done. The Reagan Administration backed off from the proposal to abolish the NEA, but Budget Director David Stockman proposed a 50% cut. While Congress did not go along, the NEA’s actual appropriation that year--fiscal 1982--declined for the first time in the agency’s history, to $143 million. For the rest of the Reagan years, the figure remained essentially flat, creating a situation in which the NEA suffered huge losses to inflation, devastating the purchasing power of its grants. Frohnmayer testified last year that the arts endowment would need more than $300 million a year just to return to the same program strength it had a decade ago. (The current year NEA budget is $175 million).

No one in the White House staffs of Reagan or President Bush has acted as an arts advocate. And the National Council, which once was truly star-studded, now includes just two internationally acclaimed, full-time working artists--painter Helen Frankenthaler and poet Donald Hall. Frankenthaler’s term expired last year and she continues to serve only because Bush has not yet appointed a replacement.

The council also includes choreographer Arthur Mitchell, founder of the Dance Theatre of Harlem. But Mitchell, 62, is today more of an arts administrator and fund-raiser than creative artist. It also includes jazz musician and composer David Baker, but Baker is also a college music professor.

Frohnmayer takes sharp issue with the contention that only two council members are legitimately classified as working artists. He totals 16 by including anyone who ever created art professionally, along with two museum directors and Mel Harris, president of the television group at Paramount Pictures Corp. However, Harris has the worst attendance record on the council and has not attended a meeting since February, 1990. (Paramount sources said that Harris had cardiac bypass surgery 18 months ago that impaired his ability to travel for a while and that turmoil at Paramount in the last few months has preoccupied him.)

Maintaining attendance throughout meetings has been a chronic problem in the last two years or so. Repeatedly, Frohnmayer and individual council members have admonished one another not to leave before the conclusion of business at the meetings--but the supplications have had limited effect. Council meetings usually last two days, but by the end of the second day, the panel has often lost its quorum.

While a quorum is not legally necessary for the council to vote on grants, the issue has created difficulties--starting in May of 1990 when the council voted on controversial grant rejections to four performance artists that later became the subject of ongoing litigation. In the lawsuit by the so-called “NEA 4,” one of the issues in dispute is over the fact that by the time all of the grants had been voted down, less than half the council members were even in the room.

There were such attendance problems even in the council’s salad days. Many of the stars named to the body seldom appeared. Some never showed up. The situation often made the council’s process chaotic. Today’s council, close observers say, is more stable than in the early days. But it is far less exciting, bombastic and galvanizing, too. From 1965 even into the 1980s, old hands recall, council meetings had an artsy flavor.

Singer and actor Theodore Bikel, who served on the council from 1978 to 1982, for instance, recalls that when he didn’t understand a grant in the NEA’s design program, he would seek advice on how to vote from the architect I. M. Pei. And when Pei needed help with dance, Bikel said, he could lean across the table to Jerome Robbins. Bikel himself, he recalled, sometimes compared notes on music grants with the pianist Van Cliburn.

“It is a very sad state of affairs,” Bikel said, “to have patrons packing the council in greater numbers. They should be on the council, but to have mostly private sector or management people is not good for the arts. The smell of greasepaint in my nostrils is something that no non-actor can know.”

Livingston Biddle, who held the NEA chairman’s job under President Jimmy Carter, recalled a synergy that developed between the arts endowment and Joan Mondale, wife of Vice President Walter Mondale. Joan Mondale became Carter’s de facto arts adviser and, Biddle recalled, elevated arts issues to a high level of White House prominence.

In the Bush Administration, noted Biddle and other observers, there not only is no Joan Mondale counterpart, but also Frohnmayer himself is not close to Bush and, worse still, has been involved in a long-running conflict with White House conservatives led by Chief of Staff John H. Sununu. The NEA chairman is an outsider, at best, leaving arts issues with little clout.

“The fact that the Reagan years passed without a committed leader for the arts within the President’s immediate group of advisers and the fact that there does not seem (to be such a person) with President Bush is certainly in part responsible for the fact that (the arts issue) doesn’t have No. 1 priority,” Biddle said.

Whoever happens to be NEA chairman--Frohnmayer is the agency’s fifth--ultimately decides whether to actually give an artist, an orchestra, an opera company or a novelist grant money. However, the chairman is prohibited by law from taking any action until the council has officially advised him. Moreover, in a little-noticed change in the NEA’s enabling legislation passed last fall, Frohnmayer is also barred from overriding a grant veto by the council. Recommendations to award grants are only advisory to Frohnmayer, who can still turn them down if he wishes.

Yet in its deliberations since last August, when grant-review portions of national council meetings were opened to the public for the first time, no council member has ever voted to disagree with the recommendation of NEA evaluation panels to approve or reject a single grant. Unanimously--usually with either no or only perfunctory discussion--the council has accepted every grant recommendation brought to it.

The NEA was forced to open the grant review portions of council meetings as a result of litigation filed by The Times, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Times.

“I am very anxious to give the council more time to be a deliberative body,” Frohnmayer said. And as to the council’s muteness on the issues over which it has the greatest power: “It’s a matter of getting comfortable with the public forum. I don’t have any evidence that anybody’s particularly held back, but my sense is that, after a while, people (will) just forget that the press and the public is there and speak their minds.”

Much of the council’s time is spent either in pro forma reviews of changes in the program guidelines for the NEA’s various artistic divisions or reviewing grant applications. Because the council lacks both the power to make enforceable policy recommendations for the agency and--apparently--the collective will to act in a strong advocacy role, most of its discussions have a warmed over, anti-climactic flavor.

In May, for instance, when the council reviewed decisions by the legislatures of more than a dozen states to emasculate the budgets of their own arts councils--a trend that has substantially diminished the financial influence of the NEA--council members engaged in a high level of hand-wringing, but little else. “The underlying (question) is, ‘What is this doing to the society?’ It is exceptionally short-sighted of state legislatures,” Frohnmayer told the council. “The arts (should be seen) as a way to help keep society together.”

But though the states’ budget crisis was discussed for more than half an hour, in the end, council members produced no insights on how to cope with--or even confront--the problem and failed even to pass a resolution urging action by Frohnmayer and the NEA staff. Later in the meeting, Roger Mandle, deputy director of the National Gallery of Art and one of the council’s emerging, perceptive voices, told his colleagues: “I worry about the council continuing to be a chowder and marching society.”

When Biddle was chairman, the National Council on the Arts established a system of subcommittees--on policy, budget and similar issues. But the practice fell out of use after President Carter left office. Last year, a special commission set up by Congress to investigate the NEA in the wake of its political troubles of 1989 and 1990 recommended a return to a committee system.

But the reform has been stalled, even though Frohnmayer has established two minor subcommittees. Frohnmayer said he hopes to introduce a committee structure and the council will experiment later this week with informal subcommittees to review some grants in individual programs.

If the NEA was a private foundation, its board would rank second among the nation’s 25 largest philanthropic organizations in terms of the representation of women on its board--42%--and fifth in its inclusion of people of color--six of the 24 people eligible to attend Friday’s session. The council’s average age: 54. No member is younger than 43 or older than 69. Overwhelmingly, they are drawn from the East and West coasts, with other parts of the country comparatively underrepresented.

The minority group members include three black men, a Latina, a Latino and an Asian-American woman. The NEA’s enabling legislation says the council should consist of members with “established records of distinguished service or achieved eminence in the arts,” mixing nationally prominent artists, patrons, museum professionals and civic leaders. Yet a third of its members are in the patron category and just two are full-time museum officials. There is no representative on the council of any arts-related labor organization, a situation that has precipitated objections from the AFL-CIO.

And despite two years of struggle against often-homophobically motivated political assault in Congress, there is no member of the National Council on the Arts who is openly gay. Yet while the council is composed in toto of people appointed by either Reagan or Bush, it is not entirely politically monolithic. Of council members whose affiliations are indicated in documents on file with the Senate committee that confirmed them, 13 are Republicans, but five are Democrats.

Even though the Bush White House has shown little inclination toward arts issues, it has quietly become evident that Bush appointments to the council have begun a process that may alter the council’s role. Three recent Bush appointees--Peter Hero, director of the Community Foundation of Santa Clara County in San Jose; Pittsburgh ceramist-arts educator Bill Strickland, and Mandle--have joined an ineffectively small group of council members capable of articulate, strong advocacy on a variety of issues.

They join five Reagan appointees--Luers, Mitchell, New York State Sen. Roy Goodman, Brooklyn Academy of Music director Harvey Lichtenstein and former Joffrey Ballet dancer and administrator Sally Brayley Bliss--in forming a still untested nucleus for change in the council’s role.

Strickland, who emerged after just one meeting as one of the most articulate council members, said its performance “has been OK up to this point, but I think a great deal more could be done. I think there (should be) more opportunities for the council and the chairman to call together cultural, corporate and education leaders to develop mechanisms for us to work more closely together.”

Frohnmayer declined to rate the council’s performance but it is clear that its track record as a forum for crucial arts issues has, to some extent, disappointed him. To help improve the quality of debate, Frohnmayer said, the NEA has retained consultants to help devise ways to make the council more effective. The consultants will start observing the council’s deliberations Friday and Saturday.

Like the council members themselves, Frohnmayer--who as chairman is a voting member--said he was concerned that the minutiae of reviewing grant applications bogs the council down. “The collection of fine minds and exemplary talents and great experience that the council represents ought to be spent thinking about how the climate for the arts (can be improved),” he said, adding that he hoped to develop more issue-oriented white papers for council review as a way to guide debate.

“What the national council should do is provide leadership in educating the public and Congress and making sure (the integrity of the grant-review) process is upheld,” said Charlotte Murphy, executive director of the National Assn. of Artists Organizations and a prominent spokeswoman for grass roots and avant garde-organizations. “They should not be censors and they should not rubber-stamp politically motivated grant denials.

“As a group, they do not represent the breadth of artistic quality in America. They don’t have a significant number of working artists or people of color and, given the overly homophobic (flavor) of the past two years, it would be good if they had someone who was ‘out’ on the council.

“Until the council really represents the best in American art and arts professionals dominate, they won’t be able to significantly help the endowment through what continues to be a rocky period.”