COMMENTARY : Cloud of Politics Spreads Ominously Over Arts Grant Process

Should the United States establish a government agency to put the nation’s artists, museums, theaters, concert halls and other arts organizations at the political service of the White House?

Is the nation ready, in other words, to organize and support its very own Ministry of Culture?

Well, fasten your seat belts because here it comes--ready or not.

Two weeks ago, the National Council on the Arts took a giant step toward the creation of just such a politically controlled operation. Their action was simple: The council decided to flex its muscle as the nation’s final arbiter of artistic quality--an option it has had for about 27 years, but one it has exercised only rarely.

The issue involved the awarding of grants to applicants in the National Endowment for the Arts category of artist-run organizations. At its Jan. 31 meeting, the National Council, which oversees the NEA, voted not to accept two of 128 recommendations for funding made by the peer panel that had evaluated applications.

The proudly declared reason: insufficient artistic quality.

Turned down by the council was a $5,000 grant recommended for Highways, funds meant to underwrite a series of exhibitions in its Santa Monica gallery space. Also vetoed was a $25,000 exhibition grant recommended for New York’s Franklin Furnace.

Urging the council’s fearless leap onto the slippery slope was beleaguered NEA Chairman John E. Frohnmayer. In a statement issued to explain the grant denials, despite favorable recommendation from recognized experts in the field, Frohnmayer firmly declared: “In both cases, the council’s decision centered on its conclusion that the applications lacked artistic merit.”

Later, he told a reporter: “The main issue here was that the council took responsibility for making artistic judgments.”

What the chairman did not say--and what must be stressed in no uncertain terms, for it lies at the core of the new Ministry of Culture philosophy now lurching to the fore--is that final determinations will no longer be made by disinterested practitioners in the arts. Instead, ultimate decisions of artistic merit will be made by political appointees.

Both the chairmanship of the NEA and membership on the National Council are political appointments, made by the President and routinely confirmed by the Senate. Frohnmayer was appointed by President Bush, whose 1988 campaign for the White House Frohnmayer had successfully managed in his home state of Oregon.

Among the members of the National Council are notable performers and administrators from a wide variety of arts organizations. Nowhere among them is a single member who does not in some way owe his/her post to a politician.

That political connection is the big difference between accepting judgments of quality rendered by a National Council jury and accepting those made by a panel of artistic peers, who are not chosen for their direct political relationships. The difference cannot be underestimated. It strikes to the very heart of the NEA.

In 1964, when Congress was debating whether to establish a National Endowment, a fearsome question loomed: What would prevent a federal arts program from becoming just an old-style Ministry of Culture, a parochial tool of Administration policy that would put the hitherto free and independent arts at the service of whatever political ideology held sway in Washington?

The question was more than merely academic, especially to a generation that had just witnessed such a nightmare occur at its most brutal extreme--Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Communist Russia. In those tragic instances, politicians and their anointed disciples happily took responsibility for deciding questions of quality in nationally funded art, music, dance and theater--to well-known result. In a democracy, the argument went, that was a fate to be avoided at all cost.

Congress, of course, pressed on and created the NEA--acting in part out of deference to the recently slain monarch of Camelot, John F. Kennedy, who more than any prior president had used his office as a platform for the arts. The NEA would stand as shining tribute to his unprecedented backing.

Still, the frightful question lingered. Concern about the possibility of political manipulation of the arts was keen among NEA staff. Paramount was the shielding of the decision-making process for grants from even the appearance of political consideration.

What evolved in response was a system in which most all artistic decisions were left to changing groups of peers brought to Washington from around the nation. Appropriately, the NEA chairman and the National Council had the power to set aside the judgments of these peer panels. Occasionally they used it, although their reasoning was hidden behind closed doors. Not until August, 1990, were council meetings opened to the public.

In matters of aesthetics, however, it seemed the links to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and to Capitol Hill were severed. But no longer. Now the appearance of political consideration is being, if not openly embraced, certainly courted by the chairman and the National Council.

The call for denying peer-recommended grants to Highways and Franklin Furnace--both notably rambunctious organizations whose applications had included sexually explicit art--was led by National Council member Jocelyn Levi Straus, a Texas friend of the Bush family, while the deliberations were chaired by Frohnmayer, former Bush-campaign regional manager. Can anyone reasonably expect that questions of election-year politics won’t loom?

After all, Bush has taken a beating from the right wing of the Republican Party over a variety of issues, the NEA highly visible among them. The last thing Bush needs right now is another NEA tempest, like those that raged in the last three years. The presidential candidacies of conservative Republicans David Duke and, especially, Patrick J. Buchanan--staunch supporter of outright elimination of the NEA--are evidence enough of that.

Politically, it’s no secret the right wing needs appeasement from the Bush Administration. Is “quality control” being newly championed by the National Council as part of that appeasement plan?

Or, is this view just dark paranoia? Fevered fantasies of a blacklist against Highways and Franklin Furnace already have been advanced, despite the contrary facts that an individual artist grant was recently made by the NEA to Highways co-artistic director Tim Miller, and that the National Council did approve another grant to Franklin Furnace, for an application in a different category.

On the other hand, never underestimate the diabolical cleverness of sharp political operatives. Maybe those successful grants to Miller and Franklin Furnace were hurled across the tracks to throw opponents off the scent. Maybe they’re part of an elaborately concealed conspiracy, involving the CIA, the Trilateral Commission and Oliver Stone.

The point, as Congress knew full well in 1964, is this: When political appointees are charged with making artistic decisions, there is simply no way to know whether those decisions have been guided by political expediency. Having political appointees act as final arbiters of artistic quality creates, at the very least, an inevitable climate of suspicion and mistrust.

It is also patronizing. Although some of its members would surely deny it, the National Council is now busily second-guessing the artistic evaluations of peer panels, and is more than prepared to render their hard-fought judgments moot. For the council to vote on the wisdom or ignorance of a panel’s artistic decisions is demeaning to the professional standing of those men and women who have agreed to serve. The council degenerates into the Peer Panel Police, issuing violations for lapses in artistic taste.

And, at the very most, charging political appointees with the final word on quality creates the specter of an agency operating as artistic handmaiden to the ebb and flow of political power. That’s what’s happening now in Washington. A Ministry of Culture is quietly being born. It is a full-scale debacle.