Political Appointees Not NEA’s Problem

Art critic Christopher Knight, in a half-page of panting hyperbole (I’m avoiding honest Anglo-Saxon in a family newspaper) that must have used a tree’s worth of newsprint, brandishes a proclamation Robespierre would have put better, and shorter: “Artists of America, rise up! You have nothing to lose but your grants. Off with their heads!”

To clarify Knight’s hyperventilated prose, he’s convinced the White House is turning the National Endowment for the Arts into a Soviet-style Ministry of Culture by appointing to its advisory council people who pollute the artistic integrity of the NEA’s program by secretly denying grants to honest artists struggling to be free.

These individuals, he fears, are (ugh) political appointees, “creating” (to give you a sample of Knight’s prose) “the specter of an agency operating as artistic handmaiden to the ebb and flow of political power. That’s what’s happening now. A Ministry of Culture is quietly being born. It is a full-scale debacle.” How about that?

Let me try to put all of this in a more realistic perspective, speaking from some experience. All my adult life, I’ve made my living in three of the arts, and played as a passionate amateur in two more.

I served a term on the National Council on the Arts and headed two major groups funded by it, the American Film Institute and the Center Theatre Group, resigning those chairmanships to serve as co-chairman on the Presidential Task Force on the Arts and Humanities.

After several months of hearings, we submitted a report endorsing the functions of the NEA and National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as the independent use of federal tax monies to fund their activities.

I’ve spent weeks of my life traveling the country with my begging bowl seeking money for the arts from state and federal taxes, as well as private and corporate pocketbooks. Believe me, I know the ground, the players and the game.

Knight is appalled that the National Council denied grants (less than 2%) submitted for approval by the peer panels and the NEA bureaucracy, including two “sexually explicit” projects (his words, not mine). If a 1.7% rejection rate strikes Knight as Draconian, consider the thousands of grant applications turned down by both peer panels and bureaucrats without ever reaching the council table.

If sexual explicitness arouses his special passion, I point out that dozens more such projects were likely among those rejected earlier by the peer panels. The granting or denial of public funds to pay for them hardly seems worth a half page in The Times. The Republic, I think, will survive.

What may not survive is the NEA. If enough constituents of enough congressmen feel their tax money is spent irresponsibly, Congress will deny the relevant funding; that’s the simple reality. The First Amendment guarantees wide protection of public expressions, it does not guarantee public money to pay for it.

Knight feels NEA choices are being made by “political appointees” to the National Council. Does he imagine the hiring of NEA bureaucrats and peer panelists is somehow free of political bias? Why should he think artists, professional or would-be, are “disinterested” participants in the grant-making process?

He is sure the guardians of cultural freedom are corrupted and appoints himself their judge. Who watches the watchers then, Mr. Knight?