National Council on Arts’ Real Mandate

In his commentary, “Cloud of Politics Spreads Ominously Over Arts Grant Process” (Calendar, Feb. 12), Christopher Knight criticizes the National Council on the Arts for rejecting two recent grant applications submitted to the National Endowment for the Arts. Specifically, he complains that by “inserting itself” into the NEA’s grant-making process, the council has become an overzealous “Ministry of Culture.”

Knight does not quibble with the substance of the council’s decision to reject applications from two performance art spaces, Franklin Furnace and Highways, on the grounds that they lacked artistic merit. Nor could he; after all, unlike the council, he has neither reviewed their applications nor seen the work submitted by these applicants.

No, his complaint is not with the decision itself but with who made it. Knight thinks the National Council should stay out of making judgments about the artistic merit of grant applications because its members are political appointees, and says those decisions should be left to panels consisting of the applicant’s artist peers, who are not.

Knight’s thesis, however, is premised on a profound misunderstanding of the council’s statutory role and of the legislative history surrounding the creation of the NEA. Moreover, in the case of Franklin Furnace and Highways, it just didn’t happen the way he says it did.

The National Council on the Arts consists of 26 artists, arts administrators and other art experts who provide policy advice and review applications for the NEA. It was given this role by federal statute. In other words, the council did not “insert itself” into the grant-making process; Congress put it there.

Peer panels also play a role in reviewing applications, but their recommendations are purely preliminary. The law mandates that all applications must be reviewed by the National Council. As a practical matter, the vast majority of the panels’ recommendations are accepted by the council, in which case, the ultimate decision lies with the chairman of the NEA. But if the council rejects an application, its decision is final and cannot be overturned, even by the chairman.

The problem with this system, according to Knight, is that the council and the chairman are political appointees who, he submits, can make judgments based on political expediency rather than artistic merit. This argument is insulting to the bipartisan council and to the chairman, who have made numerous decisions to fund and defend controversial artists and projects. It also has no support in law or fact.

The NEA is an independent federal agency, which means that the council and the chairman, although appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, serve fixed terms. This gives the agency autonomy from day-to-day partisan politics, while at the same time ensuring that it operates with some responsiveness to the popular will as expressed through elections.

Members of the council and the chairman cannot be removed except for cause, which means that they are not fired if a new President is elected before their terms end. Nor can they be fired just because they make an unpopular grant award. So the fact that they are political appointees in no way denigrates their objectivity.

More to the point, in the cases of Franklin Furnace and Highways, there were no political “marching orders” given to anyone on the council or at the Endowment. The council’s hourlong debate centered on whether the materials submitted in support of these applications demonstrated the high level of artistic judgment and merit required of NEA grantees. On that basis alone, the overwhelming majority of its members--not just the one who was singled out by Knight--voted to deny the applications.

When Congress created the Endowment in 1965, it conceived of the council as part of a system of checks and balances to prevent the NEA from imposing a single-minded aesthetic philosophy on American culture. Thus, far from seeking to isolate the council from grant-making decisions, Congress intended to involve it in the process for precisely the same reason that Knight gives for excluding it: to avoid creating a “Ministry of Culture.”

The council has been reviewing, and in some cases rejecting, grant applications for 27 years. Knight seems to take some comfort from the fact that this used to be done “behind closed doors.” But, now, the council deliberates in public, which is as it should be. Because these decisions are exposed to the sunlight, all the people the endowment serves can judge for themselves whether these decisions are based on artistic criteria. They are.