Grant a ‘Dubious’ Honor--Baitz : Endowment: Playwright accepts $15,000 from NEA but pledges to donate an equal amount to two galleries whose grants were overturned.

Calling the $15,000 grant he received from the National Endowment for the Arts “a dubious honor,” playwright Jon Robin Baitz has accepted the money but pledged to make donations equaling that amount from his own pocket to two art galleries whose NEA grants were denied.

Both galleries’ exhibits had been recommended for funding by the NEA’s advisory panel, the National Council on the Arts.

Baitz’s action was the latest in a series of protests spawned by a May 12 decision by the NEA’s acting chairman, Anne-Imelda Radice, to overturn two visual arts grant recommendations of $10,000 each to the List Visual Arts Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Anderson Gallery at Virginia Commonwealth University. The two exhibits included depictions of body parts, including genitalia.

Two peer panels judging applicants in other categories--one for sculpture fellowships, another for grants for solo theater performance--suspended their duties, saying they were “demoralized” by Radice’s ignoring their input and expressing fears that Radice’s decision was political rather than artistic.

The solo theater panel refused to continue its grant deliberations unless Radice changed her decision to deny grants to the List and Anderson galleries, as well as to provide a written explanation of the artistic criteria she used to overturn recommendations by the peer panels and the council. The panel was dismissed when Radice refused to acquiesce to its demands, and the $210,000 in grant money allotted for that category will be distributed to other artists.

Prior to Radice’s decision, composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim turned down the NEA’s prestigious National Medal of Arts, citing a climate at the NEA of “censorship and repression.”

In a May 29 letter to Donna M. DiRicco, NEA acting grants officer, Baitz said he was accepting $15,000 from the NEA “without the least bit of pleasure” and echoed the fear of a number of artists and arts organizations that the overturning of grants recommendations reflected an increasing tendency to bow to pressure from conservative forces and the religious right.

“I simply will not be complicit with faux -moralist sharpies of the right, nor with the psychosexual hysterics in the cultural sacking of this country, which has once again become a favorite conservative pastime,” Baitz wrote.

NEA spokeswoman Jill Collins said Tuesday that the federal arts organization “is always pleased when someone in the private sector wants to support the arts. This is his own money.” Collins said that Baitz could not donate NEA funds to another artist because all grantees have to file a final report detailing how the money was used for the specified purpose.

In a Tuesday telephone interview from New York, the 30-year-old Baitz said he found “the manner in which the NEA has become a pawn of the right wing to be without a shred of honor. . . . I feel that those voices from the right have begun the process of compromising, silencing, embarrassing, co-opting and overwhelming any kind of response from anyone else.”

Baitz’s plays include “The Film Society,” “The End of the Day” and “The Substance of Fire,” currently at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center.

Katy Kline, director of the List Center, said the center was “absolutely delighted” by Baitz’s action, saying that it showed “solidarity in various categories in the arts. He (Baitz) was someone whose intelligence and perspicacity the NEA respects because they gave him the grant, so I am doubly pleased that he could make a gesture in our behalf.”

Kline called the NEA’s reaction to Baitz’s donation “disingenuous,” and said the NEA had “abandoned its mission” to encourage “healthy self-criticism” of American society by artists in implying that the private sector should take responsibility for funding controversial art.

Kline said that while she understood and supported the decision of some peer panelists to suspend their duties, she hoped the grant overturns, which she called a “hysterical flank attack” by the NEA, would not cause the art community to abandon the government arts organization entirely. “They have to be held to their mission,” she said. “We can’t just walk away.”

Steven High, director of the Anderson Gallery, said he was notified of Baitz’s gift by Baitz’s attorney. He said the money would ensure that the gallery could proceed with its exhibit, “Anonymity and Identity.”

“I think this is terrific,” High said. “I think (Baitz) states his points very clearly, and I think he has also done it in such a way that it apparently meets all the requirements of the NEA.”

High added that Radice’s overturning the grants “has in effect polarized the NEA to some degree, and that’s unfortunate. This is a time when we really needed to pull together, and the exact opposite is happening.”