Arts Partisans Angry at Clinton Administration : Politics: They are criticizing the President for a perceived lack of support, particularly over the failure to name an NEA chairman.

There appears to be no cease-fire in the Culture Wars, even under a Clinton Administration expected to be supportive of the arts. On the one side there’s Pat Buchanan, declaring this month that “Culture is the Ho Chi Minh Trail to power,” and he’s on it. On the other, arts partisans are becoming vocal in their concern that a Democrat in the White House is not making the difference to their cause they had hoped for.

Buchanan appears so confident that attacks on the arts and Hollywood will broaden his political base that the television commentator who made life miserable for George Bush in last year’s primaries organized a two-day conference on “Winning the Culture War,” through his new foundation, the American Cause, earlier this month. And he took the occasion once more to pronounce the National Gallery’s outdoor sculptor by the late, internationally acclaimed artist Henry Moore “petrified dinosaur feces.”

The arts community is concerned over a Justice Department action on contested “decency” standards and President Clinton’s delay in naming a chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. So concerned that the National Council on the Arts, which advises the NEA, passed a resolution at its May meeting asking the President to make up his mind fast.

“Buchanan is on the warpath; I didn’t expect he wouldn’t be. I don’t believe Jesse Helms will let go,” council member Harvey Lichtenstein, president of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, said Tuesday. “That’s the reason we need someone (at the NEA) who is good and persuasive, who will make the case to Congress and to the country and do battle with these people. It’s been four months; I think this is ludicrous.”

For months now, daily rumors have anointed either actress Jane Alexander or Deborah Sale, chief of staff to New York Lt. Gov. Stan Lundine, as the new NEA head, with Smithsonian administrator Claudine Brown a distant third. This week’s rumors say an announcement is imminent. Meanwhile, reauthorization hearings for the NEA begin June 10.

Aside from her role on Broadway in “The Sisters Rosensweig,” Alexander has kept a low profile. However, Alexander’s name has remained constantly in the news because her accountant and financial manager, James Powers, was charged in late April with taking $3 million from various clients, including $1.9 million from Alexander and her husband, theatrical and television director Edwin Sherin. Some sources insist Alexander has withdrawn her name from consideration due to financial difficulties, while others volubly deny that she is out of the running.

But Sale has been vocal on the issues--most recently at the 1993 Capezio Dance Award to Dance/ USA. “One need only remember the heroic defiance of Bella Lewitzky against the McCarthy-like climate that perverted the longstanding democratic processes of the National Endowment for the Arts,” she said. “Dance/USA was there to demand that we all stand up with Bella against the national disgrace of intolerance--and we did.”

Choreographer Lewitzky, who refused her NEA grant to protest an obscenity clause, was one of 16 artists and arts activists also singled out for praise this month in an unprecedented meeting at the Museum of Modern Art, in which mainstream arts powers like MOMA President Agnes Gund declared their impatience with Washington and their solidarity with the more radical downtown artists who have been the chief right-wing targets in the culture wars.

Gund said she’d written the President a letter expressing her dismay that he has yet to mention the word art . But the outrage at that meeting--and in arts circles--is focused on the one time the Administration has made a public gesture on the arts, other than a First Family visit to the Barnes Collection at the National Gallery on Mother’s Day and some Hillary and Chelsea Clinton spottings at the ballet.

The Administration’s one highly visible action on the arts has been a Justice Department brief that seems to take the Bush Administration’s position on what arts groups characterize as “censorship.” It seeks to overthrow a California Federal District Court decision that the “decency” provision for NEA grants was unconstitutional.

The case, Finley vs. NEA, was originally brought in September, 1990, on behalf of performance artists Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes and Tim Miller, often called the NEA Four, against the NEA chairman who had overturned a peer panel recommendation that they receive grants.

On June 9, 1992, U.S. District Judge A. Wallace Tashima ruled that the NEA’s decency clause, which had been stipulated by Congress, violated the First and Fifth Amendments.

The new Justice Department brief, filed on behalf of the NEA on March 29, among other arguments, seeks to extend the gag rule against doctors who receive federal funds from counseling pregnant women on their options to anyone in the arts or other disciplines who receive such funding. Although Clinton threw out the gag rule, a Supreme Court decision in the case Rust vs. Sullivan narrowly supported some of its provisions. The Justice Department cites Rust vs. Sullivan in its argument.

Arts groups earlier this month met with White House officials to express their displeasure. They were so pleased to have an Administration that appeared to listen sympathetically that for weeks most of them abided by the White House stipulation that they lay low, not talk about the meeting, and trust the Administration.

“I am now releasing myself from that because they haven’t done anything,” said David Mendoza, executive director of the National Campaign for Freedom of Expression Tuesday. “We were told at the meeting that the issue is now on their radar screen. To some degree this is a case of a new Administration, a new staff and it took a long time before a new attorney general was in place.” What Mendoza would like is for the White House to instruct the Justice Department to drop the appeal. He says there have been precedents for such an action.

But the NEA’s position is that the Justice Department has to defend the government on questions of constitutionality and, since Congress enacted the decency provisions, that is a constitutional issue the Justice Department must uphold.

First Amendment lawyer and former Justice Department criminal lawyer Gloria Phares agrees, even though she is filing a friend-of-the-court brief supporting the NEA Four, on behalf of such artists as Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, David Hammons, Robert Colescott and Susan Rothenberg. Phares believes the government “is not going to settle so volatile an issue as whether the congressional statute is constitutional or not. They would rather have the court of appeals say it is not constitutional. The government has to make the best argument they can,” said Phares. “They may have to write a brief in which they are sort of holding their nose.”

There are ongoing talks between lawyers for the NEA Four and their supporters and the Justice Department that could lead to a settlement. That settlement would probably only address the damage done to the four financially, not the constitutional issues.

But arts groups want more. “Along with appointing a new NEA chair, the White House should give the new chair a welcoming gift by dropping the appeal,” said Mendoza. “Then we can move forward.”

Times staff writer Diane Haithman reported from Los Angeles.