House Approves 5% Cut in NEA Budget Allotment

The House Thursday approved a 5% reduction in the funding for the National Endowment for the Arts for the next fiscal year, reducing the NEA budget by $8.7 million to $165.9 million.

Some advocates of the cut said they wanted to “send a message” to the NEA about making controversial grants, but others who supported the reduction said they were acting out of a concern for the budget deficit.

The action came after the House refused Wednesday, by an overwhelming 322-105 vote, to knock out all funds for the troubled agency.

But the 5% cutback, offered by Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) easily passed the House, with 162 Republicans and 78 Democrats in favor of slicing NEA funds. The endowment is operating without a permanent director, pending President Clinton’s naming of a nominee to the post.

Some critics accused the NEA of indirectly supporting a current exhibition, “Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art” at the Whitney Museum in New York City, that they said contained pornographic and blasphemous works. The show, which confronts issues of gender and sexuality, contains works from the Whitney’s permanent collection by artists including Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, Lee Bontecou, Louise Bourgeois and Robert Mapplethorpe.

The NEA, said Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove), has given $200,000 to the Whitney Museum in recent years for general operating expenses, which he said indirectly supported the “Abject Art” exhibition.

Rep. Sidney R. Yates (D-Ill.), chairman of the appropriations subcommittee that allocates funds for the NEA and other federal agencies, said the NEA did not provide any money for the controversial exhibition. Yates said the Whitney used private funds for the show.

“The arts will be terribly, terribly hurt” by a reduction of 5% in NEA funds, Rep. Yates told the House in the debate over Stearns’ amendment. He said it would have an “enormous impact” on the NEA’s ability to make “seed-money” grants to local arts organizations.

Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), however, said the Whitney show included depictions of a three-foot mound of excrement, two women having oral sex and other objectionable works. Since the NEA gave funds to the museum, he argued, it indirectly supported the exhibition.

“A minimal 5% cut will at least send a message to the NEA that we don’t want the taxpayers’ hard-earned money going for this kind of trash,” Burton said.

Rep. Amo Houghton (R-N.Y.), one of the few Republicans to vote against the cut, said it was wrong to “nibble” the NEA budget because opponents did not favor federal spending for arts programs.

“Private funds (for the arts) help big cities, not small towns,” Houghton said. “Private funds alone won’t do it.”

But the House majority decided to trim the NEA budget despite advocates’ claims that the number of federal grants that cause controversy were, at most, only a tiny fraction of the funds distributed by the agency.

Advocates for the arts may try to get the $8.7 million restored in the Senate but the decisive vote in the House indicated that there will be some reduction in NEA funds for the year starting Oct. 1.

The House has been on a budget-cutting spree in recent weeks, slicing money from the space station and voting to kill the superconductor super-collider.

“Over the past few weeks we have cut funding for many programs large and small,” Stearns said. “So we should also cut a controversial program like the NEA.”