COMMENTARY : Some Words of Advice for NEA Nominee Jane Alexander

Dear Jane Alexander:

Congratulations on your nomination to chair the National Endowment for the Arts! We’ve been waiting patiently to see whom the President would finally select for the post. It means a lot to a lot of people.

Now, I must confess the chairmanship is a job I currently wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Who would want to head a federal agency that’s become the principal battleground of a culture war, revved up by conservatives on the religious right?

The NEA will likely remain a target for several years--although, it is doubtful the Clinton Administration will plant enemy spies to undermine the agency from within, as Bush’s did. But basic American freedoms do rest on your performance of the task. So, good for you for being willing to take it on.

I think of the NEA as being sort of like the Bill of Rights: If put to a popular vote, it’s unlikely our nation would have established (or kept) either one. Alas, Americans have never much cared for the arts, except in a polite, lip-service sort of way.

Yes, we can applaud statistics on how theaters, art museums and dance companies have flourished--notably in the three decades since the NEA’s founding. But if the rank-and-file really did love the stuff, we’d all have clamored for a first-rate arts education in our public schools and for a bit more than a per-capita federal arts budget of 68 cents. (In Germany it’s $27!) You’ve probably noticed we didn’t--and still don’t.

So, as chairman, you have the wildly difficult task of being a passionately committed public leader on an incidental subject in the minds of most people. You’ve got quite a selling job to do.

Perhaps it will help that you, yourself, are an artist. In fact, as a much-praised actress you have the distinction of being the first widely acclaimed artist ever nominated to the NEA’s top job. This could prove useful.

Pragmatically, your celebrity is a tool unavailable to an obscure Oregon lawyer or an unknown D.C. bureaucrat, to cite the prior jobs of the NEA’s two most recent chairs. You should have an easier time getting the public’s attention, especially through the star-hungry mass media.

You also know how to perform. As an actress who famously played Eleanor Roosevelt on TV; who’s won an Emmy and a Tony, and some Oscar nominations; who got her start in a 1967 theater project actually funded by the NEA (“The Great White Hope”), and, who is married to a television and theatrical director (Edwin Sherin), you have a certain expertise in playing to the crowds.

I mean, it worked for Ronald Reagan.

Your stature as a performing artist will surely make it harder for Endowment opponents casually to attack you. Which is not to say they won’t try. Why, I can practically hear Patrick J. Buchanan gleefully spitting out the word actress as an epithet, and citing your nomination as incriminating evidence of a pernicious cabal, in which the NEA has linked arms with the Hollywood Elite.

Americans might not be devoted to the arts, but they do love a good conspiracy theory.

There’s also a more fundamental reason why it’s important a distinguished artist has been named to the chairmanship. As an artist, you have an opportunity to restore the agency’s original alignment, which was to give the arts a voice in Washington. That direction was abruptly reversed during the Reagan years, and it went to rot under the Bush White House.

President Reagan failed to kill off the Endowment early in his term, but he accomplished the next best thing. By naming Frank Hodsoll, a career bureaucrat with virtually no arts experience, to head the federal agency, he turned the NEA 180 degrees: The chairman was no longer an Administration spokesman on behalf of the arts; suddenly, he was an Administration spokesman to the arts.

By the time George Bush came along, it’s no wonder some congressional conservatives and Administration officials (like Dan Quayle’s clever chief-of-staff, William Kristol) thought it entirely appropriate that NEA-funded artists and arts organizations should do their ideological bidding, or else shut up. As an artist-chairman, you can make it perfectly clear that what artists should do is art’s bidding.

Perhaps being a successful woman will also help. I know we’re not supposed to identify gender as a job qualification, but recent events have forced the issue. After all, gender is at the core of the right-wing attack on the NEA.

One big reason the arts place low on the national totem pole is that Americans vaguely regard culture as a feminine pursuit, not a masculine one. Things feminine are routinely devalued.

Yes, when we talk about the arts at all we do put them on a pedestal--much the same way a male-oriented society traditionally puts women on pedestals. But like a gilded cage, a pedestal is a tiny prison: an unaggressive, socially acceptable way of confining something to its place.

With varying degrees of success, a number of feminist and openly homosexual artists have been trying to make art that would challenge such historically mandated confinements. Women, as well as those men society disdainfully regards as being like them, have borne the brunt of the right-wing culture war.

In the U.S. Senate, it recently took the sole African-American member, Carol Moseley-Braun (D.-Ill.), to stare down a roomful of mostly complacent white guys, who were variously enamored of, or oblivious to, a bit of legislation giving federal blessings to an historic symbol of racism. Maybe you can likewise use the symbolic realm of the arts to open eyes to the sexist, homophobic substance of the conservative culture war.

Which brings me to the Clinton Administration’s most puzzling action on the arts to date. Heads were being scratched nationwide late last March, when the Justice Department decided to appeal a federal district court ruling that wisely said the congressional attempt to impose “decency standards” on the NEA was unconstitutional.

Maybe the appeal is some kind of arcane legal maneuver on behalf of art and freedom, which mere mortals can’t begin to understand. Still, it’s hard to feel comforted by an Administration that seems to want to undo a major victory for the First Amendment.

Since you’ll be joining this Administration, I hope your views on the subject will be elicited at your nomination hearings. In fact, since your views on national arts policy of any kind are largely unknown, either to the arts constituency or the public at large, I’m sure a good deal of interest will be focused on what you have to say.

The hearings will be a kind of “Opening Night” for you. Here’s hoping the production will be memorable, and that if it moves sufficient numbers of people deeply enough, the run will be a long and prosperous one. Break a leg!

Sincerely,

Christopher Knight