ART : COMMENTARY : The Art of Politics and Just Plain Art : A critic’s view: ‘Like Byrd and Nickles, I did not see “Four Scenes in a Harsh Life.” Unlike them, however, I’m not involved in off-year elections.’

Here’s one fundamental difference between the day- to-day job of a politician and the day-to-day job of an artist: In order to get elected, politicians must warmly embrace the conventions of middle-class morality; in order to make art, artists must dispense with those conventions.

This functional difference is one big reason disaster looms whenever politicians hold art’s purse strings. Politicians who piously insist that art do nothing but affirm middle-class morality ensure that federally funded art will be characterized by its stunning resemblance to Cheez Whiz.

In debates over the NEA’s proposed fiscal 1995 budget, the pious insisting is being done by Sen. Robert C. Byrd, conservative Democrat from West Virginia, and Sen. Don Nickles, conservative Republican from Oklahoma. They have decided the NEA should be spanked for financing a Midwest museum that presented the work of L.A.-based performance artist Ron Athey.

The punishment: a Draconian 5% slicing of the NEA budget.

In March, the highly regarded Walker Art Center in Minneapolis spent about $150 from a sizable NEA grant to underwrite the presentation of Athey’s “Four Scenes in a Harsh Life.” In the performance, Athey enacts various symbols of martyrdom, including ritual bloodletting, that partly refer to the stigmata of Christian faith. More than likely the rituals have something to do with the artist’s autobiography: Athey was reportedly raised by fundamentalist Christian aunts to be a child preacher, a profession he subsequently forsook.

Like Byrd and Nickles, I did not see “Four Scenes in a Harsh Life.” Unlike them, however, I’m not intimately involved in off-year elections this fall.

The election stakes are high. Will Republicans make substantial congressional inroads in November, as opposition parties usually do in the middle of a President’s term? Or, will Democrats be able to hold the line--including Byrd, who is up for reelection--as will be essential to the party’s political future, given that so much in President Clinton’s agenda is left to accomplish?

Finally, because the federal budget will be debated while all that congressional campaigning is going on, could the NEA explode into a hot-button issue once again, as it did so disastrously for George Bush during his 1992 campaign?

Athey’s performance, with its blood and religion, sure has the explosive dynamite. (It also helps that he’s gay, ripe for demonizing by the fundamentalist Christian right.) Can this bomb be defused?

With their bipartisan proposal for a retaliatory slashing of the NEA’s budget, Byrd and Nickles seem to have made a preemptive strike. Huffing and puffing with get-out-the-vote testimonials to middle-class morality, they railed in a fulsome letter to NEA Chair Jane Alexander at “notorious,” “offensive,” “unconscionable” grants for “so-called” performance art.

Just doin’ their jobs, ma’am. So was Athey, but artists will always lose in a political cat fight.

Byrd and Nickles, the chairman and ranking Republican, respectively, on the Senate Interior Appropriations subcommittee, have hacked $8.5 million from the NEA’s proposed budget--already pitifully small at $170 million. They also want those cuts targeted to programs in the visual arts, theater and performance.

The House, meanwhile, has demanded an unrestricted $3.4-million cut. A House-Senate compromise will be worked out in committee. Whatever that turns out to be, the punitive budget chop should provide suitable cover for everyone in the fall elections.

Everyone, that is, except the American people. In poll after poll, citizens express firm support for a robust NEA, even as its budget is being whittled into nothingness.

This is the third budget cut in as many years, but the news is actually worse. Adjusted for inflation, today’s federal arts dollar buys roughly what it did 20 years ago, when Richard Nixon was in office.

The steep slide in buying power began in 1979, thanks to runaway inflation during the Carter Administration. But the plunge continued during the Reagan and Bush years, even though inflation was under control, because it coincided with conservative ideology.

Voters plainly want a national arts agency, but conservatives have always regarded it as symbolic of federal excess. So, what’s the next best thing to abolishing the NEA? Strangle its already tiny budget, making only token increases that fall behind the rise in cost of living and, beginning with the Robert Mapplethorpe fiasco of 1989, trump up ersatz scandals as a bludgeoning tool.

The severity of the NEA budget decline was masked during the go-go 1980s by loud champions of increased privatization of arts funding. With the steady withdrawal of private arts funds in the belt-tightening 1990s, the stark impact of the federal drop is finally coming into focus.

There is a breaking point at which federal arts subsidies will be stretched too thin to matter at all. That point is fast approaching--and may already be here.

The phoniness of recent congressional debates--if “debate” isn’t too fancy a term for public spewing of nonsense--has been embarrassing. Shrieks of offended sensibilities ( grow up , senators ) and censorious demands for content restrictions are sensationalist melodrama, behind which the NEA is being quietly underfunded into functional oblivion. Meanwhile, congressional endowment supporters merely scramble to minimize damage.

For this dispiriting mess we can credit the now-permanent election campaign in American politics. Send your thank-you notes to the puffed-up moralists in Congress. And a copy to the Clinton Administration too, which has done next to nothing to reverse the atrophy.