Grants Come With Strings Attached

The 41-year-old Orange County Philharmonic Society has never received NEA money, which is rarely given to presenting groups. Society executive director Dean Corey supports the agency and what it does but believes the agency’s eradication might not be all bad.

Because most NEA grants--about 80%--are awarded for specific projects rather than for daily operational support, they encourage recipients to undertake projects that they believe will win grants, rather than work that “ought to be done” for artistic reasons, Corey said.

The society’s major income source is ticket sales, followed by individuals’ donations and special-event funds. The group also gets about $20,000 annually--less than 1% of its $2.2-million budget--from the California Arts Council.

“If there’s something your organization wants to do and it’s not necessarily attractive to the NEA, you have a tendency not to do it,” Corey said. “Without that grant money, you’re much freer to come up with stuff.”

New work by American composers or work geared toward minority communities are “big favorites of the NEA,” Corey continued.

Yet the NEA’s support of such programming can be limiting, he said, when groups do only as much as they have grant money to do.

If the Philharmonic Society received NEA subsidies for presenting ethnic music and dance, for instance, it probably would be offering less Latino programming than next year’s five-concert series, he said.

“We’d probably do a minimal approach just to say we qualified for the grant,” he said.

The NEA also can become a hot potato, he said, when political pressure erupts over the art it funds.

In the past, conservative congressmen succeeded in restricting federal funding for art that they, or some constituents, deemed “obscene or indecent,” although such laws were later ruled unconstitutional.

“In Europe, the government puts very little restriction on what you do,” Corey said. “Some things it funds are quite controversial, but the government realizes its role is not to dictate culture but to make sure it happens.”