Senators Give Unanimous Nod to New Arts Chairman

William J. Ivey, director of the Country Music Foundation and a prominent essayist on America’s musical traditions, is to be sworn in next week as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.

The controversial endowment, which some conservative lawmakers have fought for years to destroy, received its new chairman in the most noncontroversial way--a unanimous vote cast without debate by the Senate late Thursday night. That might be the first and last act of congressional unity the 53-year-old Ivey will see as he begins his four-year tenure.

“It would be naive to think that the agency will not come under attack from time to time,” Ivey said Friday from Nashville, where the Country Music Foundation is based. “But I think that criticism comes from a minority, an often powerful and vocal minority, but one that did not prevail last year, and I am confident will not prevail in the future.”

Ivey succeeds actress Jane Alexander, who saw the endowment through several attempts to strip it of all or most of its funding, a crusade that began nearly a decade ago when federally funded works by some artists were denounced as obscene. While Alexander brought a high profile to the position, Ivey is much lower key, which congressional sources said was one of the reasons President Bill Clinton nominated him.

Ivey’s challenge will be to change the image many lawmakers have of the federal grant-making agency Congress created in 1965 to support visual, literary, design and performing arts and to broaden public access to the arts.

The arts have proliferated in the country since then. Recent figures show 76 million people now attend arts affairs annually, compared to 20 million when the NEA was established and many observers have credited the endowment with playing a key role in cultivating this interest.

But the agency’s success was blighted when some lawmakers took offense to works with sexually explicit and religious content by such artists as Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano, among others. Since then, critics have also complained that the NEA is too elitist, favoring opera over such genres as country and western. That the scholarly Ivey has led the Country Music Foundation since 1971 doubtlessly made him a more palatable choice for some NEA detractors.

At the same time, he was confirmed despite his view that the arts deserve widespread financial support, a philosophy that runs contrary to Congress’ pattern of steadily cutting the agency’s annual funding--it has dropped from $176 million in 1992 to less than $100 million last year.

As a member of the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities, Ivey contributed to a recent report recommending the government spend $2 per citizen annually on the arts and humanities. That could amount to more than $500 million in NEA funds, a sum he has virtually no chance of winning.

But Ivey is considered politically astute while having a background rich in management skills. He will be the first chairman of the agency to have actually developed and run a nonprofit cultural organization.

“It was really encouraging to have the confirmation process move forward so positively,” Ivey said. “It feels to me like there is a real opportunity for a new beginning.”