President Bush wants Dana Gioia at the helm of the NEA for another term. Will this be good for America’s arts?
On the occasion of the signing of the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965 President Lyndon Johnson stated, “Art is a nation’s most precious heritage. For it is in our works of art that we reveal ourselves, and to others, the inner vision which guides us as a nation.” The thirty-sixth President of the United States then added the immortal and oft-quoted words, “And where there is no vision, the people perish.”
On September 28, 2006, The Associated Press reported that President George W. Bush would be renominating Mr. Dana Gioia as Chairman of The National Endowment for the Arts. As a new Congress prepares to convene and the Bush presidency winds to a close, the question arises whether the NEA, under its current leadership, has been fostering a vision vital enough to prevent the American people from perishing or if it has instead propagated a paradigm for obscurity.
Because of the uproar following The Supreme Court case of the so-called “NEA Four,” Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes, performance artists whose proposed grants from the National Endowment for the Arts were vetoed in June 1990 on the basis of subject matter, the NEA stopped funding individual artists, save for literature fellows. This, of course, was the pinnacle of an extended period of controversy most vociferously fueled by the late Senator Jesse Helms, who publicly admonished the NEA for funding photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, author Robert Clark Young, and visual artist Andres Serrano, whose visual piece “Piss Christ” depicted a crucifix immersed in the artist’s urine and sparked a hotbed of debate.
While only 10% of arts funding in the U.S. is derived from the government, and only about 2% of that comes from the federal government (of which only slightly less than 1% comes from the NEA), several states have been seriously debating whether or not to eliminate arts funding entirely. In the early years of the current decade, for example, California cut its arts budget by nearly 75%. (By contrast, the Italian government’s subvention for the country’s twelve or so major opera houses is nearly ten times the size of the annual NEA budget – to say nothing of its funding for arts initiatives other than opera.)
As Chairman Gioia stated at a recent National Press Club event, the question is no longer whether the NEA should exist but rather whether or not the National Endowment for the Arts can still matter? “For many [American] people,” the Chairman stated, “the arts and arts education are viewed as expendable, elitist luxuries rather than necessary elements of a healthy democratic society.”
Thus, in an attempt to both ensure that the NEA matters and can continue to exist, Gioia set the goal in FY 2004 for the NEA to deliver a direct grant to every Congressional district in the United States – without lowering the agency’s artistic standards. Some artists in search of grant money may question whether or not Kansas’s 1st Congressional district warrants money that might be directed to worthwhile artists on the cutting edge of their chosen field. It is, after all, the stomping grounds of Rev. Phelps, who protested the funeral of hate crime victim Matthew Shepard as well as those of fallen Iraqi soldiers with signs reading, “God Hates Fags.”
Or perhaps there is no district in greater need of the artistic vision President Johnson spoke of in 1965.
Chairman Gioia argues that under the German model of arts funding, the cultural world is divided into insiders and outsiders. “There is at present a genuine and urgent need to create a new public consensus for government support of arts and arts education. In order to gain the necessary support…this new consensus must be positive, inclusive, democratic, and non-divisive rather than confrontational, partisan, polarizing, and elitist. We also need to embody those goals in highly visible programs of indisputable artistic merit and enormous public reach. While it will take many organizations and millions of individuals to build this new consensus, it cannot work without NEA leadership.”
Under current Chairman Gioia’s leadership, the NEA has embarked on a number of initiatives, including: “Shakespeare in American Communities,” a movement to bring live, professional Shakespearean performances to underserved communities; “NEA Jazz in the Schools,” an introduction to jazz for high school students; and “American Masterpieces,” which in addition to museums has been awarding grants to choral music ensembles “to feature choral groups…in celebration of American music” and dance companies for the “touring and revival of American choreographic masterpieces.”
These initiatives, while certainly sensible, are arguably a far cry from visionary. By continuing not to fund individual artists, it would seem that the NEA runs the risk of becoming a diffuse agency that promotes only the safest and least controversial of art.
At a recent celebration marking the NEA’s 40th anniversary, Chairman Gioia stated that the agency has left behind its sometimes controversial past. “Some of artists the NEA supported in the late 1980s and [early] 1990s prompted conservatives to try to destroy the agency. Its detractors argued it was funding art that was obscene and offensive. [As a result,] its budget was cut by 40 percent. Today, it is far less controversial and there is little public criticism of its offerings, which include Shakespeare, poetry and opera.”
And not Karen Finley.
