Cons for the Govment Funding Fine Arts Cons for the Government Funding Fine Arts

Every bit the U.Due south. Congress struggles to remainder the federal budget and end the decades-long spiral of deficit spending, few programs seem more than worthy of outright elimination than the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Indeed, since its inception in 1965, few federal agencies take been mired in more controversy than the NEA. Nevertheless, steadfast partisans of "welfare for artists" continue to defend the Endowment, asserting that it promotes philanthropic giving, makes cultural programs attainable to those who can to the lowest degree afford them, and protects America'due south cultural heritage.

In fact, the NEA is an unwarranted extension of the federal regime into the voluntary sector. The Endowment, furthermore, does not promote charitable giving. Despite Endowment claims that its efforts bring art to the inner urban center, the agency offers little more than a directly subsidy to the cultured, upper-middle course. Finally, rather than promoting the best in art, the NEA continues to offer tax dollars and the federal seal of approval to subsidize "art" that is offensive to most Americans.

In that location are at least ten expert reasons to eliminate funding for the NEA:

Reason #1: The Arts Volition Have More Than Enough Support without the NEA

The arts were flowering earlier the NEA came into existence in 1965. Indeed, the Endowment was created partly because of the tremendous popular appeal of the arts at the time. Alvin Toffler'south The Culture Consumers, published in 1964, surveyed the booming audience for fine art in the Us, a side benefit of a growing economy and depression aggrandizement.^two Toffler's volume recalls the arts prior to the creation of the NEA-the era of the great Georges Balanchine and Agnes de Mille ballets, for instance, when 26 million viewers would turn to CBS broadcasts of Leonard Bernstein and the New York Combo. In fact, nearly all of the major orchestras in the Usa existed before 1965, and will go along to be after NEA subsidies are ended.

In spite of the vast splendor created by American artists prior to 1965, partisans of the NEA claim that the arts in the United States would face up well-nigh sure demise should the Endowment be abolished. Withal Endowment funding is just a driblet in the bucket compared to giving to the arts by private citizens. For example, in 1996, the Metropolitan Opera of New York received $390,000 from the Endowment, a federal subsidy that totals only 0.29 percentage of the Opera'southward almanac income of $133 million-and amounts to less than the ticket revenue for a single sold-out operation.^three

The growth of private-sector charitable giving in recent years has rendered NEA funding relatively insignificant to the arts community. Overall giving to the arts last year totaled almost $10 billion⁴-up from $6.5 billion in 1991^v-dwarfing the NEA'south federal subsidy. This 40 percent increase in private giving occurred during the same menstruation that the NEA budget was reduced past 40 percentage from approximately $170 one thousand thousand to $99.5 million.^{half dozen} Thus, every bit conservatives had predicted, cutting the federal NEA subsidy coincided with increased private support for the arts and culture.

That many major cultural institutions are in the midst of successful fundraising efforts belies the questionable claim of NEA supporters that private giving, no matter how generous, could never compensate for the loss of public funds. As Chart ane shows, many of these institutional campaigns have fundraising targets many times greater than the NEA's almanac federal appropriation of $99.5 million. In New York Metropolis, the geographic area which receives the largest relative share of NEA funding, the New York Public Library is raising some $430 meg (with 70 percent already completed), the Museum of Modern Art, $300 meg-450 million (with 30 percent raised), the Metropolitan Museum of Art some $300 million (with eighty percent already obtained).⁷ In fact, philanthropist Frederick A. O. Schwartz, Jr., recently told The New York Times that "we've entered a catamenia of institutional excitement comparable just to that which occurred afterwards the Civil State of war until World War I when several of the city'due south great civic and cultural institutions were built."⁸

In Corking Great britain, economist David Sawers's comparative study of subsidized and unsubsidized performing arts ended that major cultural venues would continue to thrive were government subsidies to exist eliminated. According to Sawers'south calculation, 80 per centum of all London theater box office receipts, including ballet and opera, went to unsubsidized theater.⁹ (Britain's renowned Glyndebourne opera, for case, relies entirely on private funding.)

Fifty-fifty smaller organizations can succeed without depending on the federal government. As Bradley Scholar William Craig Rice argues cogently in The Heritage Foundation'south Policy Review, "The arts will flower without the NEA." His survey shows that many arts venues can easily supervene upon NEA funding, and suggests a number of alternative strategies for those who might find the disappearance of the federal bureau problematic.¹⁰

Reason #2: The NEA Is Welfare for Cultural Elitists

Despite Endowment claims that federal funding permits underpriviledged individuals to gain access to the arts, NEA grants offering little more a subsidy to the well-to-practice. I-fifth of straight NEA grants go to multimillion-dollar arts organizations.¹¹ Harvard University Political Scientist Edward C. Banfield has noted that the "fine art public is now, as information technology has always been, overwhelmingly middle and upper middle grade and above average in income-relatively prosperous people who would probably bask fine art most as much in the absence of subsidies."¹² The poor and the middle class, thus, benefit less from public fine art subsidies than does the museum- and orchestra-going upper-eye class. Sawers argues that "those who finance the subsidies through taxes are likely to be different from and poorer than those who benefit from the subsidies."¹³ In fact, the $99.5 1000000 that funds the NEA too represents the entire almanac tax burden for over 436,000 working-grade American families.¹⁴

As part of the Endowment's effort to dispel its elitist image, Chairman Jane Alexander has led a nationwide campaign painting the NEA as a social welfare programme that can help underprivileged youth to fight violence and drugs. In congressional testimony, she has trumpeted her "American Sheet" initiative "to gain a better agreement of how the arts can transform communities."¹⁵ But despite the heartwarming anecdotes, claims for the therapeutic use of the arts are not supported by empirical scientific evidence. Studies that claim to show the arts preclude crime are methodologically questionable, due to problems of self option. And the arts offering no cure for alcoholism either: Tom Dardis devotes his 292-page scholarly piece of work, The Thirsty Muse, precisely to the loftier occurrence of alcohol corruption among American writers.¹⁶

Reason #three: The NEA Discourages Charitable Gifts to the Arts

Defenders of the NEA fence that the much of its benefit lies in its ability to confer an imprimatur, similar to the "Practiced Housekeeping Seal of Approval," necessary to encourage individual support of the arts. NEA officials accept asserted oft that past persuading donors who would otherwise not give, Endowment support can offer a fiscal "leverage" of up to 10 times the corporeality of a federal grant award.¹⁷ There is little or no empirical evidence to support such claims. The simply available study of "matching grants"-those designed specifically to stimulate giving- ended that matching grants did not increment total giving to the arts. Instead, "matching grants" appear to shift existing money around from one recipient to another, "thereby reducing the private resources available to other arts organizations in a specific community."^eighteen Indeed, a report by the Clan of American Cultures (AAC) revealed that private funders institute major museum exhibits, opera, ballet, symphony orchestras, and public boob tube to exist "attractive" for donors without an official government postage stamp.¹⁹

Economist Tyler Cowen likewise sees an ominous effect to government arts programs: "One time donors believe that regime has accepted the responsibility for maintaining culture, they will be less willing to give."^twenty This analysis is consistent with recent public statements from foundation executives that the private sector volition not make up the gap resulting from decreases in NEA funding, despite record levels of private giving in recent years. Cowen's decision: "The government can best support the arts by leaving them lonely, offering background aid through the taxation system and the enforcement of copyright."²¹

Reason #4: The NEA Lowers the Quality of American Art

NEA funding also threatens the independence of fine art and of artists. Recognizing how government subsidies threaten creative inspiration, Ralph Waldo Emerson declared that "Beauty volition not come at the call of the legislature.... It will come, as always, unannounced, and jump up between the anxiety of brave and earnest men."²² Recent critics repeat Emerson'due south creed. McGill University Management Professor Reuven Brenner has alleged: "The NEA's opponents have it correct. Bureaucratic civilisation is non genuine civilisation.... It was the unsubsidized writers, painters and musicians-imprisoned in their homes if they were lucky, in asylums or in gulags if they weren't-who created lasting culture."²³

Indeed, to many of the NEA's critics, the thought of a federal "seal of approval" on art may exist the "greatest anathema of all."²⁴ Thus, to maintain its editorial independence, The New Criterion, a journal edited past former New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer, has rejected NEA funding since its founding some 15 years agone. In 1983, Kramer was a vocal, principled critic of an NEA programme offering subsidies to art critics; his opposition forced the bureau to scrap the grants.²⁵

When regime gets in the business of subsidizing fine art, the impact upon art is often pernicious. According to Bruce Bustard, writer of a catalogue for the current retrospective on art funded through President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Public Works of Art Project," notes that the "New Bargain produced no true masterpieces." Instead, as Washington Post columnist James Glassman declared, the PWA "stifle[d] creativity," producing works "that are dreary, unimaginative condescending and political."²⁶

Cowen notes that the "NEA attempts to create a mini-industrial policy for the arts. But governments have a terrible record for choosing time to come winners and losers, whether in business organisation or the arts."²⁷ Government subsidies often tin can hurt the quality of fine art by promoting a new cult of mediocrity. Rice has pointed out that the NEA helps the well-continued and the well-established at the expense of less sophisticated-and maybe more talented-outsiders.²⁸ The NEA thereby reduces the importance of pop appeal for the arts, substituting instead the need to please a third-party government patron, and thus driving a wedge between artists and audiences.

In his major comparative report of subsidized and unsubsidized art in Great Uk, Sawers noted that government subsidies actually work to reduce choice and diverseness in the creative marketplace by encouraging artists to emulate each other in order to achieve success in the grants process. Privately funded venues, thus, are more artistically flexible than publicly funded ones. (For example, information technology was private orchestras that introduced the "early music" movement into United kingdom.²⁹) In improver, such favoritism endangers funding for otherwise worthy arts organizations just because "they do not receive a public arts agency matching grant."³⁰

The threat to quality fine art from federal subsidies was already crystal articulate to Toffler in the 1960s: "Recognizing the reality of the danger of political or bureaucratic interference in the process of artistic decision making, the principle should exist established that the The states government will make admittedly no grants to independent arts institutions-direct or through the states-to underwrite operating expenses or the costs of artistic production. Proposals for a national arts foundation that would distribute funds to foster experiment, innovation...are on the wrong track. They ask the government to make decisions in a field in which information technology has vested political interests."³¹

Reason #5: The NEA Volition Go along to Fund Pornography

In Nov 1996, in a 2-ane determination, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a 1992 ruling in the "NEA 4" case of Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes-all "performance artists" whose grant requests were denied on grounds their art lacked merit.³² The Court ruled that the 1990 statutory requirement that the Endowment consider "general standards of decency and respect" in application grants was unconstitutional.³³ The congressional reauthorization of the agency in 1990 had added this "decency provision" in keeping with recommendations of the Presidential Commission headed by John Brademas and Leonard Garment.

Without such a "decency" standard, the NEA tin can subsidize whatever type of art it chooses. Equally a upshot, attorney Bruce Fein called the Court of Appeals conclusion a recipe for "government subsidized depravity" that must (if not reversed by the Supreme Court) strength Congress to "abolish the NEA, an ignoble experiment that, like Prohibition, has not improved with historic period."³⁴ Literary critic Jonathan Yardley, writing in the Washington Post, declared: "Simply fools-of whom, alas, in the Ôarts customs' there are many-would argue that the federal authorities is obliged to underwrite obscene, pornographic or otherwise offensive "art."³⁵

There is no shortage of examples of indecent material supported directly or indirectly past the NEA. Withal, Jane Alexander has never criticized whatsoever of these NEA grantees publicly. And the Clinton Administration has yet to file an appeal of the Ninth Circuit's decision. Moreover, no Member of Congress has yet attempted to provide a legislative gear up that would require NEA grant recipients to abide past general standards of decency in their work.

On March half-dozen, 1997, Congressman Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), Chairman of the Instruction and Workforce Subcommittee that has oversight over the NEA, complained near books published by an NEA-funded press chosen "Fiction Collective 2," which he described as an "offense to the senses." Hoekstra cited four Fiction Commonage 2 books and noted that the publisher's parent organization had received an additional $45,000 grant to found a Earth Wide Web site. Co-ordinate to The Washington Times, the NEA granted $25,000 to Fiction Commonage 2, which featured works containing sexual torture, incest, kid sex, sadomasochism, and child sex; the "excerpts depict a scene in which a brother-sister team rape their younger sister, the torture of a Mexican male person prostitute and oral sex betwixt two women."³⁶ Pat Trueman, former Main of the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section of the United States Department of Justice Criminal Division, characterized the works as "troubling" and said the NEA posed a "straight threat to the prosecution" of obscenity and child pornography because of its official stamp on such material.³⁷Incredibly, the NEA continues to defend such funding decisions publicly. "Fiction Collective 2 is a highly respected, pre-eminent publisher of innovative, quality fiction," NEA spokeswoman Cherie Simon said.³⁸

The current controversy is nothing new for the NEA. In Nov 1996, Representative Hoekstra questioned NEA funding of a film distributor handling "patently offensive and possibly pornographic movies-several of which appear to deal with the sexuality of children."³⁹ He noted the NEA gave $112,700 over three years to "Women Make Movies," which subsidized distribution of films including:

• "Ten Cents a Dance," a 3-vignette video in which "two women awkwardly hash out their mutual attraction." It "depicts bearding bathroom sex between 2 men" and includes an "ironic episode of heterosexual telephone sex."
• "Sexual practice Fish" portrays a "furious montage of oral sexual practice, public rest-room cruising and...tropical fish," the itemize says.
• "Coming Domicile" talks of the "sexy fun of trying to fit a lesbian couple in a bathtub!"
• "Seventeen Rooms" purports to answer the question, "What do lesbians do in bed?"
• "BloodSisters" reveals a "diverse cantankerous-section of the lesbian [sadomasochistic] community."

Three other films center on the sexual or lesbian experiences of girls age 12 and under. "These listings have the appearance of a veritable taxpayer-funded peep show," said Hoekstra in a letter to NEA Chairman Alexander. He noted that the distributor was circulating films of Annie Sprinkle, a pornographic "performance artist" who appeared at "The Kitchen," a New York venue receiving NEA support.⁴⁰ In response, The New York Times launched an advertising hominem attack on Hoekstra (while neglecting to mention that The New York Times Visitor Foundation had sponsored Sprinkle's operation at one time).⁴¹

Another frequent response supporters of the NEA make to such criticism is to claim that instances of funding pornography and other indecent material were simple mistakes. But such "mistakes" seem office of a regular blueprint of back up for indecency, repeated year subsequently year. This pattern is well-documented in the appendix to this paper.

Reason #six: The NEA Promotes Politically Correct Art

A radical virus of multiculturalism, moreover, has permanently infected the agency, causing artistic efforts to be evaluated by race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation instead of artistic merit.⁴² In 1993, Roger Kimball reported that an "effort to impose quotas and politically right thinking" was "taking precedence over mundane considerations of quality."⁴³ Perhaps the most prominent case of reverse discrimination was the cancellation of a grant to the Hudson Review, which based its selections on "literary merit."⁴⁴

More recently, Jan Breslauer wrote in The Washington Mail service that multiculturalism was now "systemic" at the agency.⁴⁵ Breslauer, theater critic for The Los Angeles Times, pointed out that "private grantees are required to conform to the NEA'southward specifications" and the "fine art globe'south version of affirmative activity" has had "a greatly corrosive effect on the American arts-pigeonholing artists and pressuring them to produce work that satisfies a politically correct calendar rather than their best creative instincts." NEA funding of "race-based politics" has encouraged ethnic separatism and Balkanization at the expense of a shared American culture. Because of federal dollars, Breslauer discovered, "Artists were routinely placed on bills, in seasons, or in exhibits because of who they were rather than what kind of fine art they'd made" and "artistic directors began to push artists toward `purer' (read: stereotypical) expressions of the ethnicity they were paying them to represent."⁴⁶ The result, Breslauer concluded, is that "nearly people in the arts establishment continue to defer, at least publicly, to the demands of political correctness."⁴⁷

Aside from such breathy cultural engineering, the NEA also seems intent on pushing "art" that offers little more than than a decidedly left-wing agenda:

• Concluding summer, the Phoenix Fine art Museum, a recipient of NEA funding, presented an showroom featuring: an American flag in a toilet, an American flag made out of human skin, and a flag on the museum floor to be stepped upon. Fabian Montoya, an 11-year-old boy, picked upwards the American flag to rescue information technology. Museum curators replaced it, prompting Representative Matt Salmon (R-AZ) and the Phoenix American Legion to applaud the boy's patriotism past presenting him with a flag that had flown over the U.Southward. Capitol. Whereas the American Legion, Senator Bob Dole, and House Speaker Newt Gingrich condemned the showroom, NEA Chairman Alexander remained conspicuously silent.
• Artist Robbie Conal plastered "NEWTWIT" posters all over Washington, D.C., and sold them at the NEA-subsidized Washington Project for the Arts.⁴⁸
• And the NEA nevertheless has not fully answered a 1996 query from Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) for details of its support to the (at present defunct) Mission Cultural Middle for Latino Arts in San Francisco, which had received an estimated $30,000 per yr from the NEA since the early on 1980s. The reason for the inquiry was to decide what the NEA knew well-nigh the activities of one of the leaders of the middle, Gilberto Osorio. Osorio co-founded the center in 1977, and since had been exposed as a commandante in the FMLN guerrilla command during the civil war in El salvador past San Francisco journalist Stephen Schwartz.⁴⁹ One of the FMLN missions undertaken while Osorio had been chief of operations was a June 19, 1985, assault on a restaurant in San Salvador that killed four U.S. Marines and two civilian employees of the Wang Corporation. In 1982, Osorio reportedly had ordered that any American institute in San Vicente province be executed. Schwartz concluded, "some of their [NEA] grantees may be guilty of more than just crimes against proficient taste."⁵⁰

Reason #7: The NEA Wastes Resources

Similar any federal bureaucracy, the NEA wastes tax dollars on administrative overhead and bureaucracy. Anecdotes of other forms of NEA waste material are legion. The Cato Institute's Sheldon Richman and David Boaz note that "Thanks to an NEA grantee, the American taxpayers once paid $1,500 for a verse form, `lighght.' That wasn't the championship or a typo. That was the entire verse form."⁵¹ In addition to such frivolities, the Endowment diverts resources from creative activities every bit artists are lured from producing art to courting federal grant dollars and fifty-fifty attending demonstrations in Washington, D.C.

There are other ways that the NEA wastes tax dollars: Author Alice Goldfarb Marquis estimates that approximately half of NEA funds get to organizations that vestibule the authorities for more coin.⁵² Not only has the NEA politicized art, but because federal grant dollars are fungible, they tin be used for other purposes besides the support of quality art. In improver, approximately 19 per centum of the NEA's full budget is spent on administrative expenses-an unusually high figure for a government program.⁵³

As noted above, Sawers's comparative report of British fine arts noted trivial difference in the quality of art betwixt subsidized and unsubsidized venues. Sawers did uncover one major difference, however, between subsidized and unsubsidized companies: unsubsidized companies had fewer, if any, performers nether contract, relying instead on freelance staff. Stock-still and total costs for unsubsidized companies were, therefore, substantially lower than those of the subsidized companies. Subsidized venues kept "more permanent staff on their payroll" instead of lowering ticket prices.⁵⁴ Subsidies, thus, result in higher ticket prices to force the public to subsidize swollen arts bureaucracies.

Reason #8: The NEA Is Beyond Reform

In 1990, the Presidential Commission on the NEA, headed by John Brademas and Leonard Garment, ended that the NEA had an obligation to maintain a high standard of decency and respect because it distributed taxpayer dollars. The recent record of the agency, and the November 1996 appellate court decision in the case of the "NEA Four," get in unlikely that the Endowment will exist able to ever laurels that recommendation. NEA Chairman Alexander has not condemned the continued subsidies for indecent art nor explained how such grant requests managed to get through her "reorganization." Unfortunately, not a single Senator or Representative has asked her to practice and then.

Recent history shows that despite cosmetic "reorganizations" at the NEA, the Endowment is impervious to genuine alter considering of the specific arts constituencies it serves. Every few years, whether it be by Nancy Hanks in the Nixon Administration, Livingston Biddle in the Carter Assistants, or Frank Hodsoll in the Reagan Administration, NEA administrators promise that reorganization will be bring massive change to the agency. All these efforts have failed. It was, in fact, under Mr. Hodsoll'due south tenure in the Reagan Administration that grants were awarded to Robert Mapplethorpe, known for his homerotic photography, and to Andres Serrano, infamous for creating the exhibit "Piss Christ."

Recent changes in the titles of NEA departments have had little consequence. In the words of Alice Goldfarb Marquis, "All Ms. Alexander has done is, to money a phrase, re-adapt the deckchairs on the Titanic."⁵⁵ Indeed, Alexander has retained veteran NEA executive Ana Steele in a top management position to this date. Steele canonical the payment of over $250,000 to the "NEA 4" while serving equally acting chairman in 1993.

The NEA claims to accept changed, no doubt in hopes of mollifying congressional critics. Nevertheless the NEA has connected to fund organizations that have subsidized materials offensive to ordinary citizens while attempting to recast its public image as a friend of children, families, and didactics. It is a "2-runway" ploy, speaking of family values to the full general public and privately of another agenda to the arts lobby. For example, Chairman Alexander has defended NEA fellowships to private artists, prohibited by Congress afterward years of scandals. In her congressional testimony of March 13, 1997, she declared: "I ask you over again in the strongest terms to elevator the ban on back up to individual artists."⁵⁶

To transport its signal to the avant garde arts constituency, the NEA continues to fund a handful of "cut-border" organizations in each grantmaking bicycle. The NEA has fifty-fifty maintained its peer-review panel procedure used to review grants, by irresolute its proper name to "discipline review"; The Heritage Foundation cited this process in 1991 every bit ridden with corruption and conflicts of involvement, and as a major factor in the Endowment's option of offensive and indecent proposals.⁵⁷

Despite the rhetoric of reform issuing from its lobbyists, and five years of reduced budgets, the reality remains defiantly unchanged at the NEA.

Reason #9: Abolishing the NEA Will Prove to the American Public that Congress Is Willing to Eliminate Wasteful Spending

President Clinton proposes to spend $i.seven trillion in his FY 1998 budget. Over the next five years, the Assistants seeks to increase federal spending by $249 billion.⁵⁸ Further, Clinton also proposes to increase the NEA's funding to $119,240,000, a ascent of 20 percent.⁵⁹ These dramatic increases in spending come up in the historic period when the federal debt exceeded $five trillion for the first time and on the heels of a 1996 federal arrears of $107 billion.

In this era of monetary constraint, in which the need to reduce the federal deficit is forcing fundamental choices about vital needs-such every bit housing and medical treat the elderly-such boondoggles every bit the NEA should be amidst the beginning programs to be eliminated. Representative Wally Herger (R-CA), citing a contempo NEA grant to his own constituents (the California Indian Handbasket Weavers Association), pointedly said that he "does non believe that in an era of tight federal dollars, basket weaving should have a top priority in Congress."^lx Whenever American families accept to cut make cuts in their spending, nonessential spending-such every bit entertainment expenses-are the kickoff to become. If Congress cannot stand up up and eliminate the $99.5 million FY 1997 cribbing for the NEA, how volition it be able to brand the case for far more key budget cuts?

Reason #10: Funding the NEA Disturbs the U.S. Tradition of Limited Government

In retrospect, turmoil over the NEA was anticipated, due to the long tradition in the United states of america of opposing the employ of federal revenue enhancement dollars to fund the arts. During the Ramble Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, delegate Charles Pinckney introduced a motion calling for the federal regime to subsidize the arts in the U.s.. Although the Founding Fathers were cultured men who knew firsthand of diverse European systems for public arts patronage, they overwhelmingly rejected Pickney's suggestion because of their belief in limited, constitutional authorities. Accordingly, nowhere in its listing of powers enumerated and delegated to the federal government does the Constitution specify a power to subsidize the arts.

Moreover, as David Boaz of the Cato Institute argues, federal arts subsidies pose the danger of federal control over expression: "Regime funding of annihilation involves government controlÉ. As nosotros should not desire an established church, then nosotros should non want established art."⁶¹ As Cowen notes, "When the government promotes its favored fine art, the most innovative creators find it more difficult to rise to the pinnacle.... But the truthful costs of government funding practise not show up on our tax nib. The NEA and other government arts agencies politicize art and jeopardize the principles of autonomous government."⁶² The French government, for example, tried to suppress Impressionism through its control of the Academy.

The deep-seated American belief against public support of artists continues today. Public opinion polls, moreover, show that a majority of Americans favor emptying of the NEA when the agency is mentioned by name.⁶³ A June 1995 Wall Street Journal-Peter Hart poll showed 54 percentage of Americans favored eliminating the NEA entirely versus 38 percent in favor of maintaining it at whatever level of funding. An earlier Jan 19, 1995, Los Angeles Times poll found 69 per centum of the American people favored cut the NEA upkeep.⁶⁴ More than recently, a poll performed by The Polling Visitor in March 1997 demonstrated that 57 percent of Americans favor the suggestion that "Congress should end funding the NEA with federal taxpayer dollars and instead leave funding decisions with state government and individual groups."

Conclusion

Later more than iii decades, the National Endowment for the Arts has failed in its mission to raise cultural life in the United States. Despite numerous attempts to reinvent it, the NEA continues to promote the worst excesses of multiculturalism and political correctness, subsidizing fine art that demeans the values of ordinary Americans. As the federal debt soars to over $5 trillion, information technology is time to terminate the NEA as a wasteful, unjustified, unnecessary, and unpopular federal expenditure. Ending the NEA would be skillful for the arts and skilful for America.

Appendix

The NEA has used tax dollars to subsidize pornography, sadomasochism, and other forms of indecency. Here are some selected examples:

• In 1995, the NEA-funded "Highways," a venue featuring a summer "Ecco Lesbo/Ecco Human" festival in Santa Monica, California. The festival featured a plan actually called "Not for Republicans" in which a performance artist ruminated on "Sex with Newt's Mom." The artistic manager was Tim Miller (of the "NEA Four"). Erstwhile Clinton adviser Paul Begala agreed that items in the published schedule were obscene.⁶⁵
• NEA grants announced in December 1996 included $20,000 to the "Woolly Mammoth Theater" venue for Tim Miller, 1 of the "NEA Iv" performance artists. He had stripped twice, talked about picking up homosexual prostitutes, and asked members of the audition to blow on his genitals in a 1995 production entitled "Naked Breath." The NEA also awarded $25,000 to "Camera News, Inc.," also known as "Third World Newsreel," a New York distributor of Marxist revolutionary propaganda films.⁶⁶
• In June 1996, Representative Hoekstra raised questions nigh "The Watermelon Woman." The motion-picture show was funded by a $31,500 NEA grant. It contained what i review described as the "hottest dyke sex scene ever recorded on celluloid." "I had high hopes that Jane Alexander would foreclose further outrages past the NEA, but apparently even she-nice lady that she is-lacks the power and the will to put an end to the NEA's obsession with handing out the taxpayers' coin to self-proclaimed `artists' whose mentality is only so much flotsam floating around in a sewer," said Senator Jesse Helms.⁶⁷
• Hilton Kramer, in a March 1996 upshot of The New York Observer, noted a new "disgusting" Whitney exhibition he characterized as a "jolly rape of the public sensibilities." The Whitney was showing the work of Edward Kienholz, and "it nearly goes without saying that this America-every bit-a merde [French for excrement] show is supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts." The Whitney Museum recently received the largest grant issued by the NEA thus far in 1997-$400,000.
• The Sunday Maine-Telegram, reported on March 3, 1996, that William L. Pope, a Professor at Bates College, received $20,000 grant in the final round of NEA grants to private functioning artists. He intended to use the coin for at least two projects. In one, he would chain himself to an ATM machine in New York City wearing simply his underwear. In the other, he "plans to walk the streets of New York wearing a vi-foot-long white tube similar a codpiece. He's rigged information technology upwards so he can put an egg in one end, and it volition whorl out the imitation, white penis." The Maine-Telegram noted that the NEA individual fellowship plan "will get out with a bang, at least with this grant."
• "Sexual activity Is," a pornographic video displaying the NEA credit, is withal in distribution.
• Bob Flanagan's "Super Masochist," featuring sexual torture, and an Andres Serrano exhibit featuring "Piss Christ" were shown at the NEA-funded New Museum in New York City. Flanagan (at present deceased) was recently the star of a flick at the Sundance Film Festival entitled "Sick," which showed him nailing his male organs to a wooden plank. "Sick" is also on the 1997 schedule of the New Directors/New Films series co-sponsored by the Lincoln Middle for the Performing Arts and the Museum of Modern Fine art in New York City. Both institutions have been NEA grant recipients, and Lincoln Center chief Nathan Leventhal is ane of President Clinton'southward nominees for the National Council on the Arts. His nomination is pending in the Senate.
• Ron Athey's video of his ritual torture and bloodletting, subsidized indirectly through tour promotion at NEA venues like Walker Fine art Gallery and PS 122 in New York. (Walker Art Center grants actually increased in the year subsequently the museum booked Athey.)
• Joel-Peter Witkin, a iv-time recipient of NEA individual fellowships whose photograph of severed heads and chopped upward bodies were displayed by Senator Helms on the Senate floor ii years ago as testify of the moral corruption of the NEA (Helms discussed ane featuring a human being's head existence used as a flowerpot). Witkin was honored with a retrospective at New York'southward NEA-funded Guggenheim museum. Even The New York Times condemned the show as "gruesome."
• Karen Finley, likewise of the "NEA Four," brought her new "performance piece" to an NEA-funded venue in Boston.
• Holly Hughes, another of the "NEA Four" (and recipient of a 1994 individual fellowship), brought her act to an NEA-funded institution in suburban Virginia.
• New York City's New Museum, an NEA-funded operation, hosted a retrospective of the work of Andres Serrano, which once again included an exhibit of "Piss Christ."
• New York'south Museum of Modern Art, funded by the NEA, hosted an NEA-funded exhibit of Bruce Nauman's work, too displayed at the Smithsonian'southward Hirshhorn Museum, which included neon signs reading "South- and Die" and "F- and Die."
• The NEA literature program subsidized the author of a book entitled The Gay 100, which claims that such historical figures as Saint Augustine were homosexuals.

Endnotes

¹ Laurence Jarvik is an Adjunct Scholar at The Heritage Foundation, Editor of The National Endowments: A Critical Symposium (2nd Thoughts Books, 1995), and author of PBS: Behind the Screen (Prima, 1997).

² Alvin Toffler, The Civilisation Consumers: A Study of Art and Affluence in America (New York: Random House, 1973), p. 188.

ⁱⁱⁱ A typical sold-out performance at the Met brings in near $485,000 in ticket revenue, given the average ticket toll of $125 and a seating capacity of 3,877.

⁴ Artistic America: Study of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, Washington, D.C., Feb 1997

⁵ Joseph Ziegler, Testimony before House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, March 5, 1997.

⁶ Giving United states 1996 (New York: AAFRC Trust For Philanthropy, 1996).

⁷ Judith Miller, "Big Arts Groups Starting Drives for New Funds," The New York Times, February iii, 1997, p. 1

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ David Sawers, "Should the Taxpayer Support the Arts?" Current Controversies No. 7, Found for Economical Diplomacy, London, 1993, p. 22

¹⁰ William Craig Rice, "I Hear America Singing: The Arts Volition Blossom Without the NEA," Policy Review, March/April 1997, pp. 37-45.

¹¹ Derrick Max, "Staff Briefing on the National Endowment for the Arts," U.S. Business firm of Representatives Committee on Didactics and the Workforce, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, p. 29.

¹² Edward C. Banfield, The Democratic Muse (New York: Basic Books, 1984); as cited in "Cultural Agencies," Cato Handbook for Congress: 105th Congress (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 1997).

¹³ Sawers, "Should the Taxpayer Support the Arts?" p. 22.

^fourteen Heritage Tabulations from 1993 IRS Public Use File.

¹⁵ Jane Alexander, Testimony to the House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, March thirteen, 1997.

¹⁶ Tom Dardis, The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1982).

¹⁷ See Jane Alexander, Testimony to the Senate Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, May 8, 1996.

^xviii David B. Pankratz, Multiculturalism and Public Arts Policy (Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 1993), p. 55.

¹⁹ Ibid., p. 56.

²⁰ Tyler Cowen, draft ms. for Chapter 6, "Market Liberalization vs. Regime Reaction" in Enterprise and the Arts, forthcoming from Harvard University Press, pp. 22-31.

²¹ Ibid.

²² Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Fine art," in Piece of work (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1883), p. 342.

²³ Reuven Brenner, "Civilisation By Committee," The Wall Street Journal, February 27, 1997.

²⁴ Laurence Jarvik and Nancy Strickland, "Forget the Speeches: The NEA Is a Noise," Baltimore Lord's day, January 22, 1995.

²⁵ Hilton Kramer, "Criticism Endowed: reflections on a debacle," The New Benchmark, November 1983, pp. 1-5.

²⁶ James K. Glassman, "No Coin for the Arts," The Washington Postal service, April ane, 1997, p. A17.

²⁷ Cowen, "Market Liberalization vs. Government Reaction," pp. 2-22.

²⁸ William Craig Rice, The NewsHour, argue chastened by Elizabeth Farnsworth, March x, 1997.

²⁹ Sawers, "Should the Taxpayer Support the Arts?" p. 39.

^thirty Pankratz, Multiculturalism and Public Arts Policy, p. 55.

³¹ Toffler, The Culture Consumers, p. 200.

³² Diane Haithman, "Did NEA Win Battle, Lose War?" Los Angeles Times, November 13, 1996, p. F1.

³³ Affirming stance of Estimate James R. Browning, U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, filed Nov five, 1996, in Karen Finley et al., v. National Endowment for the Arts.

³⁴ Bruce Fein, "Dollars for Depravity?" The Washington Times, November 19, 1996.

³⁵ Jonathan Yardley, "Art and the Handbag of the Beholder," The Washington Mail, March 17, 1997, p. D2.

³⁶ Julia Duin, "NEA Funds `Offense to the Senses,' Lawmakers Lip Arts Agency for Aiding Prurient Publications," The Washington Times, March 8, 1997, p. A2.

³⁷ Patrick A. Trueman, Manager of Governmental Affairs, American Family unit Clan, Testimony before the Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, March five, 1997.

³⁸ Ibid.

³⁹ Representative Pete Hoekstra, letter to NEA Chairman Jane Alexander, November xvi, 1996.

⁴⁰ Ibid.

⁴¹ Frank Rich, "Lesbian Spotter," The New York Times, March 13, 1997, p. A27.

⁴² Come across Pankratz, Multiculturalism and Public Arts Policy.

⁴³ Roger Kimball, "Diversity Quotas at NEA Skewer Magazine," The Wall Street Periodical, June 24, 1993.

⁴⁴ Ibid.

⁴⁵ Jan Breslauer, "The NEA'south Real Criminal offence: Agency Pigeonholes Artists by Ethnicity," The Washington Post, March sixteen, 1997, p. G1.

⁴⁶ Ibid.

⁴⁷ Ibid., p. G8.

⁴⁸ Laurence Jarvik, "Committing Suicide at the NEA," COMINT: A Journal About Public Media, Vol. v, No. one (Spring 1996), p. 44.

⁴⁹ Ibid., p. 46

⁵⁰ Ibid.

⁵¹ "Cultural Agencies," in Cato Handbook for Congress, 105th Congress, (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 1997).

⁵² Alice Goldfarb Marquis, Fine art Lessons: Learning from the Rise and Fall of Public Arts Funding (New York: Basic Books, 1995).

⁵³ Max, "Staff Conference on the National Endowment for the Arts," p. 27.

⁵⁴ Sawers, "Should the Taxpayer Support the Arts?" p. 33.

⁵⁵ Alice Goldfarb Marquis, letter to author, February vii, 1997.

⁵⁶ Jane Alexander, Testimony before the Subcommittee on Interior and Related Agencies, U.S. House of Representatives, March 13, 1997 .

⁵⁷ Robert Knight, "The National Endowment for the Arts: Misusing Taxpayer'southward Money," Heritage Foundation Backgrounder No. 803, Jan eighteen, 1991; Robert Knight, "The National Endowment: Information technology'southward Time to Free the Arts," Family unit Enquiry Council Insight, January 1995, p. 1.

⁵⁸ "The Era of Large Government is Back: Talking Points on President Clinton's Fiscal Year 1998 Budget," Heritage Foundation Talking Points No. 17, Feb 24, 1997, p. ane.

⁵⁹ Appendix to the Budget of the The states, p. 1080.

⁶⁰ Judith Miller, "Federal Arts Agency Slices its Smaller Pie," The New York Times, Apr 10, 1997, p. B6.

⁶¹ David Boaz, "The Separation of Fine art and State: Who is going to make decisions?" Vital Speeches of the Day, Vol. LXI, No. 17 (June 15, 1995).

⁶² Cowen, "Market Liberalization vs. Government Reaction," pp. 2-22.

⁶³ Pro-NEA pollsters tend to enquire nearly "the arts," not the federal agency and its record.

⁶⁴ Jarvik, "Committing Suicide at the NEA," p. 44.

⁶⁵ Ibid.

⁶⁶ Julia Duin, "NEA makes grants as fight for life nears, Bureau conducts `business every bit usual' with its selections," The Washington Times, December 19, 1996.

⁶⁷ Julia Duin, "Black lesbian film likely to rekindle arts-funding furor NEA defends graphic comedy," The Washington Times, June 14, 1996.

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Source: https://www.heritage.org/report/ten-good-reasons-eliminate-funding-the-national-endowment-orthe-arts

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