Reasons to Get Rid of the National Endowment for the Arts

Every bit the U.S. Congress struggles to residual the federal upkeep and terminate the decades-long spiral of arrears spending, few programs seem more 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 least afford them, and protects America'southward cultural heritage.

In fact, the NEA is an unwarranted extension of the federal government into the voluntary sector. The Endowment, furthermore, does non promote charitable giving. Despite Endowment claims that its efforts bring art to the inner urban center, the agency offers little more a direct subsidy to the cultured, upper-middle course. Finally, rather than promoting the best in art, the NEA continues to offer revenue enhancement dollars and the federal seal of approval to subsidize "art" that is offensive to most Americans.

At that place are at least x practiced reasons to eliminate funding for the NEA:

Reason #i: The Arts Will Accept More Than Plenty Support without the NEA

The arts were flowering before the NEA came into beingness in 1965. Indeed, the Endowment was created partly because of the tremendous popular appeal of the arts at the time. Alvin Toffler'due south The Culture Consumers, published in 1964, surveyed the booming audience for art in the United States, a side do good of a growing economy and low inflation.² Toffler's book recalls the arts prior to the creation of the NEA-the era of the great Georges Balanchine and Agnes de Mille ballets, for case, when 26 million viewers would turn to CBS broadcasts of Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. In fact, nearly all of the major orchestras in the United States existed before 1965, and will go along to exist later NEA subsidies are concluded.

In spite of the vast splendor created by American artists prior to 1965, partisans of the NEA merits that the arts in the United States would face well-nigh sure demise should the Endowment be abolished. Yet Endowment funding is just a drop in the bucket compared to giving to the arts past individual citizens. For case, in 1996, the Metropolitan Opera of New York received $390,000 from the Endowment, a federal subsidy that totals only 0.29 per centum of the Opera's annual income of $133 meg-and amounts to less than the ticket acquirement for a single sold-out performance.³

The growth of individual-sector charitable giving in recent years has rendered NEA funding relatively insignificant to the arts community. Overall giving to the arts last year totaled most $10 billion⁴-up from $six.v billion in 1991⁵-dwarfing the NEA's federal subsidy. This 40 percent increase in individual giving occurred during the aforementioned period that the NEA budget was reduced by xl percent from approximately $170 one thousand thousand to $99.5 million.⁶ Thus, every bit conservatives had predicted, cutting the federal NEA subsidy coincided with increased individual support for the arts and civilization.

That many major cultural institutions are in the midst of successful fundraising efforts belies the questionable merits of NEA supporters that private giving, no matter how generous, could never compensate for the loss of public funds. As Chart 1 shows, many of these institutional campaigns have fundraising targets many times greater than the NEA's annual federal cribbing of $99.5 million. In New York City, the geographic surface area which receives the largest relative share of NEA funding, the New York Public Library is raising some $430 million (with seventy percent already completed), the Museum of Mod Art, $300 million-450 million (with 30 pct raised), the Metropolitan Museum of Fine art some $300 million (with fourscore percent already obtained).^seven In fact, philanthropist Frederick A. O. Schwartz, Jr., recently told The New York Times that "we've entered a catamenia of institutional excitement comparable only to that which occurred after the Civil War until Globe State of war I when several of the metropolis'southward great civic and cultural institutions were congenital."^eight

In Bully Britain, economist David Sawers's comparative study of subsidized and unsubsidized performing arts concluded that major cultural venues would continue to thrive were government subsidies to exist eliminated. According to Sawers's calculation, fourscore percent 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.)

Even smaller organizations can succeed without depending on the federal regime. As Bradley Scholar William Craig Rice argues cogently in The Heritage Foundation'southward Policy Review, "The arts volition flower without the NEA." His survey shows that many arts venues can easily replace NEA funding, and suggests a number of alternative strategies for those who might observe the disappearance of the federal agency 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 offer little more than than a subsidy to the well-to-do. Ane-fifth of direct NEA grants become to multimillion-dollar arts organizations.¹¹ Harvard University Political Scientist Edward C. Banfield has noted that the "fine art public is at present, equally information technology has e'er been, overwhelmingly middle and upper middle form and above average in income-relatively prosperous people who would probably enjoy art about as much in the absenteeism of subsidies."¹² The poor and the middle form, thus, do good less from public fine art subsidies than does the museum- and orchestra-going upper-middle class. Sawers argues that "those who finance the subsidies through taxes are probable to exist different from and poorer than those who benefit from the subsidies."¹³ In fact, the $99.5 meg that funds the NEA too represents the entire annual tax burden for over 436,000 working-class American families.¹⁴

As part of the Endowment's try to dispel its elitist epitome, Chairman Jane Alexander has led a nationwide campaign painting the NEA as a social welfare program that can help underprivileged youth to fight violence and drugs. In congressional testimony, she has trumpeted her "American Sheet" initiative "to gain a better understanding of how the arts can transform communities."¹⁵ But despite the heartwarming anecdotes, claims for the therapeutic use of the arts are not supported past empirical scientific evidence. Studies that claim to show the arts prevent crime are methodologically questionable, due to bug of cocky selection. 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 high occurrence of alcohol abuse amidst American writers.¹⁶

Reason #3: The NEA Discourages Charitable Gifts to the Arts

Defenders of the NEA debate that the much of its do good lies in its ability to confer an imprimatur, similar to the "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approving," necessary to encourage private support of the arts. NEA officials have asserted frequently that by persuading donors who would otherwise not requite, Endowment support can offer a financial "leverage" of up to ten times the corporeality of a federal grant award.¹⁷ There is little or no empirical testify to support such claims. The merely available written report of "matching grants"-those designed specifically to stimulate giving- concluded that matching grants did not increase full giving to the arts. Instead, "matching grants" appear to shift existing money effectually from one recipient to another, "thereby reducing the individual resources available to other arts organizations in a specific community."¹⁸ Indeed, a study past the Association of American Cultures (AAC) revealed that private funders constitute major museum exhibits, opera, ballet, symphony orchestras, and public television to be "attractive" for donors without an official government stamp.¹⁹

Economist Tyler Cowen also sees an ominous outcome to government arts programs: "Once donors believe that government has accepted the responsibility for maintaining civilisation, they will be less willing to requite."²⁰ This analysis is consistent with contempo public statements from foundation executives that the private sector volition not make up the gap resulting from decreases in NEA funding, despite tape levels of private giving in recent years. Cowen's conclusion: "The government tin best support the arts by leaving them alone, offer background assistance through the revenue enhancement system and the enforcement of copyright."²¹

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

NEA funding besides threatens the independence of art and of artists. Recognizing how government subsidies threaten artistic inspiration, Ralph Waldo Emerson declared that "Dazzler volition not come at the call of the legislature.... It will come up, equally e'er, unannounced, and spring upward betwixt the feet of brave and earnest men."²² Recent critics repeat Emerson's creed. McGill University Management Professor Reuven Brenner has alleged: "The NEA's opponents have it right. Bureaucratic culture is not 18-carat culture.... 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 idea of a federal "seal of approval" on art may be the "greatest anathema of all."²⁴ Thus, to maintain its editorial independence, The New Criterion, a journal edited by former New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer, has rejected NEA funding since its founding some xv years agone. In 1983, Kramer was a vocal, principled critic of an NEA program offer subsidies to fine art critics; his opposition forced the agency to scrap the grants.²⁵

When regime gets in the business of subsidizing art, the touch upon art is often pernicious. According to Bruce Bustard, author of a catalogue for the current retrospective on art funded through President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Public Works of Fine art Project," notes that the "New Bargain produced no true masterpieces." Instead, every bit Washington Mail columnist James Glassman declared, the PWA "stifle[d] inventiveness," 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. Only governments have a terrible record for choosing future winners and losers, whether in business or the arts."²⁷ Authorities subsidies often can hurt the quality of art by promoting a new cult of mediocrity. Rice has pointed out that the NEA helps the well-connected and the well-established at the expense of less sophisticated-and perchance more talented-outsiders.²⁸ The NEA thereby reduces the importance of popular appeal for the arts, substituting instead the demand to please a 3rd-political party authorities patron, and thus driving a wedge betwixt artists and audiences.

In his major comparative study of subsidized and unsubsidized art in Great U.k., Sawers noted that government subsidies actually piece of work to reduce option and diversity in the artistic 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, it was private orchestras that introduced the "early music" movement into Uk.²⁹) In addition, such favoritism endangers funding for otherwise worthy arts organizations merely considering "they do not receive a public arts bureau matching grant."³⁰

The threat to quality art from federal subsidies was already crystal clear 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 be established that the Usa government will make absolutely no grants to independent arts institutions-directly 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 enquire the government to brand decisions in a field in which it has vested political interests."³¹

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

In Nov 1996, in a ii-1 conclusion, the 9th U.S. Excursion Court of Appeals upheld a 1992 ruling in the "NEA Iv" 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 past John Brademas and Leonard Garment.

Without such a "decency" standard, the NEA tin subsidize whatever type of fine art it chooses. As a result, attorney Bruce Fein chosen the Courtroom of Appeals decision a recipe for "government subsidized depravity" that must (if not reversed by the Supreme Courtroom) force Congress to "abolish the NEA, an ignoble experiment that, like Prohibition, has non improved with age."³⁴ Literary critic Jonathan Yardley, writing in the Washington Post, alleged: "But fools-of whom, alas, in the Ôarts community' there are many-would debate that the federal government is obliged to underwrite obscene, pornographic or otherwise offensive "art."³⁵

There is no shortage of examples of indecent textile supported direct or indirectly past the NEA. Nevertheless, Jane Alexander has never criticized any of these NEA grantees publicly. And the Clinton Administration has even so to file an entreatment of the Ninth Circuit's decision. Moreover, no Member of Congress has all the same attempted to provide a legislative fix that would require NEA grant recipients to abide by general standards of decency in their work.

On March 6, 1997, Congressman Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), Chairman of the Didactics and Workforce Subcommittee that has oversight over the NEA, complained about books published by an NEA-funded press called "Fiction Collective two," which he described as an "offense to the senses." Hoekstra cited iv Fiction Collective 2 books and noted that the publisher's parent organization had received an additional $45,000 grant to establish a Globe Broad Web site. Co-ordinate to The Washington Times, the NEA granted $25,000 to Fiction Collective 2, which featured works containing sexual torture, incest, child sex activity, sadomasochism, and child sex; the "excerpts describe a scene in which a blood brother-sister team rape their younger sis, the torture of a Mexican male prostitute and oral sex between two women."³⁶ Pat Trueman, former Main of the Kid Exploitation and Obscenity Section of the U.s. Department of Justice Criminal Sectionalization, characterized the works as "troubling" and said the NEA posed a "straight threat to the prosecution" of obscenity and kid pornography considering of its official postage on such fabric.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 November 1996, Representative Hoekstra questioned NEA funding of a pic distributor handling "plain 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:

• "X Cents a Dance," a three-vignette video in which "two women awkwardly hash out their mutual attraction." It "depicts anonymous bathroom sex between two men" and includes an "ironic episode of heterosexual phone sex."
• "Sex Fish" portrays a "furious montage of oral sex, public residue-room cruising and...tropical fish," the catalog says.
• "Coming Home" 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 "various cantankerous-section of the lesbian [sadomasochistic] customs."

3 other films center on the sexual or lesbian experiences of girls historic period 12 and under. "These listings accept the advent of a veritable taxpayer-funded peep bear witness," said Hoekstra in a letter to NEA Chairman Alexander. He noted that the distributor was circulating films of Annie Sprinkle, a pornographic "operation artist" who appeared at "The Kitchen," a New York venue receiving NEA support.^forty In response, The New York Times launched an ad hominem attack on Hoekstra (while neglecting to mention that The New York Times Company Foundation had sponsored Sprinkle'southward performance 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 elementary mistakes. Merely such "mistakes" seem function of a regular pattern of support for indecency, repeated year after year. This design is well-documented in the appendix to this paper.

Reason #6: The NEA Promotes Politically Correct Art

A radical virus of multiculturalism, moreover, has permanently infected the bureau, causing artistic efforts to exist evaluated by race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation instead of artistic merit.⁴² In 1993, Roger Kimball reported that an "try to impose quotas and politically right thinking" was "taking precedence over mundane considerations of quality."⁴³ Perhaps the about prominent example 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 Post that multiculturalism was now "systemic" at the agency.⁴⁵ Breslauer, theater critic for The Los Angeles Times, pointed out that "individual grantees are required to conform to the NEA'southward specifications" and the "art world's version of affirmative activeness" has had "a profoundly corrosive effect on the American arts-pigeonholing artists and pressuring them to produce work that satisfies a politically correct agenda 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 considering of who they were rather than what kind of art they'd fabricated" and "creative directors began to push button artists toward `purer' (read: stereotypical) expressions of the ethnicity they were paying them to stand for."⁴⁶ The result, Breslauer concluded, is that "about people in the arts establishment proceed to defer, at least publicly, to the demands of political correctness."⁴⁷

Aside from such breathy cultural applied science, the NEA also seems intent on pushing "art" that offers little more than than a incomparably left-wing calendar:

• Last summer, the Phoenix Art Museum, a recipient of NEA funding, presented an exhibit featuring: an American flag in a toilet, an American flag fabricated out of human skin, and a flag on the museum floor to exist stepped upon. Fabian Montoya, an 11-year-one-time boy, picked upwards the American flag to rescue it. Museum curators replaced it, prompting Representative Matt Salmon (R-AZ) and the Phoenix American Legion to applaud the boy'south patriotism past presenting him with a flag that had flown over the U.S. Capitol. Whereas the American Legion, Senator Bob Dole, and House Speaker Newt Gingrich condemned the exhibit, 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 notwithstanding has not fully answered a 1996 query from Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) for details of its back up to the (now defunct) Mission Cultural Centre for Latino Arts in San Francisco, which had received an estimated $thirty,000 per year from the NEA since the early 1980s. The reason for the inquiry was to make up one's mind what the NEA knew about the activities of one of the leaders of the center, Gilberto Osorio. Osorio co-founded the centre in 1977, and since had been exposed as a commandante in the FMLN guerrilla control during the civil state of war in El Salvador by San Francisco announcer Stephen Schwartz.⁴⁹ One of the FMLN missions undertaken while Osorio had been chief of operations was a June 19, 1985, assail on a eating place in San Salvador that killed four U.S. Marines and 2 civilian employees of the Wang Corporation. In 1982, Osorio reportedly had ordered that any American plant in San Vicente province be executed. Schwartz concluded, "some of their [NEA] grantees may exist guilty of more than just crimes confronting good gustatory modality."⁵⁰

Reason #7: The NEA Wastes Resources

Similar any federal bureaucracy, the NEA wastes taxation dollars on administrative overhead and bureaucracy. Anecdotes of other forms of NEA waste are legion. The Cato Institute'southward Sheldon Richman and David Boaz notation that "Thanks to an NEA grantee, the American taxpayers once paid $one,500 for a poem, `lighght.' That wasn't the title or a typo. That was the entire poem."⁵¹ In addition to such frivolities, the Endowment diverts resources from creative activities as artists are lured from producing art to courting federal grant dollars and even attending demonstrations in Washington, D.C.

There are other ways that the NEA wastes tax dollars: Writer Alice Goldfarb Marquis estimates that approximately one-half of NEA funds get to organizations that antechamber the government for more than money.⁵² Not just has the NEA politicized fine art, but because federal grant dollars are fungible, they tin be used for other purposes also the support of quality art. In improver, approximately 19 percentage of the NEA's total budget is spent on administrative expenses-an unusually high figure for a government plan.⁵³

As noted above, Sawers's comparative study of British fine arts noted little difference in the quality of fine art betwixt subsidized and unsubsidized venues. Sawers did uncover 1 major difference, however, betwixt subsidized and unsubsidized companies: unsubsidized companies had fewer, if any, performers nether contract, relying instead on freelance staff. Fixed 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, issue in higher ticket prices to force the public to subsidize bloated arts bureaucracies.

Reason #eight: The NEA Is Beyond Reform

In 1990, the Presidential Commission on the NEA, headed by John Brademas and Leonard Garment, concluded that the NEA had an obligation to maintain a loftier standard of decency and respect because it distributed taxpayer dollars. The recent record of the agency, and the Nov 1996 appellate court conclusion in the example of the "NEA 4," brand information technology unlikely that the Endowment will be able to always honor that recommendation. NEA Chairman Alexander has non condemned the connected subsidies for indecent fine art nor explained how such grant requests managed to get through her "reorganization." Unfortunately, non a single Senator or Representative has asked her to exercise so.

Contempo history shows that despite cosmetic "reorganizations" at the NEA, the Endowment is impervious to genuine modify considering of the specific arts constituencies it serves. Every few years, whether it exist by Nancy Hanks in the Nixon Assistants, Livingston Biddle in the Carter Assistants, or Frank Hodsoll in the Reagan Administration, NEA administrators promise that reorganization will be bring massive modify to the agency. All these efforts have failed. It was, in fact, nether 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."

Contempo changes in the titles of NEA departments accept had lilliputian effect. In the words of Alice Goldfarb Marquis, "All Ms. Alexander has done is, to coin a phrase, re-adapt the deckchairs on the Titanic."⁵⁵ Indeed, Alexander has retained veteran NEA executive Ana Steele in a top direction position to this appointment. Steele approved the payment of over $250,000 to the "NEA Four" while serving every bit acting chairman in 1993.

The NEA claims to have changed, no dubiety in hopes of mollifying congressional critics. Still the NEA has continued to fund organizations that accept subsidized materials offensive to ordinary citizens while attempting to recast its public image as a friend of children, families, and education. It is a "two-rails" ploy, speaking of family values to the general public and privately of another agenda to the arts entrance hall. For case, Chairman Alexander has defended NEA fellowships to individual artists, prohibited by Congress afterward years of scandals. In her congressional testimony of March thirteen, 1997, she declared: "I inquire you again in the strongest terms to lift the ban on support to individual artists."⁵⁶

To send its betoken to the avant garde arts constituency, the NEA continues to fund a handful of "cutting-edge" organizations in each grantmaking cycle. The NEA has even maintained its peer-review panel process used to review grants, past changing its name to "subject area review"; The Heritage Foundation cited this process in 1991 as ridden with corruption and conflicts of involvement, and as a major cistron in the Endowment's selection of offensive and indecent proposals.⁵⁷

Despite the rhetoric of reform issuing from its lobbyists, and 5 years of reduced budgets, the reality remains defiantly unchanged at the NEA.

Reason #9: Abolishing the NEA Volition Bear witness to the American Public that Congress Is Willing to Eliminate Wasteful Spending

President Clinton proposes to spend $i.7 trillion in his FY 1998 budget. Over the next five years, the Administration seeks to increment federal spending by $249 billion.⁵⁸ Further, Clinton also proposes to increment the NEA'south funding to $119,240,000, a ascent of 20 percent.⁵⁹ These dramatic increases in spending come in the historic period when the federal debt exceeded $5 trillion for the first time and on the heels of a 1996 federal arrears of $107 billion.

In this era of budgetary constraint, in which the need to reduce the federal deficit is forcing key choices nigh vital needs-such equally housing and medical care for the elderly-such boondoggles equally the NEA should be amid the offset programs to be eliminated. Representative Wally Herger (R-CA), citing a recent NEA grant to his own constituents (the California Indian Handbasket Weavers Clan), pointedly said that he "does not believe that in an era of tight federal dollars, basket weaving should accept a tiptop priority in Congress."^sixty Whenever American families have to cut brand cuts in their spending, nonessential spending-such equally entertainment expenses-are the first to go. If Congress cannot stand up and eliminate the $99.5 million FY 1997 cribbing for the NEA, how volition it be able to make the example for far more fundamental budget cuts?

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

In retrospect, turmoil over the NEA was anticipated, due to the long tradition in the United States of opposing the use of federal tax dollars to fund the arts. During the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, delegate Charles Pinckney introduced a motion calling for the federal regime to subsidize the arts in the United States. Although the Founding Fathers were cultured men who knew firsthand of various European systems for public arts patronage, they overwhelmingly rejected Pickney's suggestion considering of their belief in limited, ramble government. Accordingly, nowhere in its list of powers enumerated and delegated to the federal authorities 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: "Government funding of annihilation involves government controlÉ. As we should non desire an established church, so we should not desire established art."⁶¹ Every bit Cowen notes, "When the government promotes its favored art, the most innovative creators find it more difficult to rising to the pinnacle.... Simply the truthful costs of government funding do not show upwards on our tax bill. The NEA and other regime arts agencies politicize fine art and jeopardize the principles of democratic government."⁶² The French government, for case, tried to suppress Impressionism through its command of the University.

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 proper noun.⁶³ A June 1995 Wall Street Journal-Peter Hart poll showed 54 percent of Americans favored eliminating the NEA entirely versus 38 percent in favor of maintaining it at any level of funding. An earlier Jan 19, 1995, Los Angeles Times poll constitute 69 percent of the American people favored cutting the NEA budget.⁶⁴ More than recently, a poll performed by The Polling Company in March 1997 demonstrated that 57 percent of Americans favor the proffer that "Congress should terminate funding the NEA with federal taxpayer dollars and instead leave funding decisions with state government and individual groups."

Conclusion

After more than than three decades, the National Endowment for the Arts has failed in its mission to enhance cultural life in the United States. Despite numerous attempts to reinvent information technology, the NEA continues to promote the worst excesses of multiculturalism and political correctness, subsidizing art that demeans the values of ordinary Americans. Equally the federal debt soars to over $v trillion, information technology is time to terminate the NEA as a wasteful, unjustified, unnecessary, and unpopular federal expenditure. Catastrophe the NEA would be good for the arts and good 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 Homo" festival in Santa Monica, California. The festival featured a program actually called "Non for Republicans" in which a operation artist ruminated on "Sex with Newt'south Mom." The artistic managing director was Tim Miller (of the "NEA Iv"). Quondam Clinton adviser Paul Begala agreed that items in the published schedule were obscene.⁶⁵
• NEA grants announced in Dec 1996 included $20,000 to the "Woolly Mammoth Theater" venue for Tim Miller, 1 of the "NEA Four" performance artists. He had stripped twice, talked most picking up homosexual prostitutes, and asked members of the audience to blow on his genitals in a 1995 product entitled "Naked Jiff." The NEA also awarded $25,000 to "Camera News, Inc.," also known as "Third Earth Newsreel," a New York distributor of Marxist revolutionary propaganda films.⁶⁶
• In June 1996, Representative Hoekstra raised questions virtually "The Watermelon Woman." The moving picture was funded by a $31,500 NEA grant. It contained what 1 review described as the "hottest dyke sex scene ever recorded on celluloid." "I had loftier hopes that Jane Alexander would preclude further outrages by the NEA, but patently fifty-fifty she-dainty lady that she is-lacks the power and the volition to put an end to the NEA'southward obsession with handing out the taxpayers' coin to self-proclaimed `artists' whose mentality is just so much flotsam floating around in a sewer," said Senator Jesse Helms.⁶⁷
• Hilton Kramer, in a March 1996 issue of The New York Observer, noted a new "icky" Whitney exhibition he characterized equally a "jolly rape of the public sensibilities." The Whitney was showing the work of Edward Kienholz, and "it almost goes without proverb that this America-equally-a merde [French for excrement] testify 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 Fifty. Pope, a Professor at Bates College, received $20,000 grant in the terminal circular of NEA grants to private performance artists. He intended to use the money for at to the lowest degree 2 projects. In ane, he would chain himself to an ATM machine in New York City wearing only his underwear. In the other, he "plans to walk the streets of New York wearing a half dozen-pes-long white tube like a codpiece. He'southward rigged it upwardly so he tin put an egg in one end, and information technology will curlicue out the faux, white penis." The Maine-Telegram noted that the NEA individual fellowship program "will go out with a bang, at least with this grant."
• "Sexual practice Is," a pornographic video displaying the NEA credit, is still in distribution.
• Bob Flanagan'due south "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 film at the Sundance Film Festival entitled "Sick," which showed him nailing his male organs to a wooden plank. "Sick" is besides on the 1997 schedule of the New Directors/New Films series co-sponsored past the Lincoln Eye 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 one of President Clinton's 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 Heart grants actually increased in the year subsequently the museum booked Athey.)
• Joel-Peter Witkin, a four-time recipient of NEA individual fellowships whose photograph of severed heads and chopped up bodies were displayed by Senator Helms on the Senate floor two years agone as prove of the moral corruption of the NEA (Helms discussed one featuring a man's caput being used as a flowerpot). Witkin was honored with a retrospective at New York's NEA-funded Guggenheim museum. Even The New York Times condemned the bear witness as "gruesome."
• Karen Finley, also of the "NEA Four," brought her new "performance piece" to an NEA-funded venue in Boston.
• Holly Hughes, some other 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'southward New Museum, an NEA-funded operation, hosted a retrospective of the work of Andres Serrano, which in one case more included an exhibit of "Piss Christ."
• New York'south Museum of Modern Fine art, funded by the NEA, hosted an NEA-funded exhibit of Bruce Nauman's piece of work, also displayed at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum, which included neon signs reading "S- and Die" and "F- and Dice."
• 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 Disquisitional Symposium (2nd Thoughts Books, 1995), and author of PBS: Behind the Screen (Prima, 1997).

^two Alvin Toffler, The Culture Consumers: A Written report of Fine art and Affluence in America (New York: Random Firm, 1973), p. 188.

³ A typical sold-out functioning at the Met brings in nearly $485,000 in ticket acquirement, given the average ticket toll of $125 and a seating capacity of 3,877.

⁴ Creative America: Report of the President's Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Washington, D.C., February 1997

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

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

^vii Judith Miller, "Big Arts Groups Starting Drives for New Funds," The New York Times, February 3, 1997, p. 1

^viii Ibid.

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

^ten William Craig Rice, "I Hear America Singing: The Arts Will Bloom Without the NEA," Policy Review, March/Apr 1997, pp. 37-45.

^xi Derrick Max, "Staff Briefing on the National Endowment for the Arts," U.South. Firm of Representatives Committee on Teaching 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 Back up the Arts?" p. 22.

^fourteen Heritage Tabulations from 1993 IRS Public Use File.

^xv Jane Alexander, Testimony to the House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, March 13, 1997.

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

¹⁷ Come across 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.

^xix Ibid., p. 56.

²⁰ Tyler Cowen, draft ms. for Affiliate vi, "Market Liberalization vs. Authorities Reaction" in Enterprise and the Arts, forthcoming from Harvard University Printing, pp. 22-31.

²¹ Ibid.

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

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

²⁴ Laurence Jarvik and Nancy Strickland, "Forget the Speeches: The NEA Is a Racket," Baltimore Sun, Jan 22, 1995.

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

²⁶ James K. Glassman, "No Money for the Arts," The Washington Post, April ane, 1997, p. A17.

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

²⁸ William Craig Rice, The NewsHour, debate moderated past Elizabeth Farnsworth, March ten, 1997.

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

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

³¹ Toffler, The Civilisation Consumers, p. 200.

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

³³ Affirming opinion of Judge James R. Browning, U.Due south. Ninth Excursion Court of Appeals, filed November 5, 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, "Fine art and the Purse of the Beholder," The Washington Mail service, March 17, 1997, p. D2.

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

³⁷ Patrick A. Trueman, Director of Governmental Affairs, American Family unit Association, Testimony before the Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, March 5, 1997.

³⁸ Ibid.

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

⁴⁰ Ibid.

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

⁴² See Pankratz, Multiculturalism and Public Arts Policy.

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

⁴⁴ Ibid.

⁴⁵ Jan Breslauer, "The NEA's Real Offense: Agency Pigeonholes Artists by Ethnicity," The Washington Post, March 16, 1997, p. G1.

⁴⁶ Ibid.

⁴⁷ Ibid., p. G8.

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

⁴⁹ Ibid., p. 46

⁵⁰ Ibid.

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

⁵² Alice Goldfarb Marquis, Art Lessons: Learning from the Rise and Fall of Public Arts Funding (New York: Bones 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 seven, 1997.

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

⁵⁷ Robert Knight, "The National Endowment for the Arts: Misusing Taxpayer's Money," Heritage Foundation Backgrounder No. 803, January 18, 1991; Robert Knight, "The National Endowment: It's Time to Free the Arts," Family unit Enquiry Council Insight, January 1995, p. 1.

⁵⁸ "The Era of Big Government is Back: Talking Points on President Clinton's Fiscal Year 1998 Budget," Heritage Foundation Talking Points No. 17, February 24, 1997, p. 1.

⁵⁹ Appendix to the Budget of the U.s., p. 1080.

⁶⁰ Judith Miller, "Federal Arts Bureau Slices its Smaller Pie," The New York Times, April ten, 1997, p. B6.

⁶¹ David Boaz, "The Separation of Art and State: Who is going to make decisions?" Vital Speeches of the Twenty-four hours, Vol. LXI, No. 17 (June xv, 1995).

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

⁶³ Pro-NEA pollsters tend to ask almost "the arts," non the federal bureau 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, Agency conducts `business as usual' with its selections," The Washington Times, December 19, 1996.

⁶⁷ Julia Duin, "Black lesbian moving picture likely to rekindle arts-funding furor NEA defends graphic one-act," 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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