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A New Chief Steps in at a Changed National Endowment for the Arts
December 22, 2001
By ROBIN POGREBIN
The Senate confirmed a new chairman of the National
Endowment for the Arts late Thursday and hardly anyone
noticed.
The confirmation of Michael Hammond, a composer and dean at
Rice University in Houston, took place without the Senate
holding a public hearing. This was a strong indication of
how the endowment - so recently red meat for Republican
presidential administrations - has been transformed from a
lightning rod and punching bag into a benign institution,
averse to controversy and with a significantly different
mission than it had a decade ago.
The transformation came with well-publicized budget cuts
and heated confrontations in Congress in which the
existence of the agency was called into question. But as so
often happens, the overhaul was accomplished in far quieter
ways, with the scalpel of Washington insiders executing a
series of small-print rules changes. These have left Mr.
Hammond, 69, in charge of an agency very much on the order
of what its conservative critics had demanded.
The changes, in seemingly mundane areas like who is
eligible to apply for grants, how many grants can be
awarded to a single organization in a year and what
proportion of money goes to state and local governments for
distribution, have cumulatively turned the agency from one
that supports the making of art for art's sake - no matter
how hotly debated - to one that largely supports art that
more clearly serves a communal purpose.
Among those utilitarian ends are historic preservation,
education and community development, which, however
laudable in themselves, also make it far more difficult to
finance photographs of urine-immersed crosses and
chocolate-covered performance artists.
It was this kind of outer-edge art that led to the
Congressional revolt against the agency and the passage of
a clause, later upheld by the Supreme Court, that required
the agency to finance only projects that met "general
standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs
and values of the American public."
"When I came up here they were dipping ladies in
chocolate," said Representative Cass Ballenger, Republican
of North Carolina, who used to call for the elimination of
the endowment, but has come around to support it. (He was
alluding to the performance artist Karen Finley, who
smeared chocolate over her body in a performance art piece
in 1990 that predated her grant application.)
"They have been rewriting the rules and regulations by
which it would operate," he said. "They're doing their best
to clean up whatever we were worried about."
These days, as the agency's critics had advocated, the
great bulk of the endowment's money is going to
conventional artistic endeavors spread out far more than
before from the country's cultural capitals.
More experimental artists and organizations have either
given up on applying for funds or have carefully tailored
their proposals to what they think a much more conservative
endowment would support. And instead of turning to the
federal government for financing, they have increasingly
looked instead to local governments, foundations and
private individuals.
"What has been lost is now organizations come to the
endowment with art that is safe," said Speight Jenkins,
general director of the Seattle Opera, who served on the
National Council on the Arts, a group of presidential
appointees who evaluate grants for the endowment.
"They know the Congress can kill them any time it wants to,
and it came perilously close to doing it."
In a statement after his confirmation, Mr. Hammond, who has
been dean of the Shepherd School of Music at Rice for the
last 15 years, said: "I will advocate especially for
policies and practices that enhance the experience of our
young people, by giving them the insights and skills that
lead to understanding and participation in the arts."
Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the chairman of the Committee on
Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, which handled the
confirmation, said, "My sense is he's going to expose the
arts to the widest possible group."
"There will always be room for art on the edge," he added.
"But I think there's a great need and appreciation for its
role in elevating the arts and expanding its appeal to a
wide group of Americans."
A biography of Mr. Hammond, released by the endowment, says
his special interests include the music of Southeast Asia,
Western medieval and Renaissance music and the
relationships between neuroscience and music. He has
degrees from Lawrence University in Appleton, Wis.; Oxford
University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar; and Delhi
University in India. From 1977 to 1980, he was president of
the State University at Purchase, N.Y., where he began the
Pepsico Summerfare festival.
Mr. Hammond will find himself at the helm of an agency with
little stomach for confrontation.
The recent move by the endowment's acting chairman, Robert
S. Martin, to delay a decision on grants to two potentially
sensitive arts projects - a California production of Tony
Kushner's play about Afghanistan, "Homebody/Kabul" (written
well before Sept. 11), and an exhibition featuring the work
of a performance artist, William Pope.L - points up how the
agency has changed. (Mr. Martin ultimately approved the
grant for the Berkeley Repertory Theater to produce Mr.
Kushner's play but not the one for the exhibition of Mr.
Pope.L's work at the Institute for Contemporary Art at the
Maine College of Art in Portland, Me.)
Before being forwarded to the chairman, applications are
reviewed by a peer panel and then the National Council on
the Arts. The applications that might prove politically
divisive do not even make it to the chairman these days, so
insulated has the agency become from hot potato proposals.
"It's practical to look at things that for political
reasons the endowment just shouldn't do," said William
Ivey, former chairman of the endowment. "I think it's
perfectly legitimate for the chairman to say, `If we fund
that, that's all we're going to talk about for the next
three years.' "
Mr. Ivey said that this kind of pragmatism was standard in
government: every federal agency needs to concentrate on
and make the case for how it serves citizens' interests.
Although it has been some time since an uproar erupted over
the art it finances, the endowment still functions very
much in terms of those experiences.
Having seen its budget chopped 39 percent in fiscal year
1996 to $99.5 million from $162.5 million, the chastened
endowment has been chipping away at itself to save itself.
"My feeling always was this: preserve the corpus, 'cause
it ain't gonna come again easily," said Jane Alexander, the
actress who preceded Mr. Ivey as chairwoman from 1993 to
1997. "Just keep it going."
The results have been measurable. The agency won its first
budget increase in nine years in the fiscal year that began
in October 2000. Mr. Ivey said relations with Congress had
never been better.
During the last presidential election, the Republicans took
the call for the eradication of the agency out of the
platform.
"It clearly has broader bipartisan support than it's had in
many years," said Representative Nita M. Lowey, Democrat of
New York.
"When you're dealing with Republicans in the White House
and Republicans in the House, I think you have to deal with
reality. And for the N.E.A. to survive, it had to go in
directions it hadn't gone before."
Ever since the initial imbroglio in the spring of 1989 over
Andres Serrano's photographs of a crucifix submerged in
urine and the homoerotic photographs by Robert
Mapplethorpe, the agency has gone through several
significant transitions.
That same year, Congress established an independent
commission to review the grant-distribution process, and
from there changes flowed in how the agency does business.
In 1996, after the Newt Gingrich- led Republican
revolution, a steady string of procedural changes altered
the nature of the endowment. Congress also decided to
finance only projects, eliminating general operating or
seasonal grants that would have left the arts groups
spending discretion. Restrictions were also imposed on
allowing grantees to subgrant to third party organizations
and artists.
Meanwhile, the endowment itself under Ms. Alexander
revamped its grant-making operation from 17
discipline-based programs like theater and dance to four
categories - creation and presentation; heritage and
preservation; education and access; and planning and
stabilization - with the effect of making the areas more
vague and innocuous.
The agency also limited applicants to one proposal a year,
which led to a dispersion of grant money away from the
largest and most sophisticated organizations, which were
usually based in large cities, and toward the smaller
towns, where conservative opposition to the agency was
often based.
The endowment also began to establish partnerships with
other federal agencies, arts organizations and foundations,
including an agreement with the United States Forest
Service to support arts programs in rural areas.
In 1998 Congress mandated that state arts agencies receive
40 percent of agency program funds, up from 35 percent from
1993 to 1997 and 20 percent in 1990, shifting the decisions
on arts financing to local governments.
Mr. Ballenger applauded the endowment's direction under Mr.
Ivey. "The more he did, the more people realized the agency
was giving something to the people and not just the elites
in the big cities," he said.
In another telling change in 1996, Congress mandated that
the membership of the National Council on the Arts be
increased to 26 from 20, with the six new members appointed
from the ranks of Congress to serve in a nonvoting,
ex-officio capacity. The effect was to reduce the
decision-making power of arts professionals and place it
more in the hands of elected officials and the endowment's
chairman.
Critics say this has an element of Big Brotherism to it.
Mr. Ballenger, who serves on the council, suggested that
this was how it ought to be.
"I'm looking over their shoulder," he said. In no small
part, he added, it has changed the way the agency operates:
"It's quit funding individual crazies," he said.
Two years ago Mr. Ivey proposed a Challenge America
initiative to foster new cultural programs in previously
underserved areas. It was for Challenge America that
Congress approved an additional $7 million for the
endowment for fiscal year 2001 and $10 million for fiscal
year 2002; the agency's regular budget remained flat.
All this has resulted in a kind of self-censorship among
arts groups, officials of several organizations say, in
which applicants try to second- guess what the endowment
will approve.
"Whenever you're writing a proposal, you kind of try to
cater to what you think they're really looking for on some
level," said Kenny Savelson, the managing director of Bang
on a Can, a New York-based music organization that has
received $20,000 to $30,000 from the endowment for its new
music festival for the last eight years.
Ms. Alexander said applicants had no choice but to take the
agency's current focus into consideration, particularly
with the "decency clause" left standing by the Supreme
Court.
"Is there a chill?" she said. "There has to be with a
decency clause like that."
In March 1998 Scott Shanklin-Peterson, the endowment's
senior deputy chairman, testified before a Senate
subcommittee that "the increased competition for funding
has caused many fine organizations to stop applying, and
this is a very serious problem."
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/22/arts/22NEA.html?ex=1010048855&ei=1&en=33db32293720c53b
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