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Inheriting an Uneasy Truce Between Art and Government
December 24, 2001
By ROBIN POGREBIN
When Michael Hammond, a composer and arts educator, assumes
the helm of the National Endowment for the Arts, he will
find himself in the middle of a historically stormy and
always uncertain relationship between the arts and the
federal government.
The Senate confirmed Mr. Hammond, 69, as the agency's new
chairman late last week without a speck of controversy.
That absence was striking given the stormy battles during
the 90's when the agency's very existence was in question.
The immediate spur for those fights was the agency's
support for a handful of provocative projects and artists.
One of those artists made a name for herself in part by
coating her nude body in chocolate during a performance;
another took pictures of a urine-immersed crucifix he had
constructed. But at the heart of the battles was something
deeper: a long-running argument about whether the nation
should commit itself financially to development of its most
cutting-edge art, whatever form it took.
For now the answer is clearly no. But it was not always
that way, and the dividing lines have sometimes broken in
unexpected ways. President Richard M. Nixon greatly
increased financing for the agency without notable federal
say in the art it supported. President Bill Clinton's
appointees to head the agency often found themselves shying
away from controversial art as they tried to save the
endowment from its critics.
When the endowment was established in 1965 as part of
President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society program, its
mandate was in large part to celebrate the creative freedom
of individual artists as a vivid counterpoint to the Soviet
Union's repression.
In his book "Visionaries and Outcasts: The N.E.A., Congress
and the Place of the Visual Artist in America," Michael
Brenson writes: "By the time Kennedy was elected in 1960,
many people in government who had little or no interest in
art but who knew America and the world were in crisis had
been convinced by the rhetoric of heroic individualism and
uninhibited creativity surrounding Abstract Expressionism.
They were ready to believe radical American creativity
could help the country find its center and were convinced
it could be an invaluable cold war tool."
Under Nixon the agency's budget increased dramatically, to
$31 million in 1972 from $16 million in 1971 and $9 million
in 1970 and continued to rise over the next several years.
Much of the credit for this increase has been given to
Leonard Garment, the lawyer and longtime Republican
political adviser who is himself a musician. Within the
Nixon White House, Mr. Garment said, he pushed the
increases for several reasons, including "merits,
manipulation and politics."
Nixon, he said, liked to surprise people. "It was kind of a
sleight of hand that would appease the liberals and antiwar
people," Mr. Garment said.
The endowment was an accepted part of the federal
government until 1989, when Senator Alfonse D'Amato, the
New York Republican, tore up a copy of Andres Serrano's
photograph of the immersed crucifix on the Senate floor and
Jesse Helms, the North Carolina Republican, said that Mr.
Serrano was not an artist at all.
In 1990 artists known as the N.E.A. Four - Tim Miller, John
Fleck, Holly Hughes and Karen Finley (the performance
artist who famously smeared herself with chocolate to
protest the brutal treatment of women's bodies) - brought
suit against the endowment for rejecting their grants on
the basis of content after they had been recommended for
financing. They went to court over the provision voted by
Congress that in making grants the endowment must measure
applications against "general standards of decency and
respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the American
public." The Supreme Court rejected their challenge.
With the controversies stoking debates that went on for
years, politicians hostile to the N.E.A. portrayed artists
as deviants, with too great a sense of entitlement and too
little sense of social responsibility. Year after year the
House of Representatives pledged to shut down the
endowment.
The burden was on the agency to make a case for itself to
Congress and the public. The hardest job fell to Jane
Alexander, the actress appointed by President Clinton to
take over a damaged agency. While Ms. Alexander worked hard
to make amends with legislators, it was an uphill climb.
Her successor, William Ivey, former director of the Country
Music Foundation, had an easier time building ties with
Congress, many say, in part because time had passed, Ms.
Alexander had made some inroads, and the agency had changed
its way of doing business. "I think we needed a period of
quiescence, and I think he brought it to the N.E.A.," Ms.
Alexander said.
In a recent interview Mr. Ivey said that the conversation
with Congress had to change. "The day of being able to
increase funding for the nonprofit arts simply by talking
lofty platitudes about the value of art for citizens - that
it's good for you, that it elevates the soul - are over,"
he said. "We have to do a better job of explaining the
value of artists as a sector to society."
Mr. Ivey tried to make that case in a speech to the
National Press Club last December calling for "An American
Cultural Bill of Rights." In a column in The Washington
Post, George Will ridiculed Mr. Ivey's speech for not
holding the arts to a higher standard of excellence.
One thing that hasn't seemed to have changed is the
distance presidents have kept from the agency. To the
extent the White House attends to the arts, it is the East
Wing, where the First Lady maintains her office.
In her memoir, "Command Performance: An Actress in the
Theater of Politics," Ms. Alexander wrote, "I thought the
president would have more to say to me about the agency. It
took me a very long time to realize that the N.E.A. and I
had been relegated to the office of the First Lady."
Mr. Ivey never got time in the Oval Office, and he and
others suggest that the country will not take the arts
seriously until the president himself does. Even before
Sept. 11, it was difficult to get President Bush to focus
on the arts. Arts advocates complain that since the
retirement in 1999 of Representative Sidney R. Yates,
Democrat of Illinois, who died last year, no legislator has
aggressively taken up the endowment as a cause. While some
arts advocates have pushed for a cultural adviser in the
executive office of the president, that does not look
likely.
"The arts are a strange part of American life," said
Randall Bourscheidt, president of the Alliance for the
Arts. "Almost everybody loves them on some level, but they
haven't been educated to think about it as part of
government."
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/24/arts/24NEA.html?ex=1010192158&ei=1&en=741ccff8073cc81b
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