Word: nea
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...civilization. Renewal means we first must identify its strengths and then identify the factors that serve to corrupt it. Some aspects of government-subsidized art are clearly designed to undermine our civilization. For example, despite its prominent reproduction in a full-page photo, Piss Christ, Andres Serrano's blasphemous, NEA-underwritten exhibit, is barely addressed by Hughes. That is not too surprising. The Piss Christ is difficult to defend aesthetically and is completely indefensible as a taxpayer-subsidized project...
...Senator Spencer Abraham proposes to privatize the national endowments. He would put the responsibility for their funding in the hands of those best able to judge and appreciate artistic endeavor, namely the arts community itself. Senator Abraham challenges the same entertainers who visited Washington this year, lobbying for increased NEA funding, to produce a series of benefit concerts and records while utilizing traditional fund-raising approaches to fund a privatized endowment...
...including licensing the revenue generated by many of its popular programs. After all, the Discovery Channel, Mind Extension University, the Learning Channel and the Arts & Entertainment Network, as well as C-SPAN, all survive and compete with PBS without tax subsidy. Alice Marquis reminds us that in 1973 the NEA issued a $5,000 grant to author Erica Jong to help her finish writing the novel Fear of Flying. How much could the endowment have received if it had requested a percentage of the royalties for putting up seed money for the work, which went on to become a huge...
...reform, without which the NEA probably won't survive at all. Its critics charge it with spending too much on grants to individual artists, but this is untrue--in fact, such grants account for only 4% of its budget. It's more important for the NEA to get rid of all its bogus democratic criteria, the therapeutic fustian of "self-esteem" and "empowerment" through art for this locality or that minority. Leave that to state arts councils (if they still want it, which they shouldn't either); in art there should be no such entitlements. The NEA should be more...
...chance of getting enough money for the NEA to become truly effective is now very slim; and the punitive funding cuts it has suffered have weakened it so far that in the end, it may not be worth keeping alive. Meanwhile, the NEH seems to have become confused with the NEA in the public mind--as though the National Endowment for the Humanities had suffered the same tsuris as the National Endowment for the Arts. In fact, its record has been excellent. Losing the NEA would be a disgrace; but the loss of the NEH as well would...