Word: nea
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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That's exactly what Republican critics accuse the NEA and the NEH of doing. Moreover, if the flat-tax enthusiasts in the G.O.P. have their way, private and corporate arts subsidies--especially gifts to museums--will vanish as tax-deduction inducements evaporate. This will destroy the mechanism that made American museum collections great. There is no sign that anyone in Congress has thought this through. And why? Because frankly, my dear, we don't give a damn...
...Works Progress Administration, which gave jobs to numerous good American artists in the Depression years, a bad idea? American government has supported the American arts--spottily, inconsistently, but always with some general sense of obligation to a larger sense of polity--almost from its beginning. The claim that the NEA and the NEH, founded in 1965, had no historical precedents in America is simply...
...have no idea that there is a vast, complex and valuable tract of images between Norman Rockwell's Thanksgiving turkey and Andres Serrano's photo of a crucifix in urine. Years of adroit propaganda by the religious right have convinced many of them that a vote for preserving the nea in any form is a vote for sodomy, blasphemy and child abuse. This has become a matter of indurated faith, resistant to any insert of mere fact...
...these zealots, modern American art is summed up in the image of Robert Mapplethorpe, that slick and vastly overrated photographer, conservative in every sense except the sexual, who is now seen as a hybrid of welfare queen and Caligula, living off the NEA on your tax dollar and mine while sticking bullwhips up his bum. In fact, Mapplethorpe neither got nor asked for one cent from the NEA to make the photos that caused the offense; a museum did that, for a show of his work. And he died a multimillionaire because of the ranting queer hatred of Jesse Helms...
...tens of thousands of grants that the NEA has made in its 30-year history, perhaps a dozen have excited serious controversy and only two--to the Mapplethorpe show and Serrano--have brought it to the verge of abolition. Significantly, neither case involved a direct grant by the nea to the artist. Serrano got his $15,000 of public money as an award from the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, which the NEA had given a grant to distribute as it thought fit. All the same, it is obvious from this debacle that the NEA should not have set itself...