Word: nea
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...National Endowment for the Arts amounts to about 69 cents -- not dollars, just pocket change -- per U.S. citizen per year. Its share of total public spending is so small that in the short form of the federal budget, it is rounded off to zero. Of the nearly 90,000 NEA grants awarded over the past quarter-century, at most a few dozen have sparked any significant public controversy -- and the cumulative cost of all those was less than a cent a person, at a time when people often won't stoop to pick up a penny from the street...
...despite this fiscal insignificance and the innocuous, even noble, nature of almost everything it underwrites, the NEA has become one of the most controversial agencies of government. A target for President Reagan on the theory that merit ought to be defined by the populist mechanism of the box office, it spent the past decade spiraling downward from dreams of expansion to danger of demise. Artists and administrators who benefit from the NEA's money and imprimatur concede they have blown the political debate. They allowed the right wing to misrepresent culture as a hotbed of the unpatriotic, the irreligious...
...Anti-NEA invective has hit a nerve and thus proved a fund-raising tool for Senator Jesse Helms and other conservatives. Last week it became a rallying point for presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan. Assailing Tongues Untied, a PBS documentary by a gay black who received $5,000 from the NEA via two intermediate agencies, a Buchanan TV ad intoned, "This so-called art has glorified homosexuality, exploited children and perverted the image of Jesus Christ...
Even for King, who seems to feel that taking a side on any issue is a definite path to getting canned, this was out of the ordinary. But later in the night, King had two guests, one pro-National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and one anti-NEA. He capped a two-hour-long debate between the two with this memorable remark: "Two able spokespersons for two vital causes...next, open phone America...
Anderson discussed art often in her performance, referring to the NEA controversy and the disappearance of the avant-garde. She jokingly speculated about a hypothetical Museum of Recent Art, bemoaning the difficulty in defining the word "modern" in a world where time is measured in split-second sound bytes and MTV video flashes...