Word: nea
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Take the Harlem School for the Arts, a 25-year-old institution that provides arts education to about 1,300 students a year, most of them black, Hispanic and Asian. It holds a $50,000 NEA grant to fund a special masters voice class for budding opera singers. This grant is just a fraction of its $1.7 million annual budget, but Joyce Perry, development director, feels "very disturbed" about the assault on the endowment: "Community institutions like ours depend on the NEA. We're established now and can get other funds, but there are other grass-roots organizations just starting...
...same way, Jomandi Productions in Atlanta, a nationally recognized theater company that is one of the few places in America where aspiring black playwrights can get their work performed, depends on its $60,000 NEA grant to pull in much of the rest of its $1 million budget. BAM, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, whose annual Next Wave festival has turned into an essential conduit between experimental and mainstream theater and dance, gets about 6% of its $10.3 million budget from the NEA; but that 6%, according to its director Harvey Lichtenstein, is crucial. Far from being opposites, private...
Quite apart from the fact that the NEA gets about 69 cents a U.S. citizen a year, less than the cost of one New York City subway token, its abolition would do very little to alter the patterns of American "elite" culture (the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Museum of Modern Art or the Chicago Symphony Orchestra) but would fall heavily both on minorities and upon the cultural opportunities of the young, the poor and the "provincial." The idea of an American public culture wholly dependent on the corporate promotion budgets of white CEOs, reflecting...
...NEA's record is long and honorable. It has fostered innumerable works, shows and performances that would never have had a chance without its modest underwriting but were of real value. And some of its money is wasted. Some NEA grants help produce lousy or ephemeral art because lots of art is ephemeral or lousy, subsidized or not. If Congress cannot be sure whether a new bomber or missile will work before committing billions to it, how can some arts panel be sure that Anna Anybody, recipient of $15,000 for a photographic project, will go on to become...
There is, as is always the case when money is being handed out anywhere, a certain amount of logrolling and favoritism among the peer groups that review applications, and a peevish sense of entitlement among many applicants on the basis of class or race or gender. But the NEA's peer-group system has at least the merit of being a tad more democratic and informed than the fiats of a minister...