Word: nea
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...redoubt of sober establishment culture. "My work is not about entertainment," she says. "People usually leave my shows crying." After leaving one of them, her grandmother sent her a note. It was a mixed review that could sum up the dilemma that any unbridled artist poses for the NEA. "She said that I was talented," Finley recalls, "but also a toiletmouth...
...Donnybrook over the continued existence of the NEA began last year with the funding of an exhibition of Mapplethorpe's photographs, has ramified immensely since then, and is now coming to a head. Helms' pressure has already forced the NEA to make arts-grant recipients pledge that they will do nothing obscene or indecent on Government money. Sometime in June the NEA's reauthorization and funding bills go to the House floor, where a vocal ultra- conservative rump, led by California Republican Dana Rohrabacher, will attempt to abolish the agency. Since the House will probably not go along -- George Bush...
Leading the NEA's defense is Democratic Congressman Pat Williams of Montana, who wants to reauthorize the NEA for another five years and leave questions of obscenity to the courts. "As long as the Federal Government can support the arts without interfering with their content . . ." says Williams, "government can indeed play a meaningful part in trying to encourage the arts . . . We know pornography when we see it, but the freedom to create is invisible...
There has been plenty of method in the anti-NEA demagoguery. At its root lies a sense of lost momentum, a leakage of power, in the far American right. The cold war thawed out after 40 years and left its paladins standing with wet socks in the puddle. "And now what shall become of us, without any barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution." The words of the poet Constantine Cavafy -- shh! a Greek homosexual! -- apply quite well to the right's dilemma...
...political-action committees in Washington, a direct-mail operation that pulled in $1.4 million in 1989. The strength of its mailing list, combined with those of right-wing religious groups like Donald Wildmon's American Family Association and Pat Robertson's 700 Club, has kept the bombardment of the NEA going strong...