Word: nea
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...agency's budgetary survival ensured for another year, and with the dust from the culture wars thus temporarily settled, Alexander announced her pending retirement from the endowment. This was quickly followed by the release of a new study that accuses the nonprofit arts world, and by implication the NEA, of elitism and a disregard for key American values. In other words, Oh, no! Here we go again! The zany twist is that the report isn't the work of Newt Gingrich or Jesse Helms; it's the loving handiwork of the NEA itself. Luuu...
...first came to light when leaked to the New York Times, which ran a front-page story highlighting the most provocative of its conclusions with the headline STUDY LINKS DROP IN SUPPORT TO ELITIST ATTITUDE IN THE ARTS. The presumption among many outraged artists was that a self-loathing NEA had somehow found common ground with right-wing bullies...
Poor arts! No one ever suggests that dogs range far afield from the traditional canine function. The catch is, when you take money from the government, you subject yourself to the mercies of the political process--which is also open, as the recent history of the NEA (not to mention history, period) proves, to philistines and worse. American Canvas reminds us that they are not all on the right. Critic Edward Rothstein put it tartly in the Times: "Washington liberals took a similarly vulgar view [to conservatives], focusing on their own versions of 'values' and treating art as a form...
...could have emerged from Jesse Helms' darkest nightmare of an NEA-performance psycho: a guy who nails his penis to a board and calls it art. Yet Bob Flanagan, masochist with a cause, might win the sympathy of any stony conservative, for he was one of the longest-lived survivors of cystic fibrosis, a lung disease that takes most of its victims in childhood. His daft wit even turned his affliction into a Mary Poppins-style ditty: "Supermasochistic Bob has cystic fibrosis/ He should've died when he was young, but he was too precocious.../ A lifetime of infection...
This is why I say the NEA Four will come to define the decade. Our complaints, our controversies, our commotions and our causes have grown so small. We all know about corporate downsizing, but who would have thought that in the '90s, everything else would get downsized too? The country is so short on big things--heroes, villains, conflicts--that we've had to inflate little things and pretend they're big. Our statesmen used to revile Hitler, Mussolini, the godless Reds--large and sinister enemies who wanted to take over the world. Now the the focus of evil...