Word: nea
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...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...
...Little Rock Nine and the Chicago Seven. By fate or design or bad luck, they came to embody their tumultuous times, as we social commentators like to say: the McCarthy era, the end of enforced racial segregation, the street riots of the 1960s. But have you heard of the NEA Four? A generation from now, historians may see that hapless quartet as embodying the less than tumultuous times of the 1990s. For this is the era of tiny commotions...
...NEA Four are "performance artists" to whom, several years ago, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded government grants. The most famous of the performers, Karen Finley, thrilled audiences by coating herself in chocolate and doing highly inventive autoerotic exercises with sweet potatoes. Some members of Congress, worried perhaps about the inevitable outcry from the tuber-rights community, deemed this an unworthy expenditure of tax dollars. The grants were rescinded--and a cause was born. The martyrs came ready-made, as did the name with the capitalized numeral Four, lending their cause a portentous...
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...