Word: nea
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...civilization. Renewal means we first must identify its strengths and then identify the factors that serve to corrupt it. Some aspects of government-subsidized art are clearly designed to undermine our civilization. For example, despite its prominent reproduction in a full-page photo, Piss Christ, Andres Serrano's blasphemous, NEA-underwritten exhibit, is barely addressed by Hughes. That is not too surprising. The Piss Christ is difficult to defend aesthetically and is completely indefensible as a taxpayer-subsidized project...
...these zealots, modern American art is summed up in the image of Robert Mapplethorpe, that slick and vastly overrated photographer, conservative in every sense except the sexual, who is now seen as a hybrid of welfare queen and Caligula, living off the NEA on your tax dollar and mine while sticking bullwhips up his bum. In fact, Mapplethorpe neither got nor asked for one cent from the NEA to make the photos that caused the offense; a museum did that, for a show of his work. And he died a multimillionaire because of the ranting queer hatred of Jesse Helms...
...tens of thousands of grants that the NEA has made in its 30-year history, perhaps a dozen have excited serious controversy and only two--to the Mapplethorpe show and Serrano--have brought it to the verge of abolition. Significantly, neither case involved a direct grant by the nea to the artist. Serrano got his $15,000 of public money as an award from the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, which the NEA had given a grant to distribute as it thought fit. All the same, it is obvious from this debacle that the NEA should not have set itself...
...reform, without which the NEA probably won't survive at all. Its critics charge it with spending too much on grants to individual artists, but this is untrue--in fact, such grants account for only 4% of its budget. It's more important for the NEA to get rid of all its bogus democratic criteria, the therapeutic fustian of "self-esteem" and "empowerment" through art for this locality or that minority. Leave that to state arts councils (if they still want it, which they shouldn't either); in art there should be no such entitlements. The NEA should be more...
...chance of getting enough money for the NEA to become truly effective is now very slim; and the punitive funding cuts it has suffered have weakened it so far that in the end, it may not be worth keeping alive. Meanwhile, the NEH seems to have become confused with the NEA in the public mind--as though the National Endowment for the Humanities had suffered the same tsuris as the National Endowment for the Arts. In fact, its record has been excellent. Losing the NEA would be a disgrace; but the loss of the NEH as well would...