Word: nea
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Over the past quarter-century, NEA seed money has been a boon and a blessing to America's myriad cultural outlets. It is easy to think of scores, and possible to find hundreds, of museum exhibitions, dance and drama projects, concerts and arts- education programs of real cultural value that would not have had private underwriting without the spur of public money. Corporations need reassurance and are reluctant to disgorge without...
Some Republicans argue that since corporate and foundation support for the arts outweighs federal support--$16 to $1--the NEA and NEH would not be missed. This is an illusion. Some American businesses, like Philip Morris, have been very generous in their support of the arts. But this generosity depends on their public relations needs. (If there were no lung cancer or emphysema, the arts would get much less.) Increasingly, these needs are defined as social rather than artistic. Hence the shift, in private philanthropy, to race- and gender-based programs, meant to make art what theatrical director Robert Brustein...
That's exactly what Republican critics accuse the NEA and the NEH of doing. Moreover, if the flat-tax enthusiasts in the G.O.P. have their way, private and corporate arts subsidies--especially gifts to museums--will vanish as tax-deduction inducements evaporate. This will destroy the mechanism that made American museum collections great. There is no sign that anyone in Congress has thought this through. And why? Because frankly, my dear, we don't give a damn...
...Works Progress Administration, which gave jobs to numerous good American artists in the Depression years, a bad idea? American government has supported the American arts--spottily, inconsistently, but always with some general sense of obligation to a larger sense of polity--almost from its beginning. The claim that the NEA and the NEH, founded in 1965, had no historical precedents in America is simply...
...have no idea that there is a vast, complex and valuable tract of images between Norman Rockwell's Thanksgiving turkey and Andres Serrano's photo of a crucifix in urine. Years of adroit propaganda by the religious right have convinced many of them that a vote for preserving the nea in any form is a vote for sodomy, blasphemy and child abuse. This has become a matter of indurated faith, resistant to any insert of mere fact...