Word: nea
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...reason is threefold. First, a plethora of Washington conservatives hope for distraction issues -- anything that will take voters' minds off the domestic economy -- and see in the campaign for moral restrictions on the NEA a rich source of cheap shots against "liberal" culture...
Second, the NEA has a new acting director, Anne-Imelda Radice, 44, an arts administrator put in by Bush to replace John Frohnmayer, who was fired to appease Pat Buchanan's distorted and ranting attacks on the NEA during the early primaries. Radice told a House subcommittee on appropriations that "if we find a proposal that does not have the widest audience . . . we just can't afford to fund that." At a May conference at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art she declared that, despite the acrid controversy over NEA policy in the arts community, "blood is thicker...
...odds are that under Radice's stewardship, anything that speaks of sex or politics -- or, worst of all, both -- can go whistle. In fact, she has canceled two grants for projects at university art galleries that had already been approved by an 11-to-1 vote of the NEA's decidedly unradical advisory council. One, for $10,000, was for "Corporal Politics," a show proposed by the List Visual Arts Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, containing images of sexual organs. The cancellation, Radice claimed, was based solely on "artistic merit...
...third element that seems bound to fuel further controversy over the NEA is a verdict just handed down by a federal court in Los Angeles. In 1990 Frohnmayer, hoping to mollify the Republican right, introduced a clause requiring "general standards of decency" as a basis for NEA grants. On that standard, four performance artists (Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, John Fleck and Tim Miller) saw their applications for grants rejected and sued the NEA. Last week Judge A. Wallace Tashima struck down the "decency" clause as vague and unconstitutional. The government, he said, does not have "free rein to impose ( whatever...
...arts and that 80% feel "the arts need to operate freely with a minimum of government control." Tell that to the self-appointed political guardians of American virtue. Pincered between them and the extremists who think any denial of a grant to "experimental" art is cultural fascism, the NEA faces plenty of troubles ahead in this election year...