Word: nea
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...despite this fiscal insignificance and the innocuous, even noble, nature of almost everything it underwrites, the NEA has become one of the most controversial agencies of government. A target for President Reagan on the theory that merit ought to be defined by the populist mechanism of the box office, it spent the past decade spiraling downward from dreams of expansion to danger of demise. Artists and administrators who benefit from the NEA's money and imprimatur concede they have blown the political debate. They allowed the right wing to misrepresent culture as a hotbed of the unpatriotic, the irreligious...
...Anti-NEA invective has hit a nerve and thus proved a fund-raising tool for Senator Jesse Helms and other conservatives. Last week it became a rallying point for presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan. Assailing Tongues Untied, a PBS documentary by a gay black who received $5,000 from the NEA via two intermediate agencies, a Buchanan TV ad intoned, "This so-called art has glorified homosexuality, exploited children and perverted the image of Jesus Christ...
...measure of how much arts leaders misjudged the effectiveness of such tactics that after two years of denouncing NEA chairman John Frohnmayer as a sellout for his attempts to placate the right wing, last week they were mourning his forced resignation and envisioning his heir as sure to be worse. Says Jack O'Brien, artistic director of San Diego's Old Globe Theater: "If President Bush got a message in New Hampshire, we did too." A chilling sign for arts leaders is that some liberals now join in doubting whether government should finance ideas. It was the talk of Washington...
CULTURE Weakened by its own bungling, the NEA is an easy target...
...Arts, had to go. Bush knew what he was getting when he selected Frohnmayer in 1989, and the President's friends heralded the appointment as proof that Bush's heart was in the right place. But then, on Feb. 20, Pat Buchanan signaled his intent to trash the NEA for "subsidizing filthy and blasphemous art," and Frohnmayer was gone the next day. "We had to wipe away at least one of Pat's points in advance," concedes a Bush aide. "Dumping John was craven, but it was just politics...