Word: nea
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Bush has retreated on conservative positions on issues. For example, funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is at its highest level ever. Conservatives have long opposed the NEA's grants process, which provides financing for many projects the Right finds objectionable. In addition, Bush has also departed from traditional conservative support for Israel...
ONCE AGAIN, disgruntled artists are crying "Censorship!" in order to discredit the concept of moral standards in art. Four artists whose grant applications to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) were recently rejected have filed a lawsuit against the organization's "decency code," which forbids the funding of works of art and literature that depict homosexuality or the erotic. They claim that the code was the reason for their rejection and that it sets an unconstitutional limit on freedom of expression...
...demand that only the former quality be the basis for judging a work's value is to deny art's role in human life and its purpose of conveying and influencing human thoughts and experiences. The value of a work to the viewer and society--which is what the NEA judges are judging when they allocate our society's money--depends on both style and content...
...artists who are suing the NEA have a right to their own ideology. So do those who fund them. If these disagree, no business will be transacted, but no one is attempting to suppress the other. There is a world of difference between refusing to buy a book and burning it. The sooner the artists realize this, the sooner they will drop these unjustifiable censorship lawsuits that make a mockery of all sincere struggles for artistic and moral freedom...
While Mozart's "licking" lyrics are racy, they do not take away from the composer's other works. We hope the NEA would fund Mozart, because his work is not exclusively devoted to what a Harvard music librarian called an "innocent, juvenile preoccupation with bodily functions." What should matter in the NEA grant process is artistic merit, not adherence by an artist to strict community standards or a particular moral structure in his or her privately financed works...