Word: nea
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...been funded indirectly by grants from the NEA—the former through the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, and the latter through the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania—and both were shocking and blasphemous (phalluses and crosses dunked in urine). Anti-NEA vitriol flooded congressional mailboxes. The director of the Southeastern Center, Ted Potter, told The New York Times, “I’ve never seen anything like this before in my 25 years as an arts administrator. Ultraconservatives are on the rise. It’s a wind that?...
...ripples were small at the time, but what was started could not be undone. By 1996, thanks to lobbying by conservative groups like the American Family Association and the new Republican Congress’s mantra of “fiscal responsibility,” the NEA saw its budget slashed by almost 40 percent. Individual artist grants were gone, as was general funding to arts organizations. Ultraconservatives won. Welcome...
...Conservatives try to paint the NEA (pun intended) and its benefactors as the peace, love, and naked calligraphy crowd—ridiculous, immoral, and totally out of touch with normal Americans—ignoring the Endowment’s bipartisan past. It was Theodore Roosevelt (Class of 1880) who established the first arts-oriented federal advisory board, the Council of Fine Arts, and Dwight D. Eisenhower who created a national cultural center for the performing arts, which 13 years and a cultural revolution later opened its doors as the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts...
...national morale has never since been so high. Another of our greatest presidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Class of 1904, looked to the arts to restore the confidence of the American people in the depths of the Great Depression, because no matter what congressional Republicans say, art is cheap. The NEA didn’t exist until 1965, but in 1935, when the unemployment rate was over 20 percent, Roosevelt created over 40,000 government jobs for artists under the Works Progress Administration. In 1995, the year before the Congress’s massive blood-letting, the NEA?...
...Cutting arts funding is a symbolic measure more than it is a practical one. As Frank Rich ’71 said in The New York Times, “Bashing the NEA, like boosting school prayer, is a high-profile, low-cost way for the Gingrich G.O.P. to distract the faithful while avoiding the hard choices about cutting multibillion-dollar entitlements that might really downsize the budget.” The NEA got cut off at the knees because it was easier—and much more popular—for House Speaker Newt Gingrich to blame Robert Mapplethorpe...