Word: nea
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Actually the reverse is likely. Corporate arts underwriting oscillates with the laws on tax deductions, and the NEA controversy could reduce it. In any case, corporations prefer "safe" institutional culture: Ford puts Jasper Johns in the National Gallery, Mobil puts Masterpiece Theatre...
...NEA was not created to subsidize such big-ticket events and famous names. Its brief is diversity; it is not a ministry of culture with control over museums, theaters or operas. All it can do on $170 million a year is give seed-money grants to a wide variety of cultural projects, many of them small, marginal, obscure and quite outside the field of prestige corporate underwriting. About 85,000 of these grants, nearly 90% of them for less than $50,000 each, have been distributed since 1965. But, though seldom large, the NEA grant is a powerful magnet...
Take the Harlem School for the Arts, a 25-year-old institution that provides arts education to about 1,300 students a year, most of them black, Hispanic and Asian. It holds a $50,000 NEA grant to fund a special masters voice class for budding opera singers. This grant is just a fraction of its $1.7 million annual budget, but Joyce Perry, development director, feels "very disturbed" about the assault on the endowment: "Community institutions like ours depend on the NEA. We're established now and can get other funds, but there are other grass-roots organizations just starting...
...same way, Jomandi Productions in Atlanta, a nationally recognized theater company that is one of the few places in America where aspiring black playwrights can get their work performed, depends on its $60,000 NEA grant to pull in much of the rest of its $1 million budget. BAM, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, whose annual Next Wave festival has turned into an essential conduit between experimental and mainstream theater and dance, gets about 6% of its $10.3 million budget from the NEA; but that 6%, according to its director Harvey Lichtenstein, is crucial. Far from being opposites, private...
Quite apart from the fact that the NEA gets about 69 cents a U.S. citizen a year, less than the cost of one New York City subway token, its abolition would do very little to alter the patterns of American "elite" culture (the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Museum of Modern Art or the Chicago Symphony Orchestra) but would fall heavily both on minorities and upon the cultural opportunities of the young, the poor and the "provincial." The idea of an American public culture wholly dependent on the corporate promotion budgets of white CEOs, reflecting...