Word: nea
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...effect, this would make the NEA hostage to every crank, ideologue and God botherer in America. A grant for an exhibition of Gothic ivories could be pulled on the grounds that the material was offensive to Jews (much medieval art is anti-Semitic), to Muslims (what about those scenes of false prophets in hell with Muhammad?) or, for that matter, to atheists offended by the intrusion of religious propaganda into a museum. A radical feminist could plausibly argue that her "nonreligious" beliefs were offended by the sexism of Rubens' nudes or Picasso's Vollard Suite. Doubtless a fire worshiper could...
...short, what the amendment proposes is a loony parody of cultural democracy in which everyone becomes his or her own Cato the Censor. Clearly, Jesse Helms has no doubt that the NEA must be punished if it strays from what he fancies to be the center line of American ethical belief. The truth is, of course, that no such line exists -- not in a society as vast, various and eclectic as the real America. Helms' amendment might have played in Papua, where a Government spokesman defended the banning of Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ on the grounds...
...problem is compounded by the fact that the NEA is not a ministry of culture. It does not commission large works to reflect glory on the state, or set firm policy for other institutions. Its $169 million budget is tiny -- less than one-third the projected price of one Stealth bomber, or, to put it another way, only ten times the recent cost of a single painting by Jasper Johns. The French government spends three times the NEA's budget each year on music, theater and dance alone ($560 million in 1989). German government spending on culture runs at around...
...fetish of supply-side culture was one of the worst legacies of the Reagan years. Though the Great Communicator was frustrated in his attempt to abolish the Endowment in 1981, he made sure that more Government money went to military bands than to the entire budget of the NEA. Oom-pah-pah culture to , fit a time of oom-pah-pah politics. After all, who could say that the arts needed support outside the marketplace at a time when star orchestra conductors were treated like sacred elephants and the art market was turning into a freakish potlatch for new money...
Conversely, why bother to support what market Darwinism seems to condemn to obscurity? "I have fundamental questions," Helms grated, "about why the Federal Government is supporting artists the taxpayers have refused to support in the marketplace." But this was exactly what the NEA was created, in 1965, to do -- and it was the wisest of decisions. Lots of admirable art does badly at first; its rewards to the patron are not immediate and may never come. Hence the need for the NEA. It is there to help the self-realization of culture that is not immediately successful...