Word: neh
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Some Republicans argue that since corporate and foundation support for the arts outweighs federal support--$16 to $1--the NEA and NEH would not be missed. This is an illusion. Some American businesses, like Philip Morris, have been very generous in their support of the arts. But this generosity depends on their public relations needs. (If there were no lung cancer or emphysema, the arts would get much less.) Increasingly, these needs are defined as social rather than artistic. Hence the shift, in private philanthropy, to race- and gender-based programs, meant to make art what theatrical director Robert Brustein...
That's exactly what Republican critics accuse the NEA and the NEH of doing. Moreover, if the flat-tax enthusiasts in the G.O.P. have their way, private and corporate arts subsidies--especially gifts to museums--will vanish as tax-deduction inducements evaporate. This will destroy the mechanism that made American museum collections great. There is no sign that anyone in Congress has thought this through. And why? Because frankly, my dear, we don't give a damn...
...which gave jobs to numerous good American artists in the Depression years, a bad idea? American government has supported the American arts--spottily, inconsistently, but always with some general sense of obligation to a larger sense of polity--almost from its beginning. The claim that the NEA and the NEH, founded in 1965, had no historical precedents in America is simply...
...chance of getting enough money for the NEA to become truly effective is now very slim; and the punitive funding cuts it has suffered have weakened it so far that in the end, it may not be worth keeping alive. Meanwhile, the NEH seems to have become confused with the NEA in the public mind--as though the National Endowment for the Humanities had suffered the same tsuris as the National Endowment for the Arts. In fact, its record has been excellent. Losing the NEA would be a disgrace; but the loss of the NEH as well would...
Since it was founded in 1965, the NEH has awarded $2.9 billion in some 51,000 fellowships and grants, and its Challenge Grants program, in place since 1977, has generated more than $1.3 billion in nonfederal aid for American libraries, museums, universities and colleges. Its net of activities reaches very wide. It funds the study and publication of essential archives, like the papers of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, Ulysses S. Grant, Mark Twain and Dwight Eisenhower. (Twenty-eight volumes of Washington's papers alone have appeared so far.) It has given more than $1 million to a projected...