Something remarkable happened last week. The chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts appeared before a congressional appropriations subcommittee and presented the administration's budget proposal for the agency.
That happens every year, of course. What's different is that the NEA chairman, Dana Gioia, with Bush administration blessing, is seeking a budget boost of 18 percent, its largest in two decades. If Congress approves the request, the NEA will receive nearly $140 million in the next fiscal year, which would return the agency to roughly where it stood—in real dollars, not allowing for inflation—in 1979.
The surprise here is that a profoundly conservative administration wants to increase support for a reviled bête noir of its ideological base. One of the reasons the biggest appropriation increase in 20 years will not return the NEA to its budget of 20 years ago is that Republicans celebrated the Inglorious Revolution, their 1994 ascent to power in the House of Representatives, by slashing the NEA budget nearly 40 percent. The wonder of many at the time was that it survived at all, so eager were the newly empowered solons to eviscerate the agency whose funds had supported, however indirectly, the work of Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano.
The proposed increase is anything but assured. Some conservatives are miffed to find their crippled foe slipping back over the horizon. Its budget once again attained nine figures a few years back, and inched up to $120 million this year. And others are worried, rightly, about the spiraling federal deficit—although the argument heard in the 1980s and early 1990s remains valid, that the NEA is a negligible driblet in the vast federal barrel.
If the request passes, $15 million of the $18 million hike will go to a new program, American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius, which would tour great works in all art forms throughout the land. (The endowment plans to launch the program in any event, according to a spokeswoman.) It follows two similar projects, Shakespeare in American Communities and NEA Jazz Masters, heralded by Chairman Gioia.
Thinking "safe," are you? Controversy is unlikely to threaten programs shopping Shakespeare and jazz around the country. No doubt Masterpieces will embrace a cozy canon of ethnically diverse but docile productions. John Rockwell noted pointedly in The New York Times that the days of NEA support for questing work by individual artists are gone. Indeed, the NEA makes fellowship grants only in one category, literature, these days.
But Rockwell also acknowledged the sometimes "elitist" edge of NEA grant-making. Many in Congress and elsewhere have groused that the bulk of grants go to the two coasts, leaving great swaths of heartland underserved. And the indelicate little secret of the NEA's grant-review panels was their often chummy, incestuous nature. It is not trivial for the NEA to send Shakespeare and Ellington to small towns and sparsely populated states. It should do that, for one thing; and for another, making itself visible in the heartland might win a few new supporters among previously scornful legislators.
The argument remains that the purpose of the NEA once was to spur creativity, not to rehash its greatest hits. In the halcyon antebellum days—pre Culture Wars—this was possible. The handful of grants, among many thousands, that attached the NEA logo to controversial productions could be overlooked. Would it were so again.
But cultural conservatives had a point. Innumberable artists managed—and manage still—to turn out innovative and questing work without government support. It should be said, too, that the truculent identity politics, celebrating "transgression" of bourgeois morés, has not helped. Both Mapplethorpe and Serrano were unfairly maligned—a tad less puritanism might have allowed context to triumph—but some artists strategically court infamy. As Rockwell observed, "censorship of transgressive art cannot be equated, as too many transgressive artists seem wont to do, with the failure to give it grants."
A kind of suppression quietly thrives, however. Rockwell also noted that institutions receiving grants from the NEA or state art agencies are wary of controversy and avoid anything "edgy." To its credit, the Nevada Arts Council still supports individual artists through several categories of grants, including fellowships of $5,000 in literature, performance and visual arts. And some of these grants have gone to artists who create challenging work.
The NEA's crimped budget, however, has hurt state and local agencies that depend on it, and strapped state governments often cut culture first. California last year found itself ranked last in per capita arts funding among the 50 states. So any increase in the NEA funding is welcome. And who knows? Gioia's effort to increase awareness of the nation's culture heritage could contribute to the opening some previously closed minds. However tame it might seem today, the best of that heritage comprises work that questions accepted wisdom.
Chuck Twardy has written about art and architecture for several daily newspapers and for magazines such as Metropolis.