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It is a nice diversion: a punitive hullabaloo, casting the NEA as the patron, if not of Commies, then of blasphemers, elitists and sickos. The arts grant becomes today's version of the Welfare Queen's Cadillac. And if the NEA is trashed or even dismantled in the process, so much the better: it only shows that the post-Reagan right still has teeth.
A few facts are in order.
Last year the U.S. Government gave the NEA $171.3 million to support theater, ballet, music, photography, painting and sculpture throughout America. Compared with the arts expenditures of other countries and with the general scale of federal outlays, this is a paltry sum. In 1989 France, with less than a fourth the population of the U.S., spent $560 million on music, theater and dance alone.
Williams speaks of "the right of the taxpayers to determine through this body ((Congress)) how their money shall be spent." Fair enough, but there is a degree of micromanagement to which democracy will not stretch; one cannot expect a national plebiscite every time a Kansas repertory group asks for $10,000. The fact is hardly any other major Western government spends less on the arts than the U.S. For every dollar that came to the arts from the Federal Government in 1987, about $3 came from corporate subsidies.
But, say abolitionists like Rohrabacher, isn't that the point? "If the NEA disappears, art would still prosper. If funds for the NEA are cut, the private sector will surely fill any holes and gaps that remain."
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 on PBS.
But the 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 for corporate dollars.
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 out that can't make it without the stamp of approval of the NEA."