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In the 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 and public money work together. On this level, the NEA has served the public very well for 25 years, and on the stingiest of budgets.
This reality contradicts the vaporings of antifunders like Douglas Bandow of the Cato Institute -- "There's no justification for taxing lower-income Americans to support glitzy art shows and theater productions frequented primarily by the wealthy."
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 the concerted interests of one class, one race, one mentality, is unthinkable -- if you think about it. But that is all the abolition of the NEA offers.
The NEA's record is long and honorable. It has fostered innumerable works, shows and performances that would never have had a chance without its modest underwriting but were of real value. And some of its money is wasted. Some NEA grants help produce lousy or ephemeral art because lots of art is ephemeral or lousy, subsidized or not. If Congress cannot be sure whether a new bomber or missile will work before committing billions to it, how can some arts panel be sure that Anna Anybody, recipient of $15,000 for a photographic project, will go on to become the next Diane Arbus or Imogen Cunningham? And how can it know in advance what she will produce? It can't, that's how. No one's taste is infallible; some seeds germinate, others do not. And grants are not state commissions. A degree of waste is built into patronage, period. The notion of "cost-effective" culture is a Reaganite fantasy.
There is, as is always the case when money is being handed out anywhere, a certain amount of logrolling and favoritism among the peer groups that review applications, and a peevish sense of entitlement among many applicants on the basis of class or race or gender. But the NEA's peer-group system has at least the merit of being a tad more democratic and informed than the fiats of a minister.
NEA advocates who claim that conservative assaults constitute censorship of free speech are both wrong and right. They are wrong because Government refusal to pay for a work of art is not censorship but a withdrawal of favor: the artist is still free to do whatever he/she wants, only not on public money.