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Thus Congress--and the nation--is now full of indignant wannabe reformers who know next to nothing about American culture but want to get tough on it. They have no idea that there is a vast, complex and valuable tract of images between Norman Rockwell's Thanksgiving turkey and Andres Serrano's photo of a crucifix in urine. Years of adroit propaganda by the religious right have convinced many of them that a vote for preserving the nea in any form is a vote for sodomy, blasphemy and child abuse. This has become a matter of indurated faith, resistant to any insert of mere fact.
For these zealots, modern American art is summed up in the image of Robert Mapplethorpe, that slick and vastly overrated photographer, conservative in every sense except the sexual, who is now seen as a hybrid of welfare queen and Caligula, living off the NEA on your tax dollar and mine while sticking bullwhips up his bum. In fact, Mapplethorpe neither got nor asked for one cent from the NEA to make the photos that caused the offense; a museum did that, for a show of his work. And he died a multimillionaire because of the ranting queer hatred of Jesse Helms, Pat Buchanan and the religious right--not to mention the tribal loyalty of art-world homosexuals, many of whom would have you think that any criticism of his work amounts to homophobia.
Of the tens of thousands of grants that the NEA has made in its 30-year history, perhaps a dozen have excited serious controversy and only two--to the Mapplethorpe show and Serrano--have brought it to the verge of abolition. Significantly, neither case involved a direct grant by the nea to the artist. Serrano got his $15,000 of public money as an award from the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, which the NEA had given a grant to distribute as it thought fit. All the same, it is obvious from this debacle that the NEA should not have set itself up as the Lady Bountiful of the so-called cutting edge, as it did in the '80s. Government is almost by definition a poor patron of the avant-garde. Artists who call themselves sociopolitical subversives, and then ask for state handouts, are either fools or hypocrites. But at the same time, it is, and plausibly should be, a legitimate function of government patronage to encourage promising forms of artistic expression that are not familiar enough to find their way in the marketplace. This is a thin rope to walk; the NEA fell off it and broke a leg. But you don't kill the endowment over that, any more than you abolish the U.S. Navy because of Tailhook.
The key is reform, without which the NEA probably won't survive at all. Its critics charge it with spending too much on grants to individual artists, but this is untrue--in fact, such grants account for only 4% of its budget. It's more important for the NEA to get rid of all its bogus democratic criteria, the therapeutic fustian of "self-esteem" and "empowerment" through art for this locality or that minority. Leave that to state arts councils (if they still want it, which they shouldn't either); in art there should be no such entitlements. The NEA should be more elitist--rigorously so, in fact--and should hand out more money to fewer projects. It should wholeheartedly embrace the dreaded Q word: quality.