National Endowment For the Arts v. Finley is the major Supreme Court case that considered the standards and merits of grant funding.
For New Leader of the Arts Endowment, Lessons From a Shaky Past
Although it may be hard to remember now, there was a time when the National Endowment for the Arts seemed to be on solid footing, both financially and politically, and could spend its days quietly financing artists and arts groups at its discretion.
Then came the controversies — Robert Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic photographs, Karen Finley’s chocolate-smeared performance pieces, Andres Serrano’s urine-immersed crucifix and others — and from the late 1980s onward, the endowment seemed to be constantly under siege.
After the Republican sweep of Congress in 1994, it was only a matter of time — just about a year — before the N.E.A.’s overall budget was cut by 40 percent, to $99.5 million for 1996, from $162.3 million, and its ability to finance potentially divisive artists (with the exception of some literary writers) was eliminated. For a while there, it seemed as if the agency might not survive.
But it did, thanks partly to the efforts of successive leaders, partly to the gradual fading of the culture wars from public consciousness. And now, as the N.E.A.’s chairman-designate, Rocco Landesman, awaits his confirmation (his proposed nomination is expected to be approved before the Congressional recess in August), he looks likely to start the job on firmer ground than any of his recent predecessors.
In June a House subcommittee approved a $170 million budget for the endowment for next year, an increase of $15 million from the current budget and $9 million more than President Obama, widely considered an avid arts supporter, had requested. (The president, however, did supplement this year’s budget with $50 million in stimulus money, which the N.E.A. has been distributing to state arts agencies and local organizations.)
Certainly the economy, and the growing public anxiety about the deficit, may yet put a damper on arts financing. But political goodwill toward the endowment is clearly on the rise, and many in the arts world are wondering if Mr. Landesman will be able to lead it, finally, into a new era — and, if he does, in what direction he will take it.
Mr. Landesman isn’t talking, pending his confirmation. Still, as a Broadway producer, he has a reputation for being direct, irreverent and occasionally confrontational, which has led many people to expect a shake-up of the endowment and a more aggressive management style.
Bill Ivey and Dana Gioia, the endowment chairmen who served through most of the years after the deep cutbacks of 1996, worked hard to make the most of the depleted agency they inherited, spending much of their time and energy trying to rebuild the N.E.A.’s prestige and credibility with Congress. Even if Mr. Landesman hopes to strike out on a new path, say, by pushing to restore grants to individual artists — something many people in the arts considered “the heart and soul of the endowment,” as the painter Chuck Close put it in an interview — he may find himself looking to the tenures of Mr. Gioia and Mr. Ivey.
As interviews with the former chairmen and others familiar with the endowment show, along with an analysis of N.E.A. grant patterns, the two men often found creative, if not always universally admired, ways to push their agendas forward in the face of institutional constraints.
In some cases they did this by identifying and honing in on areas of potential spending that were less likely to raise Congressional hackles. During Mr. Ivey’s tenure, from 1998 to 2001, for instance, spending on design grants increased by more than 130 percent, even if the chairman — an academic whom President Bill Clinton hired away from the directorship of the Country Music Foundation in Nashville — was not himself a design hound.
“I’m a folklorist and came into the chairmanship with an interest in the folk arts, but, while folk arts funding was certainly maintained during my tenure, I did not feel free to indulge my enthusiasm by pumping up that part of the endowment’s work,” Mr. Ivey said. “We were still playing defense under the gaze of a critical and watchful Republican Congress, so we were very careful with both the reality and appearance of how money was spent.”
And in 2003 the first of Mr. Gioia’s six years as chairman, spending on arts-education grants increased by 49 percent. Although there were reductions in later years, that increase helped arts education dominate grants financing from 2003 to 2005. (Only N.E.A. “partnerships,” through which state arts agencies and regional arts organizations distribute funds, received more money; these arrangements typically account for about 40 percent of the money the endowment awards.)
The United States has “dismantled the arts-education programs that used to be part of every public school,” Mr. Gioia said. “The N.E.A. is uniquely positioned to provide leadership in this.”
For Mr. Gioia, arts education was central to his vision for redeeming the endowment.
“Part of our mission as a public agency was to address the public,” he said, adding that he saw changing perceptions of the agency — through public outreach and his frequent meetings with members of Congress — as an important part of his mandate as chairman.
Mr. Gioia is proud, he said, of having “defined the N.E.A. as an agency which brought the best of art and arts education to all Americans.”
In much the same spirit, Mr. Gioia also established crowd-pleasing programs, like the Big Read, through which people read and discuss a single book in their communities; Operation Homecoming, in which active-duty troops and veterans write about their wartime experiences; and Shakespeare in American Communities, which sends traveling professional Shakespeare productions around the country and bills itself as “the largest tour of Shakespeare in American history.”
Some arts professionals argue that these programs — known as National Initiatives — have absorbed too great a proportion of endowment funds. The Big Read, for example, cost about $9 million over the last two years.
“There were definitely concerns that by building special initiatives of that size, you were limiting the agency’s ability to do the routine work of supporting other organizations,” Mr. Ivey said, adding that the Big Read seemed to him more like “a humanities project and less like an art project.”
Robert L. Lynch, president of Americans for the Arts, a lobbying group, said Mr. Gioia’s effort to create a better image for the agency through these initiatives was “a good thing but not necessarily a long-term strategy.”
“The emphasis needs to be using the leverage power of a tiny amount of money so that more things get funded in more places by people themselves,” Mr. Lynch added, articulating a widely held view of how N.E.A. financing works best. The fiscal impact of the endowment’s small budget has always been magnified by its outsize cultural influence, the thinking goes; the stamp of approval conferred by even a paltry N.E.A. grant can provide an arts organization with a powerful fund-raising tool.
“Much of what I did was try to explain to the country why they needed artists,” Mr. Gioia said, pointing out that for fiscal year 2008 he secured the largest increase for the endowment’s overall budget — $20.1 million, raising the budget to nearly $145 million — in 28 years. “That would not have happened had Congress not been convinced of the agency’s ability to spend the money productively,” he said.
The question that probably most preoccupies people in the arts is whether Mr. Landesman will succeed in securing more money for the endowment — its budget still pales in comparison with those of other federal agencies — and if he will try to restore the N.E.A.’s ability to make grants to individual artists. Although he declined to comment on his plans for the agency, Politico.com reported this month that Mr. Landesman had expressed an interest in reinstating those grants.
Representative Norman D. Dicks, Democrat of Washington, the chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on the Interior, which oversees the N.E.A., said he was open to discussing it. “We’re willing to entertain that idea,” he said in a telephone interview. “There is some risk here, and that’s what we want to evaluate.”
Some say that it is unlikely that the grants will be revived, because they require the N.E.A. to approve art before knowing its content. “I don’t know if we’re at a point where the political process can withstand the vicissitudes of contemporary art,” Mr. Ivey said. “It does expose the agency more than any other single activity.”
On the other hand, he continued, “I think it’s much closer to being brought back” — and he said he believes it should be. The grants would represent “a kind of signature investment by the federal government in the vitality of the nation’s cultural life,” Mr. Ivey said. “The American people should have the nerve to invest in the work of individual artists.”
At the very least, cultural professionals say they are hopeful about a growing potential for art to be taken seriously as part of the national identity, rather than disparaged as an elitist, effete enterprise unworthy of federal support. “I hope that time is over, the period when artist have been held as suspicious by the politicians,” said Michael Conforti, president of the Association of Art Museum Directors.
“Anybody interested in the arts has to be so thankful that, whatever did or didn’t happen, the N.E.A. didn’t go away,” he added. “If it had gone away, it would be very difficult to reconstitute.”
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