The State of the Art

You may have heard: there’s an election coming up.

In fact, you may have heard a lot of things lately—about the economy, about healthcare, about war spending, about aerial wolf hunting—but you may not have heard about something else: the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).

Senator Barack Obama said in the third presidential debate, that “there’s never been a nation on earth that saw its economy decline and continued to maintain its primacy as a military power,” but there is more to our standing in the world than sheer military and economic might. For years our national self-image has been thriving on the dividends of our psychological investment in Wall Street, but we must diversify our portfolio. Especially now, when Americans have to work harder than ever to be proud of our country, we need the NEA.

The Endowment today is a ghost of what it once was and could have been. The long, slow death began in 1989, when controversy erupted over two exhibitions of work from Andres Serrano and the late Robert Mapplethorpe. Both had been funded indirectly by grants from the NEA—the former through the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, and the latter through the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania—and both were shocking and blasphemous (phalluses and crosses dunked in urine). Anti-NEA vitriol flooded congressional mailboxes. The director of the Southeastern Center, Ted Potter, told The New York Times, “I’ve never seen anything like this before in my 25 years as an arts administrator. Ultraconservatives are on the rise. It’s a wind that’s blowing.”

The ripples were small at the time, but what was started could not be undone. By 1996, thanks to lobbying by conservative groups like the American Family Association and the new Republican Congress’s mantra of “fiscal responsibility,” the NEA saw its budget slashed by almost 40 percent. Individual artist grants were gone, as was general funding to arts organizations. Ultraconservatives won. Welcome to a new era.

Conservatives try to paint the NEA (pun intended) and its benefactors as the peace, love, and naked calligraphy crowd—ridiculous, immoral, and totally out of touch with normal Americans—ignoring the Endowment’s bipartisan past. It was Theodore Roosevelt (Class of 1880) who established the first arts-oriented federal advisory board, the Council of Fine Arts, and Dwight D. Eisenhower who created a national cultural center for the performing arts, which 13 years and a cultural revolution later opened its doors as the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

The Kennedy Center is the deceased President’s official memorial in Washington D.C., and a true testament to the belief of John F. Kennedy ’40 that progress in the arts is more than valuable—it is utterly integral to progress as a nation. Paying tribute to the poet Robert Frost less than a month before his assassination, Kennedy declared: “I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist.”

Kennedy’s presidency covered one of the most anxious periods in our nation’s history, at the height of the Cold War, and yet our national morale has never since been so high. Another of our greatest presidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Class of 1904, looked to the arts to restore the confidence of the American people in the depths of the Great Depression, because no matter what congressional Republicans say, art is cheap. The NEA didn’t exist until 1965, but in 1935, when the unemployment rate was over 20 percent, Roosevelt created over 40,000 government jobs for artists under the Works Progress Administration. In 1995, the year before the Congress’s massive blood-letting, the NEA’s budget represented just 0.01 percent of federal funds outlays.

Cutting arts funding is a symbolic measure more than it is a practical one. As Frank Rich ’71 said in The New York Times, “Bashing the NEA, like boosting school prayer, is a high-profile, low-cost way for the Gingrich G.O.P. to distract the faithful while avoiding the hard choices about cutting multibillion-dollar entitlements that might really downsize the budget.” The NEA got cut off at the knees because it was easier—and much more popular—for House Speaker Newt Gingrich to blame Robert Mapplethorpe for our problems than actually to solve them.

When you think of America, what makes your heart swell with pride and your eyes well up? Is it the idea of steel mills, microwaves, and the Internet? Or is it “American Gothic,” the Lincoln Memorial, and “My Country ‘Tis of Thee?” The fact is that when politicians stopped supporting artists, they stopped supporting the country’s vision of itself. We may have grown as a country since then, but that does not mean we have grown as a culture.

Whichever candidate wins on Tuesday (although I have my fingers firmly crossed for one of them), I urge him to heed the wisdom of Kennedy and Roosevelt. Spending $500 billion on a missile defense system may no longer be advisable, but surely spending $5,000 on modern dance is.

Jillian J. Goodman ’09, a Crimson arts writer, is an English concentrator in Quincy House.