An Open Letter to the President of the USA

1 May 2008

Dear Ms. or Mr. President,

OK, I’m covering all the bases. I wrote this before the Dems finished nominating so I don’t know who their candidate is or who will win the general election. No matter. Collectively, you spent more than $600 million getting elected. Maybe you think that was a bargain, but it seems like a lot of dough to me. Especially when compared to the National Endowment for the Arts’ $113 million.¹ Of course, what you spent getting into the White House is peanuts compared to the Department of Defense’s outlay for 2007, some $602.2 billion. That’s $1.65 billion a day (!)—enough money in one day to fund the NEA at its present level for 14 years. Isn’t arithmetic fun?

I know there are lots of very important things you have to get going on during your first 100 days: ending the war in Iraq, rebuilding our economy and infrastructure, jobs, health care, education, housing. But add the arts to that First Agenda. The arts are the soul of a culture.

Since the 1990s, the arts have been dissed by the government in two ways. First, the NEA grants budget remains absurdly tiny—about 37 cents per American per year. Second, since 1996 when the NEA budget was chopped by 40 percent and the agency was instructed to stop making grants to individuals, the NEA has operated solely through institutional gatekeepers. It’s time to unfetter the NEA while bringing its budget up to at least $1 per American: $305 million. You can do this—and a whole lot more—by cutting the Defense budget by 20 percent. That would give you more than $120 billion a year to spend on things like health care, education, and rebuilding infrastructure.

Let’s back up a bit and recall how the NEA got chopped down. In 1989, afraid of losing its funding after outcries against Robert Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic photographs, Washington’s Corcoran Gallery canceled its Mapplethorpe retrospective. At about the same time, a similar furor arose concerning Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, “a 60-by-40-inch cibachrome print of a wood and plastic crucifix submerged in the artist’s urine” (Phelan 1990:5). Seeing an opening, Jesse Helms introduced legislation severely crippling the NEA. The Helms bill failed but the NEA was definitely put on notice. Then, later in 1990, even as the first Iraq War began, the performance art of Karen Finley, Tim Miller, Holly Hughes, and John Fleck (thereafter dubbed the NEA Four; see Phelan 1990, Schechner 1990, and TDR 1991) further outraged many conservatives and evangelicals. So much so that the then head of the NEA, John Frohnmayer, bowing to what he called “the political realities,” overrode the recommendation of the NEA’s peer-review panel and rescinded grants made to the four performance artists. Finally, in its 1995 guidelines, the NEA announced that henceforth “our agency will do business differently.”² The NEA has not recovered from the awful attacks made on it more than 20 years ago.

It is time to reinvigorate the NEA.

A disempowered NEA is bad for the arts and bad for the country. The NEA needs not only to have a lot more money, it needs to be enabled to make grants to individuals. Experimental and unorthodox arts need extra help, not crippling restrictions. It is through experimentation, dissenting thought, images, and works that a democracy reinfuses itself. The “ordinary” arts are fine, that goes without saying; and the classics deserve to be heard and seen again and again. But what really delineates a living tradition is its avantgarde. That avantgarde cannot be defined in advance or arbitrated by institutional gatekeepers. It’s bad enough that the peer reviewers on the various NEA panels are not necessarily the most knowledgeable in their fields and have to decide who is worthy of support; often the most adventurous artists are overlooked and/or underfunded. Are the panelists uncomfortable with uncomfortable art? It’s scandalous that the USA does not have in its NEA a vigorous proactive...