An Open Letter

Dear Theatre Topics Reader

As you probably know, the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities are in trouble. Newt Gingrich has promised to “zero out” the NEA by 1997. Clearly, the NEA is a symbolic “trophy” for the Right, and the debate about the future of the endowments is in fact a debate about what kind of country we want to live in. I do not want to live in a country where politicians assume that they can score points by attacking art and cutting its funding. Or at least I do not want to allow this to happen without a fight. My friends and I are organizing a national protest in Washington, D.C., on October 6, 1996 called ARTNOW. We invite all readers of Theatre Topics to join us in the capital that Sunday in order to demonstrate that there is indeed an audience for the arts in the United States that is as passionate as the Christian Right. This fact seems to be somewhat obscure in mainstream political consciousness today. We hope that ARTNOW will remind the politicians that there is indeed a huge, voting audience who wants a fully funded NEA, and a lot more besides. It is helpful to recall, in more detail, some of the historical threads and themes that have led us to this moment.

The NEA was established in 1965. Its charter included this directive: the endowment must devote “the fullest attention to freedom of artistic and humanistic expression. . . . The intent of this act should be the encouragement of free inquiry and expression. . . . Conformity for its own sake is not to be encouraged and no undue preference should be given to any particular style or school of thought.” In short, the charter of the NEA was alert to the possibility that state-sponsored art could produce its own orthodoxies, its own dogmas. In keeping with the tenor of the mid-sixties, the NEA was established with an implicit anti-Russian rhetoric. Recognizing the dangers of what had come to be called Soviet realism, the NEA wanted to promote diversity, not curtail it. In the intervening thirty years, however, we have seen a relentless attack on diversity in all forms. From the erosion of affirmative action, to the explicit censoring of individual artists as diverse as Bill T. Jones and Karen Finley, the disemboweling of the NEA stems in part from the largely paranoid response to what Time magazine calls “the browning of America.” Moreover, conservatives recognized that just as the sixties were defined by the civil rights movement, and the seventies by the women’s movement, so too the late eighties gave birth to both a disability rights movement and a gay and lesbian movement; these groups caused conservatives increasing consternation. The response to that consternation was to make these movements less visible by refusing to promote their work.

While the debates about Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano, Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, Tim Miller and John Fleck created a great deal of controversy and commentary, the much less sensational but historically more damaging transformation of the NEA between 1995 and 1996 has received little comment. In 1995, the NEA had a budget of $162 million. While $162 million may seem like a large amount of money, in real tax dollars it is not. It represents less than .1% of the federal budget. The so-called “decent taxpayer” who Republicans were so eager to protect from the wasteful NEA in the past five years contributes less than 71¢ per capita each year to the NEA. In 1996, however, the NEA’s budget was cut by 40%, and is now only $99.5 million. Ninety people from a staff of 238 were fired and the categories for NEA applications were consolidated into four groups. With the exception of creative writing and jazz, all individual artists’ grants were eliminated. This year the NEA is accepting applications in these four categories: health and preservation, creation and presentation, education and access, and planning and stabilization. Clearly, with 50% of the Endowment’s money going to either stabilization or preservation, the conservative agenda has won the day. Unfortunately, even...