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• • • The End of the Edge An Epilogue At New York's first Fringe Festival in 1997, I saw the new life in art we were all going to have once we were done losing the culture war. I didn't see it onstage but in the festival's infrastructure and ability to sell itself. Skillfully organized and effectively marketed, the Fringe began with no funding and ended with no debt. This after 175 shows in twenty-one venues over eleven days. A miracle. I came away with new hope and new forebodings. For the Fringe was also something of a fraud, less a showcase for edgy work than a construct of "the edge." Or, as the Fringe guide put it, flour own private theme park, Off-Off-World." All that transgressive work born in the '80S performance clubs had disappeared by then-as if those scabrous Karen Finley monologues (and everything else that supposedly brought down the National Endowment for the Arts) had never happened. One night during a Fringe performance of K, the Neo-Futurists's clever adaptation of The Trial, I realized that the last time I'd visited that particular theater, I was watching Joe Coleman bite the heads off several white mice and throw their carcasses into the audience. But let me not wax nostalgic. My introduction to the first edition of this book (1993) said quite enough about the rise and demise of the East Village scene. What followed was actually more devastating-and it applied nationwide, for the War on Art left whole chunks of the nonprofit world in ruins. Meanwhile, New York was becoming a city of luxury condos, with artists' enclaves scattered from the South Bronx to Red Hook. Maybe that's a good thing: No one "scene." No one aesthetic. But it also came' with a price tag. New York can no longer be the destination for all the round pegs who leave Squaresville. They can't afford it. 354 FIN-DE-MILLENIUM Some of the artists I covered in this book are finding it harder than ever to even get a gig, while the return of forms like burlesque strikes me as regressive. There's simply less financial, critical, and community support for anything risky. Does that mean there's also less need? One of the bigger ironies surrounding the concept of "alternative space" is that most of those venues for the irascible and the experimental depended on government largesse. The NEA began funding them in 1972. Note the birthdates of a few of New York's finest: the Kitchen in 1971; Artists Space in 1972; Danspace in 1974; Creative Time in 1974; Franklin Furnace in 1976; P.s.122 in 1978. As I write here in 2007, all still exist, though the Furnace had to become virtual and the rest have had to adjust in other ways to "new realities." Martha Wilson, the Furnace's founder and director, described the shift when I interviewed her in '97, the year the Franklin Street space shut down. She recalled that NEA program officers used to visit the Furnace and encourage her to apply. "We got money. We got praise. The notion that experiment is good and should be supported by the culture was out and about," she said. "We had no idea that the climate would change 180 degrees. I would say by about the mid-'80s, the avant-garde was viewed as a virus eating away at the body politic-something that needed to be stamped out if possible. Artists should be-if not killedat least silenced." Congress got into the act in 1989, and began punishing and micromanaging the NEA. I date the year of greatest cataclysm to 1995. Heady with victory in the Republican Revolution of '94 led by Newt Gingrich, right-wingers in Congress saw their chance to finally kill the hated Endowment . They managed merely to take its soul. They wiped out fellowships to individual artists (except in folk art, jazz, and literature). They eliminated the category of "Artists' Organizations," which included all the venues mentioned above. And they cut off funding for general operating support. That's just money to pay the light bill (for example), but without it, no organization can afford to take many chances on what they present. They need box office. Looking back at the War on Art now, I see it as a sort of testing ground for far-right tricks, featuring some of the same players who advanced the...

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