A History of the National Endowment for the Arts: Chapter 6

 

A Supplement to the Regional Theater Series 

[Thank you for returning to Rick On Theater for the sixth installment of “A History of the National Endowment for the Arts,” a serialization of the NEA’s own report, “National Endowment for the Arts: A History, 1965-2008.”  Chapter 6 covers the turbulent chairmanship (1989-92) of John Frohnmayer (b. 1942).

[As I’ve recommended before, visitors to ROT who are just encountering this series should go back first to the beginning and read parts one through five, published on 4, 8, 11, 14, and 17 November, respectively.  The NEA’s report is organized chronologically, so jumping in in medias res will make comprehension difficult.

[As with Chapter 3, this segment of the series is a little longer than my self-mandated maximum.  It was too difficult to edit, so I left it at its original length.]

“NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS: A HISTORY, 1965-2008”
edited by Mark Bauerlein with Ellen Grantham
(National Endowment for the Arts, 2009) 

p a r t  I

The HISTORY of the NEA

 

chapter 6

Culture Wars

In September 1987, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, received a grant of $75,000 [$173,000 in 2023] from the NEA to support the seventh annual Awards in the Visual Arts program, known as AVA-7. The idea for AVA began under Chairman Hanks as a model for public-private partnership programs. The NEA grant was matched by a total of $75,000 [$173,000] from the Equitable Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. These grants enabled the SECCA jury to meet and select ten artists, including photographer Andres Serrano, to showcase their art in a traveling exhibition. The Arts Endowment played no part in the selection process. Nearly a year later, in July 1988, the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) received an NEA grant of $30,000 [$66,500 today] for a retrospective of works by another photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe, who soon after died in 1989. 

The AVA-7 exhibition opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in May 1988. It continued through the middle of July, then traveled without incident to the Carnegie-Mellon University Art Gallery in Pittsburgh before being displayed, again without protest, at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond from mid-December through January 1989. AVA-7 included a photograph by Serrano that showed, in a blurred focus, a crucifix as seen through a golden liquid. The title of the work was Piss Christ.

The Mapplethorpe exhibition, entitled The Perfect Moment, was an extensive retrospective of Mapplethorpe’s career, which opened at the ICA in Philadelphia in December 1988. Unlike Serrano’s image, Piss Christ, which was hazy in appearance but provocative in title, the Mapplethorpe exhibit included graphic sexual images under a mild title. The Mapplethorpe show was installed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago from February to early April, and was then scheduled for the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington beginning July 1, 1989. These appearances were to be followed by stops at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, the University Art Museum in Berkeley, and the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston, to conclude at the end of August 1990.

In November 1988, national elections were held, and President Reagan was succeeded by another Republican, George H. W. Bush. The themes raised by these two exhibitions seemed a far cry from the dominant foreign and domestic policy issues of the campaign—the Cold War, the Middle East, violent crime—but they soon erupted into a controversy that would affect national politics through to the next presidential election.

Uproar

The furor over the Serrano and Mapplethorpe images began just as another heated controversy was winding down. In 1981, a massive steel sculpture by Richard Serra, Tilted Arc, was placed on the plaza [Foley Square] in front of a federal office building [Jacob K. Javits Federal Building] in [lower] Manhattan by the General Services Administration (GSA). An Arts Endowment panel had recommended Serra for the commission through its advisory role in the GSA’s “Art in Architecture” program. Although the work was intended to improve the aesthetics of its location, workers who used the space claimed that the sculpture was obstructive and discomforting. For years they complained loudly about the work. In spring 1989, it was removed in the middle of the night at the orders of a regional administrator of the GSA.

[In accordance with Serra’s wishes, Tilted Arc has never been publicly displayed since it was removed. It’s currently in storage in three sections in a Maryland warehouse and is unlikely to ever be exhibited again.]

The Tilted Arc affair principally involved people who made daily contact with the artwork, and the impact of the incident was largely confined to local citizens and people in the art world. News of the Serrano and Mapplethorpe exhibits, however, would spread far beyond the art world to become a major political story across the nation. After the AVA-7 exhibition closed, the Reverend Donald E. Wildmon, executive director of the American Family Association in Tupelo, Mississippi, saw the catalogue containing Serrano’s Piss Christ. He condemned both Serrano and his work, initiating a public campaign against the show and the agency that helped make it possible. Thousands of like-minded citizens across the country flooded Congress with protests. Wildmon called for the dismissal of the “person at the National Endowment for the Arts responsible for approving federal tax dollars.”

At the time, the Arts Endowment was in transition. Frank Hodsoll had departed, and the Bush Administration had not yet nominated a successor. The acting chairman, Hugh Southern [28 February-13 November 1989], had served as deputy chairman under Hodsoll. On April 25, 1989, Southern issued a statement intended to moderate the growing tumult. It said, “The involvement of the National Endowment for the Arts as a funder of the Southeast Center for Contemporary Art follows Endowment panelists’ advice, and that of the National Council on the Arts. The Endowment is expressly forbidden in its authorizing legislation from interfering with the artistic choices made by its grantees. The National Endowment for the Arts supports the right of grantee organizations to select, on artistic criteria, their artist-recipients and present their work, even though sometimes the work may be deemed controversial and offensive to some individuals. We at the Endowment do, nonetheless, deeply regret any offense to any individual.”

The statement did nothing to blunt the hostile reactions. Criticism of the Arts Endowment in Congress was led by Senators Jesse Helms (R-NC) and Alfonse D’Amato (R-NY), and echoed in the Washington Times. Joined by 22 other Senators—including several Democratic standard-bearers such as Bob Kerrey (D-NE), Dennis DeConcini (D-AZ), Harry Reid (D-NV), and Tom Harkin (D-IA)—they released a letter in May denouncing Serrano’s work as “trash” and demanding a review of the Arts Endowment’s award procedures.

[The Washington Times is a conservative daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It covers general interest topics with a strong focus on U.S. politics. It was founded in 1982 by Sun Myung Moon (1920-2012), head of the Unification Church and owned until 2010 by a media conglomerate founded by Moon. It’s currently owned by a subsidiary of the Unification Church. The Washington Times is known for its conservative political stance, supporting the policies of Republican presidents and the positions and opinions of conservative politicians.  It has published columns which reject the science of environmental and health issues and has attracted controversy by publishing conspiracy theories and racist content.]

Telephone calls and letters poured into the agency complaining about Serrano’s work. In a June broadcast, televangelist Pat Robertson [founder and chairman of  the Christian Broadcasting Network] added his voice to the chorus attacking Serrano and the Arts Endowment. Southern replied to the protesting senators with a letter on June 6,1989, to Senator D’Amato stating that he “personally found [Serrano’s photograph] offensive,” but pointed out that the selection of the art had been made by SECCA’s jury, not by the Arts Endowment itself. Southern said that the Arts Endowment and the National Council on the Arts promised a review “to ensure that Endowment processes are effective and maintain the highest artistic integrity and quality.” However correct they were, his communications did not give the angry legislators what they wanted—a guarantee that the NEA would not support projects containing works that outraged public taste.

The battle heightened as columnist Patrick Buchanan and theologian Jacob Neusner—a member of the National Council on the Arts—weighed in, each in a distinct venue and with considerable differences of style and tone. Buchanan used the Washington Times editorial page as a forum to blast offensive artworks, many of which were not funded by the Arts Endowment. He cited the commercial film, The Last Temptation of Christ, and a mural of revolutionary icons Lenin and Castro on a private building in Manhattan. Buchanan called on newly elected President George H. W. Bush to purge the Arts Endowment.

[The Last Temptation of Christ is a 1988 film of the life of Jesus based on Nikos Kazantzakis’s 1955 novel, produced by Universal Pictures and directed by Martin Scorsese.

[The “Pathfinder Mural” was a work of art located at 410 West Street in the West Village neighborhood Manhattan. It was conceived of by artist Mike Alewitz in 1988 and painted as a collaboration among 80 artists from 20 nations.  The mural was painted on the side of the Socialist Workers Party building housing the left-wing Pathfinder Press. The mural was permanently removed in 1996 to repair the wall of the building and the SWP later sold the building.]

From his position at the program of Judaic studies at Brown University, Neusner wrote a letter to Senators Helms and D’Amato, “I wish the Endowment leadership would simply say . . . we goofed and we’re sorry. Because we did goof and I for one am sorry and also, I personally am enormously chagrined.” Within days of Neusner’s letter, on May 31, 1989, Senator Slade Gorton (R-WA) called on the Arts Endowment to cut off funds to SECCA for five years.

Mapplethorpe Controversy and Congressional Reaction

At almost the same time, the Mapplethorpe exhibit began to generate controversy, beginning with the show’s cancellation by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in June 1989. As a demonstration of approximately 60 people outside the Corcoran ensued, the decision caused a huge uproar in arts circles throughout the country. The Washington Project for the Arts exhibited the work in July-August 1989. The clamor over Mapplethorpe became noticeably louder just as Congress began debating H.R. 2788, the appropriations bill for the Interior Department and Related Agencies, which provided funding for the Arts Endowment. Four critical amendments were offered. Three of these were defeated: one to eliminate the Endowment’s entire appropriation for fiscal year 1990, another to cut its grants and administration appropriation by 10 percent, and another to reduce its budget by 5 percent.

A fourth amendment, offered by Representative Charles Stenholm (D-TX), called for a reduction of Arts Endowment funding by $45,000 [$90,700]—representing the $30,000 [$60,400] NEA grant that had been awarded to ICA for the Mapplethorpe show and the $15,000 [$30,200] that had gone to AVA-7 to exhibit Serrano. The Stenholm amendment carried, and the bill passed the House.

When the Senate took up the NEA’s appropriation bill, Senator Helms inserted language prohibiting the Arts Endowment from using any appropriated funds for materials deemed “obscene or indecent,” including those denigrating belief in a religion or non-religion, or debasing any person on the basis of race, creed, sex, handicap, age, or national origin. “Obscenity” was defined as works which include “sadomasochism, homoeroticism, the sexual exploitation of children, or individuals engaged in sex acts and which, when taken as a whole, do not have serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” Other amendments were introduced to ban for five years all direct grants to SECCA and to the ICA at the University of Pennsylvania, and to shift $400,000 [$844,400] from the agency’s Visual Arts Program to other Endowment programs in the areas of folk arts and community arts—even though the Mapplethorpe grant came from the Museum Program, not Visual Arts.

When the final version of the bill emerged, the Senate had provided $250,000 [$527,800] to create an independent commission to review the Arts Endowment’s grantmaking operation. The amendments to take funds from the Visual Arts Program and to place a ban on SECCA and ICA grants were not included. Thus, at that point, the controversies had not resulted in reduction of the NEA’s budget. Conservatives in public life and several Republicans in Congress, however, maintained their suspicion of the Arts Endowment, and to many the names Serrano and Mapplethorpe were now tokens of moral corruption inside the agency. Into this heated and confusing climate, new Arts Endowment leadership arrived.

Frohnmayer’s Chairmanship

In July 1989, President George H. W. Bush appointed John E. Frohnmayer to head the Arts Endowment, and in November he was sworn in as the agency’s fifth chairman. The moment of Frohnmayer’s arrival could not have been less auspicious, but the new chairman displayed an attitude of optimism.

A Washington Post writer characterized the reaction to one of Frohnmayer’s public appearances in Oregon, his home state, directly after his nomination to the chairmanship, as “giddy applause.” Frohnmayer was a successful lawyer—specializing in the First Amendment—an art collector, and chairman of the Oregon State Arts Commission. He had studied for the ministry before choosing law as a profession.

In his memoir, Leaving Town Alive (published in 1993), Frohnmayer wrote that before accepting his appointment he had considered the Arts Endowment chairmanship to be “the best job in the country,” one which he “had always wanted.” In fact, he had unsuccessfully lobbied for the post at the beginning of the Reagan era. As a state arts leader in Oregon, he had experienced the benefit of NEA assistance to the state agencies, writing that Oregon had received “money to help fund full-time directors for local arts councils, and this small amount of assistance increased these councils from three to 14 over a two-year period.” In his pre-appointment interviews, he argued that the “Endowment could be extraordinarily helpful to the President [George H. W. Bush] as he sought to bring the country together.”

Frohnmayer also wrote in his memoir that he had been asked in his pre-appointment interview by White House staff what he would do if the Administration had a different point of view about a particular program from his own. He responded, “I would try my best to persuade the Administration that my point of view was right, but that I was a team player, and if I failed to persuade, I would do the Administration’s will.” As he soon realized, however, it would prove difficult to balance the competing demands of different constituencies as the culture wars came to Washington.

Frohnmayer remembered being “hopeful that Serrano and Mapplethorpe would be history by the time I got to the Endowment.” But Serrano and Mapplethorpe were history only in the sense that they had become permanent symbols. Indeed, at the time of this publication the grants and the controversy are nearly two decades old, yet the two names have been incessantly repeated by critics of the Arts Endowment, though to ever-diminishing effect. Likewise, the reputations of both artists have become inseparable from the NEA controversy.

Fighting on Two Fronts

To comply with Congressional mandates, the new chairman inserted the wording of the obscenity clause into the terms and conditions governing all NEA grants. His decision satisfied the Administration but evoked virulent attacks from a new group of dissenters: artists and arts administrators who had previously looked to the agency for support. The arts community began accusing the NEA of failing to defend freedom of expression, and soon the outcry became a complaint of censorship. The arts community also accused Chairman Frohnmayer of “selling out” to censors. Composer Leonard Bernstein refused the 1989 National Medal of Arts as a protest against the chairman’s policies, and New York theater director Joseph Papp [founder and artistic director of the New York Shakespeare Festival, later renamed the Public Theater] denounced Frohnmayer as “out-Helmsing Helms” and as “a person not to be trusted.” Papp put his denunciation into action in 1990 when he turned down two NEA grants totaling $323,000 [$651,000], one a $50,000 [$100,700] award to support the Shakespeare Festival’s annual Festival Latino. Another organization, the Bella Lewitzky Dance Foundation, won a grant that year, but when it submitted a request for payment, the company manager refused to comply with the new terms and conditions of the grant. When the Arts Endowment insisted the grantee abide, as required by law, the company filed suit.

The Arts Endowment now found itself fighting a war on two fronts. Some arts advocates labeled the new wording in the grants’ terms and conditions a “loyalty oath.” Frohnmayer later claimed that he had adopted the language as “an invitation to a lawsuit, which I hoped would lead to a finding that the language was unconstitutional.” Because of the obscenity clause, a number of artists regarded the Arts Endowment’s grant contracts as “a symbol of repression,” and many artists and arts organization directors refused to serve on panels. In 1992, no fellowship awards were granted for sculpture because the members of a Visual Arts panel had resigned in protest.

In his memoir, Frohnmayer continued, “My course was set and I wasn’t going to change it.” After the insertion of the new language into grant terms and conditions, he stated his opposition to the politicization of art, while expressing surprise when protests grew among the artists opposed to his policies. Joseph Wesley Zeigler, in his book Arts in Crisis, identified the cause of Frohnmayer’s dilemma: “His failure to understand the [Washington political] system led him to overreact to Congressional moves, while at the same time he underestimated the anger in the arts world at the NEA’s refusal to support cutting-edge works. . . . This inflamed artists while failing to assuage the conservatives.”

The difficulty in defining a consistent policy in this polarized climate was visible within a month of Chairman Frohnmayer’s confirmation. His first direct conflict with artists involved Artists Space, a nonprofit New York gallery. Artists Space was opening a show, with $10,000 [$21,100] in Arts Endowment funds, about the impact of AIDS on the arts community. The exhibit included depictions of sexual activity, as well as a catalogue replete with highly polemical statements. Examining the catalogue, Frohnmayer consulted with National Council on the Arts member Jacob Neusner, who informed him the catalogue included violent attacks on public figures—including fantasies by artist David Wojnarowicz of setting Senator Helms on fire with gasoline and throwing another conservative legislator from a high building—that had not been included in the original funding proposal submitted for the show. Chairman Frohnmayer decided to suspend financing for the exhibit, on the grounds of its political nature. A week later, however, he reversed his decision, and restored the $10,000 [$21,100] grant with the proviso that the funds would not pay for the catalogue. His decision only inflamed the situation, and Zeigler observed, “For the next two years, 1990 and 1991, Frohnmayer was caught in the middle of the crisis.”

[Artists Space’s show about the devastation of AIDS on the art community, curated by photographer Nan Goldin, was Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing (16 November 1989–6 January 1990). Wojnarowicz’s essay in the exhibit catalogue, “Postcards from America: X-Rays from Hell,” was assailed by such NEA opponents as Helms (1921-2008; Senator from North Carolina: 1973-2003), Dana Rohrabacher (b. 1947; Congressman from California: 1989-2019), and William Dannemeyer (1929-2019; Congressman from California: 1979-93).

[For more on artist David Wojnarowicz, including the Artists Space controversy, see my posts “David Wojnarowicz,” 15 March 2011; “The Return of HIDE/SEEK,” 4 January 2012; “Words with Pictures / Pictures with Words: DAVID WOJNAROWICZ (1954-92),” 16 September 2014; and “History Keeps Me Awake At Night,” 19 October 2018.  There’s also some discussion of the NEA Four in “David Wojnarowicz,” 15 March 2011; “Performance Art, Part 2,” 10 November 2013; “Culture War,” 6 February 2014; “‘Arts and the State’" by Paul Mattick, Jr., 14 November 2021; and “A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro, Part 6,” 1 May 2023.]

The “NEA Four”

The next chapter in the saga started with the performance art of Karen Finley. Zeigler explained, “In the world of ‘underground’ culture, Karen Finley was a darling: admired by the cognoscenti, and unnoticed by the wider public.” A performance in which she poured chocolate sauce on her naked body brought her to national attention when it was the subject of a column by Washington journalists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, who offered an unattributed description of the performance, by “an Administration insider,” as “outrageous.” At a stormy meeting in May 1990 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, that would be long remembered, the National Council on the Arts voted to defer for four months a group of 18 grants for Finley and other performance artists, that had been recommended by the Arts Endowment’s Theater panel. Of the 18 grants delayed, 14 were eventually recommended for funding by the National Council and awarded by Chairman Frohnmayer. Along with Finley, the remaining artists not recommended were John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller. These individuals sued the Arts Endowment and came to be known in the arts community as the “NEA Four.”

[The Rowland and Evans column, “The NEA’s Suicide Charge,” appeared as an op-ed piece in the Washington Post of 11 May 1990. After the grants to the performance artists were rejected on 29 June 1990, after having been approved by the agency’s peer review panel, the “NEA Four” sued the Endowment on 27 September in Finley v. National Endowment for the Arts on the grounds that their grants had been illegally denied for political reasons rather than artistic ones. When the government settled the suit out of court on 4 June 1993, it tacitly admitted that Frohnmayer and the Endowment had been making political determinations.]

In his memoir, Frohnmayer described these individuals as “boldly and confrontationally taking on social issues about which there was tremendous societal debate.” While Evans and Novak claimed that “White House sources” had said that Frohnmayer was “adamantly against disapproving any of the recommended applications,” Frohnmayer later protested this was untrue, and that he did not have a planned course of action. But, Frohnmayer had already written to White House aides Andrew Card and David Bates about an upcoming Finley performance, which the Arts Endowment had previously funded, that from all appearances the performance “was defensible on its artistic merit.”

The ferocious public debate over the Arts Endowment’s grants approval process and a lawsuit by several newspapers led the agency to change its policy on National Council meetings. In August 1990 the National Council on the Arts opened its grant review sessions, which had previously been closed, to the public.

Ongoing Accomplishments

Although the controversies persisted, the regular business of the Arts Endowment proceeded apace. As in every previous year, the agency reviewed thousands of applications, awarding grants to arts organizations and artists. Thirteen distinguished artists living in Hawaii, South Dakota, and Puerto Rico, among other places, received NEA National Heritage Fellowships. Composer George Russell, pianist Cecil Taylor, and bandleader Gerald Wilson were honored as NEA Jazz Masters.

The Arts Endowment continued to offer crucial support to significant projects. Visual Arts grants funded artist residencies at state universities in Colorado, Illinois, New Jersey, New Mexico, Utah, Virginia, and Washington. The Art in Public Places program, which helped local governments and organizations place art in public spaces, supported commissions at Duke University Medical Center, Las Vegas City Hall, and the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, and for highway overpasses in San Diego.

Preservation remained a central focus of the Arts Endowment funding to museums. The conservation grants in 1990 numbered 73 and totaled $1,169,800 [$2.4 million] in program funds. The Currier Gallery of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, for example, received money to conserve furniture and woodwork designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in his Zimmerman House. The Toledo Museum of Art won a grant to conserve a collection of Islamic ceramics, while Oberlin College received funds to support work on Gustave Courbet’s Castle of Chillon, and the Detroit Institute of Arts received a grant to conserve three monumental stained glass windows by John La Farge.

These were not unusual awards. Each represented the thousands of worthy projects evaluated and supported by the agency at the same time that media attention and political pressure focused only on a tiny group of controversial works of art.

Research Studies

Amid the din, the Arts Endowment continued to carry out some remarkable research projects with significant impact on different arts fields. One of the most important was the publication Survey of Public Participation in the Arts: 1982-1992 (SPPA). The SPPA was the third in a series of national population surveys designed by the NEA research staff to collect data on the U.S. population’s engagement in the arts. Data on the consumption side of the arts was thin. Until 1982, little reliable information could be found regarding how many and how often American adults visited museums, attended theater, listened to opera, read poetry, and in various other ways participated in the arts. The Arts Endowment’s Research Division set out to increase the knowledge base by designing a questionnaire and commissioning the U.S. Bureau of the Census to compile a sample of respondents and conduct the survey. More than 17,000 people were interviewed in 1982, making it the largest single survey of U.S. arts participation ever. In 1985, another statistical survey was conducted, providing the first opportunity to draw comparisons and explore trends in arts participation among the American public.

The 1992 SPPA followed the same basic procedures, but used more clearly articulated definitions and more sophisticated data collection. With a ten-year gap between it and the first survey, and with the respondent pool broken down by age, income, race, education level, and gender, the 1992 report signaled important trends in arts participation and supplied arts organizations with invaluable information on audiences. Among the findings:

• From 1982 to 1992, the attendance rate at art museums and galleries rose almost five percentage points.

• Audiences for opera, classical music, and jazz on radio increased by 49 percent, 60 percent, and 71 percent, respectively.

• Literary reading rates (fiction, poetry, drama) fell by three percentage points.

The 1992 SPPA generated a front-page article in the New York Times on February 12, 1996. Written by Judith Miller and titled “Aging Audiences Point to Grim Arts Future,” the article was the first of several to profile a troubling trend, the “graying of the arts” phenomenon documented in the SPPA results; that is, younger age groups were not participating in the fine arts at the rate their parents did when they were young. Future surveys would be conducted in 1997 and 2002, confirming the “graying” pattern while building a uniquely broad and consistent database on arts participation for researchers, educators, journalists, and policymakers, as well as arts organizations.

The data from the first surveys in 1982 and 1985 also provided material for another significant report, Arts in America 1990. This was the second in a series of reports requested by Congress on the status and condition of the arts in the United States. Arts in America 1990 gave the agency the opportunity to reflect upon changes in the arts during the 25 years of the agency’s existence. The report recounted dozens of projects and artworks funded by the Arts Endowment, but perhaps most impressive, given the political climate, were the trends in arts production and participation. The United States had experienced a remarkable growth in the number of arts organizations and artists, amount of public and private support, and size of audience:

• In 1965, there were five state arts agencies with combined appropriations of $2.7 million [$25.3 million]. By 1990, there were arts agencies in all 56 states and jurisdictions with total appropriations of $285 million $574.2 million].

• In 1990, local arts councils numbered around 3,000, with 600 having full-time staff.

• Private sector giving for the arts, humanities, and culture grew from $44 million [$413.1 million] in 1965 to $7.5 billion [$15.8 billion] in 1989.

• Performing arts attendance from 1965 to 1988 rose from nine to 24 million for symphony orchestra concerts, three to 18 million for opera, and one to 15 million for nonprofit professional theater.

The Arts Endowment’s impact on generating non-federal support for the arts was demonstrated by other statistics, cited in Arts in America 1990:

• In 1989, the NEA’s $119 million [$251.2 million] in organizational grants generated $1.4 billion [$3 billion] in non-federal funds.

• By 1990, the NEA’s Challenge Grants totaling $237 million had been matched by more than $2 billion [$4.2 billion] in new non-federal funds.

• In 1990, all four Pulitzer Prize recipients in poetry, fiction, drama, and music had been recognized earlier in their careers with NEA fellowships.

Arts in America 1990 contained testimonials from arts leaders about the benefits of an Arts Endowment grant, not only providing money, but something far more valuable in the long term—recognition. Joan Myers Brown, founding artistic and executive director of the Philadelphia Dance Company, Philadanco, explained it well: “The impact the National Endowment for the Arts has made on predominantly African-American dance organizations since its inception can be exemplified by the history of the success of organizations such as Dayton Contemporary Dance Company of Ohio, Dallas Black Dance Theatre in Texas, Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Company in Denver, Colorado, and Philadanco in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Being able to move into the main or national funding stream because of the approval of the Endowment opened doors to local agencies, foundations, and community-based funding in our areas. This ability to compete for grants, often given only to the more established cultural institutions, allowed what were often considered ‘grassroots’ or ‘community-based’ to secure a stronger footing in the field.”

The Arts Endowment also reported in Arts in America 1990 on the economics of working as an artist in the United States. A 1989 Columbia University study of 4,000 artists found that three-fourths of them earned no more than $12,000 [$25,300] annually from their art. Rising medical costs hit hard during the 1990s, affecting artists not only because they tend to be self-employed but also because of the physical hazards to which many in the arts are exposed. Another NEA research study, which was later published in 1993 as Dancemakers, found that the average annual income choreographers earned from their artistic work in 1989 was $6,000 [$12,700], while their professional expenses totaled $13,000 [$27,400]. Including money earned in other pursuits, a dancer’s average income reached only $22,000 [$46,400]. Dancemakers was, recalls Andrea Snyder, executive director of Dance/USA and former NEA Dance Program assistant director, “the first study of its kind to reveal the true economic life of today’s choreographers. It quickly became one of the most important references for the dance field as it made the case for increasing resources and services to artists making dances.”

Arts in America 1990 concluded on a triumphant note: “Over the past 25 years, the National Endowment for the Arts has been most effective at helping to create a diverse network for public support of the arts and increasing the number and quality of arts institutions.” The figures provided a strong argument for federal support for the arts, demonstrating the public’s responsiveness to public funding and the enduring impact of grant awards.

The Independent Commission

In the middle of 1990, an Independent Commission mandated by Congress to study the National Endowment for the Arts began its work. Comprised of 12 members, plus a staff of eight, the commission was co-chaired by John Brademas, the former Indiana Democratic Congressman and co-sponsor of the 1965 legislation creating the Endowments, and Leonard Garment, who, as an assistant to Richard Nixon, had played a leading role in increasing the Arts Endowment’s budget under Nancy Hanks. Soon after the Independent Commission held its first meeting, the “NEA Four” sued the Arts Endowment, alleging that their grant applications had been denied illegally.

The mandate of the Independent Commission was twofold. First, it was charged with reviewing the Arts Endowment’s grantmaking procedures, including the panel system. Second, the commission was to consider whether standards for publicly funded art should be different from those for privately funded art. These issues reflected the primary criticisms leveled at the Arts Endowment; namely, that its grantmaking process was afflicted by cronyism, and that it had funded works too far from the mainstream of public taste.

The commissioners identified the fundamental cause of the Arts Endowment’s crises as a deep change in the national sensibility. They wrote, “Today, twenty-five years after its creation, the system no longer works as it once did, for reasons that the NEA’s founders could not have foreseen. On certain social and cultural issues, the nation has become more polarized. As with other federal agencies, these developments affect the NEA and the environment in which it operates. . . . The Independent Commission believes it is time to restate what the founders of the NEA took for granted: The National Endowment for the Arts is a public agency established to serve purposes the public expresses through its elected representatives.”

The Independent Commission went on to state, “While the artists and the arts institutions receiving NEA funds are indispensable to the achievement of the purposes of the agency, the NEA must not operate solely in the interest of its direct beneficiaries. As with every federal agency, the Endowment must do its part in pursuing worthy social objectives but the agency cannot let such goals take precedence over its primary task of strengthening the role of the arts in American life.”

In its most substantial comments, the introduction included the following: “Publicly funded art . . . should serve the purposes which Congress has determined for the Endowment. It should be chosen through a process that is accountable and free of conflicts of interest. . . . Insuring the freedom of expression necessary to nourish the arts while bearing in mind limits of public understanding and tolerance requires unusual wisdom, prudence, and most of all, common sense.”

Reconciling freedom of expression and public acceptance, however, is a delicate process, especially when voices from both sides become extreme and antagonistic. Few public agencies had to contend with clashing cultural forces as intensely and sensationally as the Arts Endowment did in these days. The commission’s call for NEA leadership to exercise wisdom and prudence was not an easy task with so many in the government, the press, and the art world making conflicting demands.

Regarding grant panels, the Independent Commission pointed out a similar difficulty, noting that “making decisions about awarding grants to the arts is not an objective activity, subject to quantitative measures or improved by formulaic prescriptions. Professional expertise, aesthetic discernment, and an awareness that federal funds are being expended—all these qualities are essential to the successful grant making by the NEA.”

Assessing the NEA’s Record

In examining the record of the Arts Endowment, the commission took testimony from arts professionals, NEA employees, and prominent figures in the arts and public life. Individuals testifying included Theodore Bikel, then-president of Actors’ Equity [the professional theater actors’ and stage managers’ union] and former member of the National Council on the Arts; Samuel Lipman, pianist, publisher of the conservative New Criterion monthly, and also a former council member; theater director, teacher, and critic Robert Brustein; free speech litigator Floyd Abrams; and constitutional expert Theodore B. Olson, who later served as U.S. Solicitor General under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2004.

Drawing from the same data that went into Arts in America 1990, the Independent Commission determined that the NEA had “helped transform the cultural landscape of the United States.” When the Arts Endowment was founded, the number of symphony orchestras in the nation totaled no more than 110, but in 1990 the number had risen to 230. Opera companies had increased from 27 to 120, while state folk art programs had exploded from one to 46. Dance companies jumped from 37 to 250, and art museums from 375 to 700. The number of artists in the United States had tripled. The commission report summarized the work of the Arts Endowment by affirming that “a relatively small investment of federal funds has yielded a substantial financial return and made a significant contribution to the quality of American life.”

The commission also determined that “although there are deficiencies in the operation of the Endowment and some mistakes are inevitable, these problems can be ameliorated, if not eliminated, by a combination of Congressional guidance and oversight, significant reforms in grant-making procedures and prudent administration of the Endowment. These goals can be achieved while at the same time assuring both freedom of expression and accountability for expenditure of public funds.”

Commission Recommendations

The Independent Commission developed a series of recommendations concerning publicly funded and privately funded art, grantmaking and panel procedures, the role and responsibilities of the National Council on the Arts, private-public partnerships, and obscenity.

The commission found that the standard for selecting publicly funded art “must go beyond” that for privately funded art. With regard to “aesthetic or artistic qualities,” both should be judged only on the basis of excellence. Government support, however, must bring with it criteria beyond artistic worth; publicly funded art must not ignore the conditions traditionally governing the uses of public money, and must serve “the purposes which Congress has defined for the National Endowment for the Arts.” These must include meeting professional standards of authenticity, encouraging artists to achieve wider distribution of their works, and reflecting the cultures of minority, inner-city, rural, and tribal communities.

The commission recommended that the preamble of the legislation authorizing the establishment of the Arts Endowment “be amended to make clear that the arts belong to all the people of the United States.” Next, the Independent Commission recommended reforming the grants application process. The commission called for the strengthening of the authority of the chairperson; for the National Council on the Arts to be more active in the grants process; for the elimination of “real or perceived conflicts of interest”; for the evaluation of grant applications to be “fair, accountable, and thorough”; for advisory panels to be broader and more representative in terms of aesthetic and philosophical views; and for it to be made “clear that the National Endowment for the Arts belongs not solely to those who receive its grants but to all the people of the United States.”

On the issue of obscenity, the commission affirmed that “freedom of expression is essential to the arts,” but also that “obscenity is not protected speech,” and that the Arts Endowment “is prohibited from funding the production of works which are obscene or otherwise illegal.” It also declared, however, that the Arts Endowment is an “inappropriate tribunal for the legal determination of obscenity, for purposes of either civil or criminal liability.” It also recommended that Chairman Frohnmayer rescind the requirement that grantees certify that the works they proposed would not be obscene.

The commission concluded with an affirmation: “Maintaining the principle of an open society requires all of us, at times, to put up with much we do not like but the bargain has proved in the long run a good one.” The report was a major factor in the ongoing status of the Arts Endowment. While it was prompted by the immediate controversies, the commission took the occasion as a moment to reflect the different pressures and viewpoints in American life and culture. Its recommendations marked a serious attempt to renegotiate the competing demands from artists, arts institutions, journalists, politicians, and the public that had affected the Arts Endowment from the start.

Discord Continues

Unfortunately, the Independent Commission report did not dispel the atmosphere of conflict that had become attached to the Arts Endowment. While worthy grants continued to be awarded, uncertainty characterized its policymaking. In November 1990, the Endowment approved, “without opposition and almost without discussion,” in the words of the Washington Post, grants to two of the NEA Four, Karen Finley and Holly Hughes, only two months after the group had filed their suit against the Endowment. In December 1990, Chairman Frohnmayer announced that he would approve a fellowship to New York visual artist Mel Chin, one he had previously turned down.

By then, the presidential primary campaigns had begun. For the first time in its history, the NEA became an issue in a national election. Republican contender Patrick Buchanan, who as a newspaper columnist had castigated the NEA, was running on a “culture war” platform that combined virulent attacks on the Arts Endowment with the threat to close it down (and “fumigate the building,” he added in a New York Times article). The negative public perception of Frohnmayer as an ineffective leader increased with these assaults, and the agency’s situation worsened. With few supporters, Frohnmayer submitted his resignation to the President on February 21, 1992, becoming the only NEA chairman to resign under political pressure. Soon after, Buchanan unveiled a campaign advertisement claiming that the sitting Administration had “invested our tax dollars in pornographic and blasphemous art too shocking to show.” Administration spokesmen denounced the ad as “demagoguery,” but a great amount of damage had been done to the image of the National Endowment for the Arts. The agency had lost support in Congress, the White House, the media, and from the public.

[With this chapter, the NEA reaches its quarter-century mark at the same time it weathers its stormiest controversies.  The political Culture Wars of the 1980s came close to scuttling the Arts Endowment and the commitment to support and nurture artistic creativity in the United States. 

[In the next installment of “A History of the National Endowment for the Arts,” Chapter 7, “What Is to Be Done?” which records the administration of actress Jane Alexander as NEA Chairman (1993-97) as she endeavors to keep the NEA afloat and mend the damage suffered under her predecessor.

[Note that there will be an interruption of the NEA history series so I can publish a new post from my friend Kirk Woodward.  He’s completed a report on a 1986 book, Great Directors at Work by David Richard Jones, which will run on ROT on Saturday, 25 November. 

[I’ll return to the history of the NEA on Thursday, 30 November, and I invite readers to come back for the continuation of Mark Bauerlein and Ellen Grantham’s report.  At 25 years covered, we’ve only covered a little less than half the Arts Endowment’s existence.]