The Big Read, a relatively-cheap National Initiative arts program, is seen by many as too costly. The NEA's meager budget is one legacy of the arts recession of 1997.

The weekly blog, ALL THAT JAZZ
By JASMINE MAHMOUD
Published online: July 31, 2009

I want to call your attention to last week’s New York Times article about the National Endowment for the Arts and Rocco Landesman.  “For New Leader of the Arts Endowment, Lessons From a Shaky Past,” by Robin Pogrebin and Jo Cravin McGinty, was less of an article about the current state of affairs for the NEA-Chair elect, and more of a history lesson about the NEA’s past two decades.

One history lesson was about the often-unreported arts recession of 1997.  Pogrebin and McGinty wrote:

After the Republican sweep of Congress in 1994, it was only a matter of time — just about a year — before the N.E.A.’s overall budget was cut by 40 percent, to $99.5 million for 1996, from $162.3 million, and its ability to finance potentially divisive artists (with the exception of some literary writers) was eliminated. For a while there, it seemed as if the agency might not survive.

I am happy they included this lesson. I first learned about the arts recession of 1997 two months ago when I interviewed Dudley Cocke, director of Roadside Theater. He told me:

For many of us, the recession began twelve years ago. It is an unreported story and a gap in our history of the democratic arts movement in the U.S. I think two big things happened. In 1997, the National Endowment for the Arts and its leader, Jane Alexander, caved into the relentless right-wing pressure, which began with the launch of the culture wars in 1981 and got rid of all the NEA’s discipline programs. In place of dozens of programs, they substituted a few broad themes, like creation and presentation. The NEA had a Folk Arts Program and, equally important for many of us, the Expansion Arts Program, which was a legacy of the civil rights movement. Both programs were focused on expanding participation, on including the majority of Americans as audiences and as art makers. The leaders of the Expansion Arts and Folk Arts programs, A. B. Spellman and Bess Lomax Hawes, respectively, were thoughtful leaders who really helped the rest of the federal agency begin to understand the gifts offered by traditional artists and other artists in inner city and rural communities

When the discipline programs disappeared, a lot of the particular knowledge, which existed among program staff became lost. Also, organizations like ours now could only submit one application. Roadside Theater and Appalshop typically had been receiving annual support from a dozen different discipline programs. After 1997, we lost 90% of our federal funding. Equally damaging for Roadside and other touring companies, the NEA Arts Presenting Program collapsed, which in turn devastated national touring of new and experimental plays.

[To read the rest of my interview with Dudley Cocke, click here.]

The arts recession of 1997 is an important story to tell. The singular view of arts as (Pogrebin and McGinty report), “controversies — Robert Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic photographs, Karen Finley’s chocolate-smeared performance pieces, Andres Serrano’s urine-immersed crucifix,” rather than as needed social goods led to drastic decreases in public funding for the arts.  This was a point emphasized to me when I interviewed Juda Baca, muralist, community organizer and artistic director of SPARC. She told me:

That’s the problem because we’re caught in that historic position of the arts as the Culture Wars, where we were arguing for the rights of one individual to produce whatever work they wanted with public money. It hurt us, and made us come off as a community of selfish people who weren’t concerned with the greater good. We were affecting First Amendment rights—the Mapplethorpe issues and Karen Finley, the NEA four—which was, of course, something I supported. I spoke in front of the Senate. At the time I went before the Senate, I was thinking, “what am I doing here, because I am really not speaking to the censorship that has occurred historically to the exclusion of entire populations of people.”

The take-away: always, and especially during times of arts controversies, artists and arts groups must defend themselves as needed culture keepers and creators that contribute to a social good.

One final lesson: the NEA’s meager funding continues to limit larger national arts initiatives. In The New York Times article, Pogrebin and McGinty detail controversy over National Initiatives arts programming that some think are too costly. They write:

Some arts professionals argue that these programs — known as National Initiatives — have absorbed too great a proportion of endowment funds. The Big Read, for example, cost about $9 million over the last two years.

$9 million over two years!  $4.5 million per year is a very small amount to spend on a national initiative. However, the NEA’s budget remains so small–a legacy of the 1997 arts recession, and of national attitudes about the arts as unneeded, controversial and only for the rich–such that any significant funding initiative is burdensome to the broad goal of fostering arts groups, artists and arts initiatives across the country. This is tragic because national arts initiatives are needed to increase aesthetic citizenship values, to create a space for dialogue and problem solving, and to foster economic, artistic and cultural development.  In absence of a larger budget, the NEA and the arts community must find free to low-cost ways to foster national arts initiatives. Danielle and I wrote a policy brief, which offers some low-cost ideas and solutions. As the economy and national views on the arts continue to affect arts funding and policies, we welcome a greater dialogue to make sure that the dream of a more robust arts landscape becomes a reality.