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                                                                                CULTURE, Page 72

A Cheap and Easy Target


The downfall of the arts endowment was caused by a bungling
cultural community, not just election pressures

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III -- With reporting by Ann Blackman/
Washington and Daniel S. Levy/New York


    The cost of the National Endowment for the Arts amounts
to about 69 cents -- not dollars, just pocket change -- per
U.S. citizen per year. Its share of total public spending is so
small that in the short form of the federal budget, it is
rounded off to zero. Of the nearly 90,000 NEA grants awarded
over the past quarter-century, at most a few dozen have sparked
any significant public controversy -- and the cumulative cost
of all those was less than a cent a person, at a time when
people often won't stoop to pick up a penny from the street.

    Yet despite this fiscal insignificance and the innocuous,
even noble, nature of almost everything it underwrites, the NEA
has become one of the most controversial agencies of
government. A target for President Reagan on the theory that
merit ought to be defined by the populist mechanism of the box
office, it spent the past decade spiraling downward from dreams
of expansion to danger of demise. Artists and administrators who
benefit from the NEA's money and imprimatur concede they have
blown the political debate. They allowed the right wing to
misrepresent culture as a hotbed of the unpatriotic, the
irreligious, the sexually permissive and perverse. "We have let
the extremes dictate the battlefield," says Milton Rhodes,
president of the American Council for the Arts.

    Anti-NEA invective has hit a nerve and thus proved a
fund-raising tool for Senator Jesse Helms and other
conservatives. Last week it became a rallying point for
presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan. Assailing Tongues
Untied, a PBS documentary by a gay black who received $5,000
from the NEA via two intermediate agencies, a Buchanan TV ad
intoned, "This so-called art has glorified homosexuality,
exploited children and perverted the image of Jesus Christ."

    It is a measure of how much arts leaders misjudged the
effectiveness of such tactics that after two years of denouncing
NEA chairman John Frohnmayer as a sellout for his attempts to
placate the right wing, last week they were mourning his forced
resignation and envisioning his heir as sure to be worse. Says
Jack O'Brien, artistic director of San Diego's Old Globe
Theater: "If President Bush got a message in New Hampshire, we
did too." A chilling sign for arts leaders is that some liberals
now join in doubting whether government should finance ideas.
It was the talk of Washington cultural circles last week that
ABC correspondents Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts endorsed
abolishing the agency on David Brinkley's Sunday news show.

    In two turbulent years, Frohnmayer enraged artists by
suspending a few grants on political or sexual grounds and by
requiring all recipients to certify in writing that their work
was not obscene, a term even the U.S. Supreme Court has trouble
defining. He then irked conservatives by dropping the
certification and reinstating some taboo artists. He tried to
appease two sides utterly uninterested in compromise -- one
ablaze with the First Amendment, the other afire with populist
indignation at forcing citizens to support unwelcome ideas. He
was also contending with congressional demagoguery and, inside
the agency, with a deputy and potential successor, Anne-Imelda
Radice, widely regarded as a watchdog for the right.

    In the melee, artists belatedly realized, they were lured
into arguing the free-speech rights of a fringe few rather than
the central value of culture in defining a society. Says Andre
Bishop, artistic director of New York City's Lincoln Center
Theater: "We have been between a rock and a hard place. Rallying
behind endangered groups produced a big problem. Not rallying
behind them is unthinkable."

    Ostensibly the struggle has been about a handful of works
meant by their creators to challenge and shock. Underlying these
confrontations is a philosophical battle over the nature of
government. The rationale for withholding NEA monies because
some substantial segment of the population finds a work
objectionable (while another substantial segment applauds) is,
in essence, the same as the rationale for withholding funding
for abortion or even abortion counseling. The idea is that after
electing leaders and paying taxes, a citizen still ought to
retain a moral veto.

    This can be viewed as a healthy vestige of New England
town meetings. But it can also be seen as part of the unhealthy
wider erosion of consensus. Rather than a pluralist tolerance
in which one seeks only to ensure that one's side is heard,
anti-NEA campaigners seem to seek a monopoly in which no other
values can be affirmed by government. Says Robert Dugan, public
affairs director of the National Association of Evangelicals,
which represents 45,000 churches: "Unless the President can get
someone who will stand up to the arts community and be firm with
the liberal elite, the end will come. The NEA asked for it by
rubbing our noses in it."

    What their noses were being rubbed in was a reminder that
in a heterogeneous society there are other, often antagonistic,
points of view -- with equal entitlement to respect. It is
ironic that the NEA battle has been so much misunderstood by
artIt is not about money or common sense, but about symbols --
and thus its intensity affirms the true importance of culture.