Beato blows up the NEA: govt subsidies and not-so-radical artists

From Greg Beato in Reason...

In this long season of bailouts and federally administered stimuli, with seemingly every starving investment banker pleading to Congress that capitalism is just too hard, America’s artists had a golden opportunity...Instead, they sold themselves out at the ridiculously low price of $50 million. Andy Warhol must be spinning in his grave.

That comparatively paltry sum was all the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) was able to wangle from the massive $787 billion stimulus package President Obama signed into law in February. Since there are roughly 2 million dancers, sculptors, painters, and other professional aesthetes in the U.S., that means they are in line for an extra $25 each. Or about enough to buy a new black beret.

Wouldn’t it have been more provocative, inspiring, and educational if they’d simply said, “No, thanks”? If, say, they’d commissioned Karen Finley to storm the Capitol, her naked body decorated with a portrait of Milton Friedman fashioned from smeared Godiva chocolate? “We don’t want your money!” she could have exclaimed. “Not the $50 million mandated by the stimulus act, nor the $145 million in annual funding the NEA was already scheduled to get this year! Keep your soft-core socialism...We’re artists! Fiercely autonomous! Proudly independent! Unlike our cowardly, un-American counterparts in the world of big business, we’re committed to free enterprise and self-determination!”

Instead, arts advocates responded like every other underachieving opportunist peddling its troubled assets to federal sugar daddies...

In the early 1990s, when the NEA was helping underwrite artists who baptized Jesus Christ in urine...its value to our culture was clear: For less than a dollar a year per taxpayer, the organization served as a vivid symbol of our commitment to free expression. In other countries, the government might behead you for blaspheming sacred figures; in America, it was paying you to do so! Granted, the NEA did a far better job offending conservative sensibilities than liberal ones, but anyone with a taste for unfettered discourse could appreciate it on an abstract level at least. The arts bureaucracy was itself a work of conceptual art.

Today the agency is careful to fund nothing more controversial than bilingual puppetry epics....it exists largely to reinforce the notion that musicals are somehow more inherently suited to nourishing the roots of our culture than sitcom pilots....

If you’d be disturbed by an institution called the National Endowment for Faith that not only funded explicit religious expression but also favored a few specific creeds and religions while ignoring all others, you should be equally wary of the NEA....