ARTS - AND YOUR MONEY

Dearly Beloved, we take as our text today a comment from Jane Alexander. Shes the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and she was talking to Congressional Quarterly at the candid time. She was explaining why a state like Arkansas would get turned down on 11 out of the 12 grants it had sought from the NEA. And in the course of her remarks, Chairperson Alexander dropped that oh-so-democratic mask of hers for a moment to reveal the congealing mass of condescension behind it.

To quote Congressional Quarterly: The arts, Alexander explained, are much like the apple industry. Most apples come from a few states with ripe growing conditions and are then shipped around the country for everyone to enjoy.

You got that, bub? Our job is to send the money to Washington and take what we get from New York or San Francisco and be darned grateful. Or as Ring Lardner might have summarized The Chairwomans comments: Shut up, she explained.

Well, after all, its not as if we out here in the sticks could produce art ourselves or could claim a Fay Jones or John Gould Fletcher or Rosemary Fisher or Al Allen or ... well, space does not permit. Jane Alexander may never have heard of our artists; therefore, when it comes to grants, they dont exist.

Caught speaking her mind, Ms. Alexander stopped condescending and started flattering: I didnt mean to imply that Arkansas doesnt have wonderful arts, she explained. Indeed, it does. Just not wonderful enough to get more than one out of the 12 grants we asked for. Just not as wonderful as Andres Serranos Piss Christ or a real show-stopper like Sex With Newt Gingrichs Mother another example of the NEAs idea of art thats worth the money or, more precisely, your money.

Considering the NEAs taste in art, Ms. Alexanders condescension is preferable to her approval not that its possible to take either very seriously. Nobody would have to pay attention to her comments at all if public funds were not involved.

Jane Alexander, the NEA and the rest of the official, government-issue Art World have managed to safely distance themselves from relevance, but not, alas, from your money, Gentle Taxpayer. Ninety-nine million dollars of it. Out of which, art in a state like Arkansas gets a measly $400,000. Mainly because it has to; each state is entitled to a minimal grant. Otherwise, maybe all the $99 million could be spent on the kind of artistic product that Jane Alexander cant seem to differentiate from apples.

Ms. Alexanders applesauce is part of a familiar pattern. The few hundred thou that states like Arkansas collect is an attenuated form of hush money something to keep the peasants quiet while the elites collect their millions.

Item: The NEA has never been subjected to any outside review of its management or accounting, which may explain its exceptionally high administrative costs, even for a government agency. (Those costs now approach 20 percent of the money it is given; apparently, it costs a lot to give the publics money away.)Just look at the distribution of NEA money.

A third of the NEAs direct grants go to only six cities: New York, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington.

A third of the countrys congressional districts never get any direct funding from the NEA.A fifth of the NEAs grants go to arts organizations with multimillion-dollar budgets. (Talk about corporate welfare.)Democratic congressional districts get $3 in direct grants from the NEA for every $1 that goes to Republican districts. (Everybody knows Democrats are more artistic, at least when it comes to government-approved art.)Do you detect a pattern in all this? Of course. This isnt art for the people; its art for the artists or, rather, for artists with good connections. The bureaucrats get handsome cuts, too. How long do you think the apple industry could make it if its administrative costs approached 20 percent.

Naturally, it wont do to call this rip-off a rip-off. Rather, its Cultural Policy, a phrase that should go off in American heads like a warning buzzer. In a free country, its the culture that should influence government, not government that should mold the culture. When that happens, can Socialist Realism be far behind? (The American version will probably be closer to Multicultural Muddle.)Mixing art and the state, like mixing church and state, has its hazards. Both will be corrupted soon enough. In a society that recognizes the intimate power of art its spirituality the concept of government-approved cultural policy should be embraced about as warmly as a keg of dynamite. Rather than look on the arts as another slush fund, it would be far better to prohibit Congress from passing any law respecting an establishment of art or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

In the arts, the NEA has set out to play the role of an established church, and that is not good for either government or art. Just as an established church tends to stultify religion, so officially certified, capital-A Art tends to muffle the real thing no matter what Ms. Alexander, our current bishop of the arts, says.

The NEA would not be attracting all this controversy if it had confined itself to simply distributing federal funds for the arts on a per capita basis or encouraging student orchestras and fingerpainting classes. But it has a far more ambitious and mischievous agenda: Cultural Policy. Which is just the sort of policy the state should not be making, at least not this state. America doesnt need a minister of culture, which is what the chairman of the NEA sounds like when she starts comparing apples and arts.

Paul Greenberg is the editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.