ARTISTS ARE NOT NECESSARILY ENTITLED TO TAXPAYERS' MONEY

John Frohnmayer, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, was the first political casualty of the Republican primary war.

As a TV commentator, Pat Buchanan inveighed against Frohnmayer and the NEA for years. When he brought his campaign to the church-going conservatives of Georgia, Buchanan blasted George Bush for "subsidizing filthy and blasphemous art" at the National Endowment. The very next day Bush pitched Frohnmayer into the dumpster, awkwardly claiming that his "vision thing" was anti-filth.

Frohnmayer was a man without friends. To Jesse Helms and Pat Buchanan, he was soft on smut. To the art world, he was a sniveling weakling who caved in to the shouts of Neanderthal know-nothing censors. Frohnmayer's humiliating departure causes one to ask how the federal government began subsidizing the arts at all. It was during the halcyon days of the Great Society, when Lyndon Johnson decided to rescue the arts and broaden the base of American culture.

No longer would the arts be the preserve of the rich and left to flourish or perish as private patronage dictated. The development and dissemination of the arts would be democratized, bringing a new burst of diversity and creativity and reaching the broadest possible constituency. The National Endowment for the Arts, created in 1965, was to be the governmental vehicle for this noble concept. Grants were to be given so as to widen access and encourage both traditional and non-traditional forms of artistic expression. The latter goal was part of the original mission and in time became the problem.

It's the funding of non-traditional forms of expression that forces the federal government to decide in current terms what is art and what is worth the expenditure of its taxpayers' dollars. Congress didn't provide much guidance. Endowment support would be given where there was "substantial artistic and cultural significance, giving emphasis to American creativity and the maintenance and encouragement of professional excellence." Support could go to artistic endeavors of "significant merit" that "achieved standards of professional excellence."

Art historians claim that art is anything an artist makes or performs and an artist if anyone who calls himself by that name. Those loose, sweeping definitions may work where purely private funding is involved, but they will not work when tax money is at stake.

Officials and agencies are accountable for how they spend the public's money. When an artist submits his or her request to the National Endowment for the Arts and is approved, the artistic endeavor is no longer a purely private exercise of free expression. The government becomes to some extent associated with the artistic message, which may be controversial or even offensive to many who pay the bill the taxpayers. That's the inescapable consequence when private people seek to use public funds for purposes they still deem to be purely private.

As the New York Times states, "And yes, the paymaster calls the tune and politicians will clash over which claims for art deserve the public's funds." An artist has the constitutional protection of free expression, but doesn't have the unqualified right to the government's financial imprimatur.