National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)

• FOUNDED: 1965
• TYPE OF ORGANIZATION: Federal agency created to support the fine arts through the distribution of grant money

SIGNIFICANCE: Controversies surrounding NEA activities have raised questions about First Amendment protections of the arts, while illuminating conflicting visions of the proper role of government in culture

The National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the Federal Council on the Arts and Humanities were collectively created when the U.S. Congress passed the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act on September 29, 1965. That law’s purpose was to provide federal grant support for the fine arts and the humanities. The law specified that support should go only to artistic projects that were not for profit, that were undertaken professionally, and that were recognized as of high quality by professionals in their fields.

Government and the Arts

The establishment of the NEA authorized the federal government to sponsor fine art continuously. Since its creation, the NEA has stimulated debate on the nature of government-subsidized art and highlighted contrasting assumptions about the government’s proper role in the arts. The two fundamental positions on government sponsorship of the arts divide on whether the government should act impartially or as an advocate. Each position is associated with a particular political vision. When those visions conflict, questions arise about whether the NEA censors art.

The NEA's budget has been a controversial subject since its inception. In the late twentieth century, pressure from conservative advocacy groups led the government to cut funding to the group. However, its funds largely recovered in the early twenty-first century, receiving budgets of over $210 million each year in the early 2020s. This money funds grants for American traditional artists, jazz musicians, writers and translators of world literature, and more. About 40 percent of NEA’s grantmaking budget is directly awarded to individual states’ arts agencies to use as appropriate, including in underserved communities.

The Modernist-Postmodernist Paradigm

Critics who have viewed the NEA as an impartial agent have seen it ideally as an unbiased nurturer of the cultural life of America. The law that established the endowment forbade it from exercising any direction, supervision, or control over the operations of its grantees. It was merely to distribute funding impartially, following the advice of art professionals. Applications for endowment funds were to be reviewed by rotating panels of recognized experts. The experts who decided which submissions should be funded were to do so by utilizing rare insight and judgment that would advance public culture and art. From this point of view, any interference in the charge given to the NEA by Congress would constitute a philistine or censorious blocking of the advancement of the cultural life of America. This viewpoint assumes the modernist position that art is the product of genius—that it can be recognized by experts, that it is intrinsically serious, and that it is subject to disinterested contemplation, in other words: art for art’s sake.

This same viewpoint informed attempts by Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., and Chief Justice Warren Burger to distinguish art from obscenity in the Court’s 1973 Miller v. California decision. For those who maintain a modernist position, any interference in the exercising of that advocacy or interference in the activities of the artists who benefit from its largess would constitute an act of censorship.

There have been those, however, who have doubted that art can ever be truly “for its own sake,” or that the NEA can, or should be, an impartial sponsor of the cultural life of America. The modernist position that art is for art’s sake and that it must be serious has been challenged by postmodernism. This is a challenge that neither the NEA nor the courts were prepared to meet. At the time of the Miller decision, a critic pointed out that the Court articulated its test for “serious artistic value” at precisely the moment that modernism itself was dying. Miller, the critic further argued, was based on outmoded modernist ideas that some art is not good or serious enough to be worthy of First Amendment protection and that clear distinctions can be drawn between good and bad art. The decision further accepted the idea that the value of art can be verified objectively and that art can be distinguished from obscenity.

A case in point is the example of the “NEA Four”—artists whom the NEA refused to fund. Performance artists Holly Hughes, Tim Miller, Karen Finley, and John Fleck gained national attention when their applications for NEA grants were rejected. Their work involved such elements as smearing a nude body with chocolate and bean sprouts symbolizing sperm, urinating into a toilet bowl containing a picture of Jesus, urinating into the audience, and performing explicit sexual activities. NEA chairman John Frohnmayer recalled in his memoirs that “one could not glean, from reading the transcript, why specific performers were recommended or what artistic ability distinguished them from other applicants.” What should he say, he asked, “when one of our critics says that we funded a guy who whizzes on the stage?

The work of the NEA Four is characteristic of postmodernism, which holds that art should not be grounded in genius or expert opinion, but that it should serve as the expression of—or attempts to deconstruct—oppressive power structures. By this view, art is never for its own sake, but must be for the sake of the political; judgments of quality, obscenity, or seriousness are seen as intrinsically arbitrary and therefore necessarily oppressive and censorious. From this perspective, the failure of the NEA Four to obtain NEA funding resulted from government censorship. That perceived censorship is seen as an improper interference with the congressionally authorized duty of the endowment, and with freedom of expression and the exercise of First Amendment rights.

More broadly, the controversy surrounding the NEA Four reflects a clash of distinct cultural visions. The modernist definition of art as something that is aesthetic and intrinsically serious conflicted with the postmodernist assertion that such criteria—indeed any criteria for judging art or obscenity—are arbitrary, oppressive, and censorious. There is, however, another cultural vision to consider, a vision that subscribes to neither modernist nor postmodernist positions. That vision is conservative.

The Conservative Paradigm

It is mainly political conservatives who have viewed with skepticism both the modernist notion of art for its own sake and the postmodernist notion that the quality of art, and of human actions, is indiscernible, unqualifiable, and therefore arbitrary and oppressive. They maintain that fine art properly entails the expression of positive values, and that those values are better grounded in free conviction than in legislative decree. While defending free speech as a positive cultural value, they have hesitated to equate it with artistic expression. In this respect, they have found common ground with postmodernist feminists who have argued that pornography is unworthy of First Amendment protection.

Conservatives have generally regarded with skepticism the possibility of impartially subsidizing the arts, and they have questioned whether any form of governmentally subsidized free speech can truly be free. If, however, such subsidies must be offered, conservatives have argued that their purpose should be to advance the highest ideals and aspirations of American culture. To conservatives, therefore, the NEA’s proper role is not to act impartially or as a liberator from tradition and values, but rather to be a steward of American culture. Furthermore, if—as the modernists claim—governmental funding even can be impartial, conservatives would maintain that it should not be, and that governmental largess should not be distributed to suit the judgment of particular art experts or of their favorites.

Thus, there are those who believe that as a governmental agency, the NEA can and should be impartial, those who believe that it should reflect a liberation from tradition and values, and those who believe that it should reflect a living heritage of national values. Within a political, cultural, or academic context, these views are not easily, if at all, compatible, and result in charges and countercharges of censorship. Those holding that the NEA ought to be impartial will resist a perceived politicizing of art. Those who believe in advocacy via the arts will resist art that is perceived to be reactionary, or alternatively, nihilistic or obscene.

The NEA and Connoisseurship

As a governmental agency the NEA has been asked both to subsidize art impartially and to act as an advocate. Any subsidizing of art implies connoisseurship—a practice that involves recognizing what constitutes works of art and evaluating their quality. Modernists, postmodernists, and conservatives tend to view the phenomenon of a governmental agency dedicated to funding the arts differently. Postmodernists would see the interaction of connoisseurship and politics as inescapable; modernists would insist that qualitative determinations be justified; conservatives would want the ideals advocated by government-funded art to be those of the American people as a whole.

The responsibility of being a connoisseur of fine art entails a reckoning with two distinct visions of art. One vision is modernist: art for its own sake, unencumbered by dogma. Another is that of art in the service of belief. That vision can be either postmodernist or conservative. However, whereas the postmodernist argues that liberating art should be funded, the conservative argues that if art is to be governmentally funded, it should represent the positive core values of American culture. These distinct visions of art correspond with differing assumptions about the proper role of government in art. In addition to the examples of the NEA Four, these differing assumptions came to the surface when the NEA funded exhibitions of work by Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano.

Mapplethorpe has been widely recognized as a technically brilliant photographer whose work included subject matter regarded as sadomasochistic. Serrano is also a photographer, whose Piss Christ depicted a plastic crucifix submerged in a urine-filled container.

Those dedicated to a modernist approach to sponsoring fine art reject evaluating art in political and social terms. They view the issue of connoisseurship neutrally and see the proper role of the NEA as impartially subsidizing the cultural life of America. In this context, professionals in the fields who evaluate potential grantees are expected to judge artistic quality without regard to partisan politics or content bias. In seeking to be especially neutral concerning the content of works of art, they adopt a bureaucratic view of funding for the arts: Efficiency and formal excellence, rather than substantive quality, become paramount. From this perspective, the technical and aesthetic qualities of the work of Mapplethorpe and Serrano would warrant serious consideration for NEA funding, despite their provocative subject matter.

Those who hold that art should not be funded impartially are those who assume that art is connected with advocacy. The postmodernists advocate a liberation from oppressive power structures, from societal norms that are held to limit both the imagination and life. In seeking to be an advocate of liberation from values and tradition, the postmodernist perspective adopts an exhilarating but arguably nihilistic vision of the fine arts. From this perspective, the content of these works by Mapplethorpe and Serrano warranted subsidization by the NEA.

In contrast, from a conservative perspective Piss Christ, regardless of its technical brilliance or the intentions of the artist, is an offensive exercise in public bigotry, and Mapplethorpe’s art depicting sadomasochism is judged to be advocating behavior that undermines basic human dignity. Therefore, from a conservative perspective neither Serrano’s nor Mapplethorpe’s art warrant NEA funding.

Bibliography

"About." National Endowment for the Arts, www.arts.gov/about. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.

Biddle, Livingston. Our Government and the Arts: A Perspective from the Inside. American Council for the Arts, 1988.

de Grazia, Edward. Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius. Random House, 1992.

Frohnmayer, John. Leaving Town Alive: Confessions of an Arts Warrior. Houghton Mifflin, 1993.

Jarvik, Laurence. The National Endowments: A Critical Symposium. Second Thoughts Books, 1995.

Kramer, Hilton. The Revenge of the Philistines. Free Press, 1985.

"National Endowment for the Arts." Grants, www.grants.gov/learn-grants/grant-making-agencies/national-endowment-for-the-arts-nea. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.

"National Endowment for the Arts Quick Facts." National Endowment for the Arts, 2022, www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/NEA-Quick-Facts-8.9.22-two-pager.pdf. Accessed 20 Oct. 2024.

Netzer, Dick. Subsidized Muse: Public Support for the Arts in the United States. Cambridge UP, 1978.

Straight, Michael. Nancy Hanks: An Intimate Portrait: The Creation of a National Commitment to the Arts. Duke UP, 1988.