The role of the NEA: Is there a place for controverial art in the government's budget?

A piece about arts funding by David Smith, author of Money for Art: The Tangled Web of Art and Politics in American Democracy, was run in the Wall Street Journal today. The column discusses President Obama’s selections of Jim Leach and Rocco Landesman to head the National Endowment for Humanities (NEH) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), respectively. Many in the arts community are disappointed with these choices, as they seem to signal that there will be no change from the somewhat conservative status quo. But Smith embraces these choices; indeed, he argues:

Privately funded art need not steer clear of controversy, but publicly funded art should. In addition to hurting the endowments' standing in Congress, controversy undermines in the public eye the idea that the arts and humanities are important to civic life and are worthy of public funds.

What’s more, he distinguishes between grants made to individual artists, and grants made to programs:

On the surface there's certainly nothing wrong with either cultural agency disbursing grants to individuals. But the debate over such grants highlights the question of who should be the real beneficiary of the endowments: artists and scholars or the public? In truth, the NEA functions just fine without making individual grants. In fact, absent this practice it's easier to see the agency as its creators back in 1965 intended: one whose primary beneficiary is to be the American people as a whole.

The foundation for each of these positions is the belief that the American public as a whole does not benefit from controversial art. But is this assertion true?

In fact, some of the most valuable artistic contributions that have been made have also been controversial, in style, subject matter, or both. These include Goya's Naked Maya and Los Caprichos, Turner's The Slave Ship, the works of the Impressionists, Picasso's Guernica, and Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans.

In literature, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, The Color Purple by Alice Walker, and Ulysses by James Joyce have all sparked debate and been banned or censored from various institutions.

In fact, one appeal of a lot of good art is its ability to provoke controversy, because this often indicates that it is also provoking thought. Certainly there is work that shocks gratuitously, but the fact that an artist presents something shocking or controversial does not make it gratuitous. Nor does it make it self-serving. I can think of no better way to benefit American society than to encourage and stimulate thought.

Smith trumpets such NEA sponsored programs as Shakespeare in American Communities and Poetry Out Loud because these programs foster a sense of appreciation for the arts, which he believes is in keeping with the spirit of the original NEA mission. But, the NEA's stated mission is:

to foster the excellence, diversity, and vitality of the arts in the United States, and help broaden the availability and appreciation of such excellence, diversity, and vitality.

If we are to foster excellence, diversity, and vitality of the arts, then we are to encourage not just appreciation, but also actual making. And, to be fair, the NEA does do that, in the form of grants to organizations that then redistribute the grants to individual artists. The Vermont Studio Center, The Women's Studio Workshop, Aljira Inc, Art in General, and Public Art Fund Inc are examples of organizations that have received NEA grants for "Access to Artistic Excellence," in other words, money that they will pass along to individual artists, often to do a specific project.

I don't know that returning to a system in which artists apply directly to the NEA for money would be the best way to pomote and advance new work. However, I would be interested in exploring whether eliminating some of the middle-men could be a cost-saving measure that doesn't undermine the integrity of arts funding.

Furthermore, Smith ignores the fact that grants for art appreciation could also spark contoversy. In fact, the poets whose work is included in the Poetry Out Loud program include Jimmy Santiago Baca, who spent 6 years in prison for drug possession and intent to sell, Allen Ginsberg, whose work Howl, was the catalyst for an obscenity trial against San Francisco book dealers, and Gertrude Stein, the lesbian author of one of the earliest coming-out stories, Q.E.D, and whose other works, like Tender Buttons, often commented on lesbian sexuality.

Indeed, many of the museums and arts institutions received NEA grants specifically for exhibitions that might be deemed controversial. The Williams College Museum of Art funded the exhibition of controversial African American artist Kara Walker with a $40,000 grant from the NEA. The recent Jenny Holzer exhibition at the Whitney, Protect Protect, which is highly critical of the Iraq war, was made possible with a grant from the NEA.

And that's a good thing. The government should not deny funding to artists or organizations that promote artists simply because the artwork is critical of a societal institution. To do so is indirect censorship. That is, it encourages those in the arts community to abstain from riskier, controversial endeavors in favor of safer, less critical projects that will more readily receive funding. And if we do that, then what we are not "fostering a vitality of the arts in the United States," but rather a degeneration of American culture.

Art and Privilege

This past weekend, while checking out my friend Joe Borelli’s work as part of the Bushwick Open Studios event, we got in a conversation about art and privilege: Simply, creative pursuits require money and time. Connections help too. As such, those who come from money and an upper class background have an advantage. They can take off for three months to do a residency that allows them to make more work and more relationships in the art world without worrying about how to pay rent and loans and bills. They can take low paying or even unpaid positions because they offer an opportunity to work with a well-known artist or at a prestigious institution. Or they can work part-time, not be burdened by an inflexible 40+ hr a week schedule; they can go into their studios fresh, rather than exhausted after a long day of work for someone else. They can make projects on a scale or with materials that others simply can’t afford to realize. Those projects then get recognition and more funding for even larger projects—the whole thing is cyclical. The rich really do get richer.

But, is this an issue that is unique to artists? Indeed, hasn’t the disparity between the upper and middle and working classes been growing? Hasn’t the cost of higher education been increasing exponentially? Isn’t this just indicative of a larger societal issue?

The answer is of course, yes. But, the issue is even more exaggerated in the arts for the following reasons:

1) Art is the artist’s job. Everything else, at least in terms of employment and career, is secondary. The goal is not to advance in the job or jobs that pay the bills. Those jobs, often only tangentially related to one’s real job of being an artist, offer little help in terms of advancement in the art world, and in fact, take away time from the research, making, schmoozing, and applying that is all part of being an artist—(No, I am not so romantic as to think that being an artist is only about making artwork). So, those with the means to pursue art without having to hold down another job or jobs are able to spend more time on their job of being an artist, and will have an advantage in advancing in that job.

Also, this is different from the lawyer who has to put in her time at a corporate law firm to pay off her student loans before she can start a small practice that focuses on domestic violence issues. She still gets to be a lawyer at the big firm, and is practicing and learning law-related things there. Or, she can choose to ultimately stick with the big firm, and join the ranks of the wealthy. Sticking with art brings no financial security.

2) Related to this, artists are more likely to be freelancers. This means that they have little security in their means of income. Freelancers aren’t eligible for unemployment when their contracts end, and they’ve often been working without health insurance or other benefits. The artist who lives paycheck to paycheck can quickly spiral into severe debt when he becomes un or underemployed, which leads to anxiety and depression, neither of which is good for artmaking (despite the tortured artist myth).

3) Education. The costs of education are rising, and the idea of studying to be an artist doesn’t seem like a viable way to pay back the loans that are often necessary to pay for school. And, many of the best art schools are also among the most expensive. But, unlike, say, the best engineering schools, or law schools, or business schools, a degree from one of the best art schools is still little assurance of making major career advancement as an artist (but it is not worthless— that MFA is a requisite for many galleries now.) This was the case before the economic recession (which admittedly has made job searches more difficult for most disciplines), and now the economy’s downturn has only exaggerated the issue for artists, as galleries close or scale back on shows, or cut down on the artists they represent. So, students without means can abandon the idea of becoming an artist, downgrading art from career to hobby, and pursue something else. Or, they can saddle themselves with the loans that make it necessary for them to take jobs that distract from their real job of being an artist.

The result is that the pool of working artists becomes less economically diverse. Because it takes a certain amount of privilege, or a certain amount of delusion that one can break into such privilege, to identify as an artist. There was an article in the NY Times yesterday about the collapse of Williamsburg, a trendy Brooklyn neighborhood that has found favor with many of the city’s artists, now that so many of the hipsters’ trust funds have dried up. (Full disclosure: my apartment and studio are in the burg) I’m not sure how I feel about it. I’d like to think that it’s the start of putting artists from different financial backgrounds on more equal footing, but in reality, it may just make it even harder for those of us who never had money to make art.