NEA vetoes unleash protests, walkouts Essay Example For Students

NEA vetoes unleash protests, walkouts Essay Escalating controversy leaves the Endowment in disarray Within just two weeks of assuming her position, the new acting chairman of the National Edowment for the Arts sparked a new round of controversy for the agency, creating a volatile atmosphere just as its annual congressional appropriations process was getting underway. Anne-Imelda Radice, who took over the NEAs leadership on May 1 following John Frohnmayers forced resignation, wasted no time in letting it be known that she meant for the beleaguered NEA to regain the confidence of the American people and their representatives in Congress, and that, in doing so, she viewed her role and the agencys funding policy quite differently than did her predecessors. After telling a congressional subcommittee that she would use her authority to veto grants for work that she feels has difficult subject matter or flies in the face of deeply held religious beliefs, she illustrated her words by turning down two Museum Program grants. At press time, her veto of the grantswhose funding had been strongly recommended by both the National Council on the Arts and an Endowment review panelhad set off a chain reaction that prompted two other review panels, including the Theater Programs solo theatre artists fellowship panel, to suspend deliberations in unprecedented acts of protest, unleashing a barrage of press coverage and public response. Beyond excellence Radicethe former chief arts adviser at the U.S. Information Agencys Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs prior to her appointment as the NEAs chief deputy a year agopresided over her first National Council on the Arts meeting in early May. The council approved panel recomendations for more than 1,100 grants at the quarterly meeting, including $10,000 recommended by the Museum Programs special exhibitions panel to the List Visual Arts Center of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The grant was to support Corporal Politics, an exhibition examining sexism and other social problems through metaphorical depictions of human body parts, including genitalia. Following pointed deliberation over the potentially controversial application, the council voted 11-to-1 to support it. The following week, Radice testified before the House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Sidney Yates (D-III.). When asked by Rep. Yates whether artistic excellence should remain the primary criterion for awarding NEA grants, Radice replied, Excellence is more than technical ability or trendiness or expression of social concerns. There are the concerns of the taxpayer, the concerns of Congress, as well. If we find a proposal that does not have the widest audienceeven though it may havee been done very sincerely and with the highest intentions, we just cant afford to fund that, she said at another point in her testimony. Radice avowed her willingness to overrule panel recommendations and veto grants for sexually explicit or other controversial works, suggesting that they could be funded by the private sector rather than with taxpayer dollars. She indicated that she considers neither the controversial homoerotic photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe nor the graphic poem Wild Thing, written in the fictitious voice on one of the teenagers involved in the Central Park jogger rape, suitable for federal funding. The Endowment grants for a Mapplethorpe retrospective and a literary journal that published the poem were among the more controversial grants made since the beginning of the federal funding debate three years ago. Overruling both panel and council recommendations just a week after the hearings, Radice exercised her veto power on the recommended grant to the List Visual Arts Center, as well as one to the Anderson Gallery at Virginia Commonwealth University, also for $10,000, for a proposed photography and video exhibition entitled Anonymity and Identity that was to include a work that incorporates more than 100 tiny photographs, one of which is of a penis. Dialogue in Bethlehem EssayThe controversy gained another dimension when the popular rock group Aerosmith staged a press conference at the List Center in Cambridge, denouncing the Radice vetoes and donating $10,000 to support the Corporal Politics exhibit. Were angered to see and personal freedom erode, Aerosmith said in a prepared statement. Jon Robin Baitz, recipient of a 1992 NEA playwriting fellowship of $15,000, followed suit a week later, announcing two donations to the List Center and the Anderson Gallery equalling the amount of his own grant. In a letter announcing the gifts, Baitz declared, I simply will not be complicit with faux-moralist sharpies of the right nor with psychosexual hysterics in the cultural sacking of this country. As the acts of solidarity and protest escalated, NEA review panelist Murray N. DePillars, dean of Virginia Commonwealth Universitys arts school, resigned from the panel, and Beacon Press of Boston and the Artist Trust of Seattle decided to refuse funding from the agency. Our integrity is worth more than $39.000, stated Beacon Press director Wendy Strothman. In addition, NEA general counsel Amy Sabrin resigned in a move believed to be the result of disagreement with Radices congressional testimony. Ironically, National Council member Donald Hall, the New Hampshire poet who was prevented by illness from attending the May meeting at which the two controversial Museum Program grants were considered, had sent a letter to his fellow council members prior to the meeting, strissing the importance of the councils acceptance of review panel recommendations. I think it is useless to overturn the judgment of panels in the attempt to be expedient, in the hope that we may appease bigots and art-bashers, he wrote. When we pay tribute to a bully, a bully demands more. Because attacks on the NEA are disingenous and hypocritical, answering the letter of an attack accomplishes nothing.