Preserve Artistic Freedom – End the National Endowment for the Arts

Posted by Enrique on 09.24.2009

No accounting for taste



Earlier this month, an official at the National Endowment for the Arts was reassigned to a different position amid allegations he organized an inappropriate teleconference. Several members of the MSM credited Fox News commentator Glenn Beck with instigating the move when he accused then-NEA communications director Yosi Sergant of attempting to enlist the arts community in improper partisan politicking.

This minor brouhaha raises some interesting questions – Is it ever appropriate for government to be involved in the arts? Once the government is financially supporting artists, isn't their independence (and legitimacy) compromised? Isn't government interference a threat to artistic freedom? Would it be so bad if the NEA ceased to exist?

The story so far…

On August 10, the NEA organized a conference call with various well-respected members of the American fine arts community, ostensibly to recruit them to direct their efforts toward projects that would benefit the Obama administration. Although it's assumed artists in general are left-leaners who likely supported Barack Obama as a candidate, the NEA took the impolitic step of explicitly asking high-profile artists to use their work to support the objectives of the Executive Branch. According to a transcript of the call at Big Hollywood (which also features an audio recording of the teleconference), there can be little doubt the NEA was asking artists to check their independence at the door. Most of the call was moderated by one Mike Skolnik, who purports to be a filmmaker and political director for hip-hop impresario Russell Simmons. Early in the teleconference, Skolnick leaves no illusion as to his objective:

[T]he goal of this phone call, is through this group that we can create a stronger community amongst ourselves to get involved in things that we're passionate about as we did during the campaign but continue to get involved in those things, to support some of the president's initiatives, but also to do things that we are passionate about and to push the president and to push his administration.

Here's a handy opportunity to employ the Bush Test – what if an official in the Bush administration had organized a teleconference with sympathetic members of the artistic community (I know it's an incongruous notion, but work with me) with the unambiguous goal of enlisting them to produce propaganda? That certainly would have had some highly nuanced ethical implications, no? How would you have felt if the following artistic representation had been partially funded by taxpayer dollars?



Later in the teleconference, Mr. Sergant takes the floor and reiterates the importance of the artistic community becoming de facto agents of the party in power:

This is the first telephone call of a brand new conversation. We are just now learning how to really bring this community together to speak with the government. What that looks like legally, we're still trying to figure out the laws of putting government Web sites on Facebook and the use of Twitter.

This is all being sorted out. We are participating in history and it's being made. So bear with us as we learn the language so that we can speak to each other safely and we can really work together to move the needle and to get stuff done. Pick – I would encourage you to pick something whether it's health care, education, the environment, you know, there's four key areas that the [NEA] has identified as areas of service.

For this transparent political coercion, Sergant was reassigned from his position as communications director. (Or was he?) [Update 9/24: Sergant has, in fact, resigned from the NEA.] As it happens, the content of this teleconference was exposed by one of its participants, Patrick Courrielche, a Los Angeles-based "art community consultant" who apparently posseses a mischievous anti-authority streak. The story was subsequently highlighted by Glenn Beck on his popular Fox News program, which led several media outlets to give Beck credit for the kink in Sergant's career path. The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Huffington Post all cited Beck as the reason for Sergant's demotion. Frankly, they give Beck too much credit – he's just another opposition pundit who happens to be very popular right now, just like Rush Limbaugh and Jon Stewart before him. He's not a threat to American political discourse, nor is he some kind of hero for bravely exposing the corruptions that have been endemic in politics since time immemorial. He's just a guy with a TV show. No point in exaggerating his impact on our cultural landscape.

Still, Beck must have been on to something – earlier this week, the White House issued new guidelines to prevent any future appearances of impropriety. While I'm sure Sergant and the NEA had the best of intentions, the underlying issue is whether it's a good idea for the government to be involved in funding the arts at all. The current NEA budget is over $150 million. In these stressful economic times, families across America have had to make difficult financial decisions. Now would be a perfect time to ask if the NEA is worth the money.

The NEA represents another case of how inappropriate government involvement can have regrettable unintended consequences. I'm sure the folks who accept NEA grants are terrific people, but the fact is government funding politicizes the arts by definition. Some of us are old enough to remember the 1987 Piss Christ photograph, which demonstrated that all taxpayer-funded art might unwittingly find itself subject to national scrutiny. And as Sergant's recent teleconference demonstrated, taxpayer art might unwittingly find itself subject to stark naked coercion. How legitimate can art be when its independence is compromised like this? Writing at Big Government, Nick Gillespie observes:

Given that the NEA prides itself on being the single largest funding source for the arts in the country, such arm-twisting by agency officials, however masked in fulsome compliments to creators' genius, is disturbing on its face. It clearly sets a political agenda for the very people who are likely to be applying for, well, NEA and other government grants. Does anyone think that the organizers were fishing around for projects that might complicate the public option for health care?

Embedded in the discussion is at least one other disturbing point: a nearly lunatic delusion that artists are the vanguard of the proletariat. As Mike Skolnick, the political director for music impresario Russell Simmons, told the participants, the assembled crew "tell our country and our young people sort of what to do and what to be in to; and what's cool and what's not cool." While that command-and-control notion is widely shared by liberals and conservatives alike, it is patently false. Artists and politicians hate to hear this, but the audience does have a mind of its own.

Discussion of the arts sometimes gives too little credit to the audience, but I would suggest the audience might be a better judge of artistic merit than the federal government. If the NEA ceased to exist, it wouldn't mean the end of domestic arts. We all support the arts in our own way – personally, I've gone to local clubs to see rock bands perform for many years. Artists would adapt to the change, and the fine arts would continue to thrive. It could be a preferable situation to continuing to give a majority of the American electorate veto power over artistic expression.