Several years ago, when I started writing my book on the National Endowment for the Arts, I wanted to examine the political history of its founding, the cultural context from which it came, and give serious attention to the early arguments against it. These things hadn’t really been explored in depth. To be honest, when I began the project, I was a little skeptical of the agency and of federal government funding of the arts in general. But by the time I finished writing the last few chapters, my attitude had changed. I began to see that the Endowment served a much broader constituency than I previously understood. When I sent the manuscript off to the publisher, I’d become a supporter.
(One broader takeaway from all this I suppose is when you understand the complexities, and the story of something, you’re liable to have more fully developed and reasoned ideas about it. Maybe some people think that’s not a good thing.)
Since the agency stopped giving grants to individual artists back in the mid-1990s, groups like local symphonies and city arts festivals have been the main beneficiary of Endowment spending. These days the NEA functions more like the National Gallery of Art, but on a truly national scale. Similar to how the National Gallery puts the best art ever created on public display for those who can make it to Washington, the NEA’s mission is to carry the experience of art far afield.
In FY2023 Congress passed an appropriation for the NEA that totaled $207.0 million, an increase of $27.0 million from the year before. A big chunk of that money went to state arts agencies in all 50 states (in red states and blue states) and the rest went directly to arts organizations in cities, counties, and towns all over the country—literally down to every single congressional district. It funded projects expressly designed to bring art before more people. The idea used to be that if members of Congress understood that their own districts saw benefit from the program, they would be willing to support it.
Since its beginning in 1965 there have been those in Congress who, for one reason or another, wanted to cut the Endowment’s budget or do away with it all together. But it has always survived such attempts as members of both parties, year in and year out, rallied around and defended the idea behind it.
Never before however has the executive branch just ordered it to stop spending the money Congress gave it to spend. In the past couple of weeks, many of its program directors have been shown the door, most electing to take something called deferred resignation.
The Arts Endowment is a community good whose benefits are designed not for inscrutable individualists who seek to shock or offend, but for the general population. That’s what makes it worthwhile. That’s how it should be defended and how it has been defended for the past 35 years. The matter now however seems to be that over half of Congress is no longer willing to.
