On Tuesday, President Obama announced his 2013 budget proposal, which included $154 million for the National Endowment for the Arts — that's $0.49 per person in the United States, or less than the amount of income tax you will be paying on the money you made while reading this article at work. That request would top the 2012 NEA budget by $8 million, returning it to its 2010 level. However, the request is a largely symbolic figure, as it's almost assuredly going to be cut down by congressional negotiations in the coming months as the election campaign year heats up. After all, as per the Constitution, the "President's budget" is just a politicized suggestion; Congress has the power of the purse.
Unfortunately the NEA, which last year had an annual budget of less than half of the daily cost of the Afghanistan war, is a highly charged political scapegoat that gets brought up with notorious frequency despite its relatively tiny size. Art is controversial. Who really wants to argue about bloated budgets for private security contractors in Baghdad when you can go on the Sunday shows and rant about the "anti-Christian bigotry" of Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ" instead?
But highly controversial, politicized art is not the bread and butter of the government institution — rather, it is a lean institution that spreads out funds among various small towns across America, and most of the art it supports is relatively banal. Ronald Reagan first suggested abolishing the NEA in the 1980s (which, incidentally, was the high-water point for funding). But it was the '90s that really did in the institution. As speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich painted a picture of a wasteful, elitist, unnecessary Big Government entity and almost succeeded in getting rid of it. It emerged from the Contract for America fundamentally changed. Its budget was slashed by 45 percent in 1996, and fund increases since have only kept up with inflation.
It isn't surprising that someone like myself, an urban elitist with a liberal arts degree and a career in the art world, is out to defend the NEA. But not because I think it helps me, or anyone around me. The Chelsea gallery scene would muddle along just fine if the NEA faded into oblivion.
These days, it's really the people outside of urban areas — America's heartland, if you will — who should be concerned. This country's major museums, concentrated in cities where there are groups of people who actually list their profession as "philanthropist," are supported by private donors and gigantic tax-breaks (the Republican-preferred way to support the arts). They have budgets that stretch into the hundreds of millions of dollars and are largely beholden to the intellectual and financial urban elite. By contrast, the NEA gives comparatively tiny grants (generally $5,000-500,000) to small-town arts institutions that support culture for America's rural and suburban populations who, polling data suggests, tend to vote for the people who want to abolish the NEA.
So, you might ask, what's the matter with Kansas? Go back and read the Q&A we did with former head of Kansas's Arts Commission Henry Schwaller last year when governor Sam Brownback eliminated the organization, making the state ineligable for NEA funds, and you will get a sense of what arts mean for the heartland. "There's a small community in the southwest portion of the state, a tiny town near Dodge City, and its arts center is the community center," Schwaller told ARTINFO, by way of example. "People go there — little old ladies go there to paint watercolors, but they also go there on the holidays to wrap Christmas gifts for service members in Iraq or needy children, and they gather there for coffee and other things, and that's what the arts centers across Kansas do." How un-American.
When he took the reins, the new, Senate-confirmed head of the NEA Rocco Landesman fought to direct funding toward good art, rather than basing funding on a simple geographic distribution criteria. But in 2011 his NEA also launched a new program called "Our Town" to support community projects utilizing "local creative assets." Last year, "Our Town" gave $100,000 to fund the redesign of public spaces, channeling resources, for instances, to the artistic promotion of the "tri-cultural heritage" of the small town of Ajo, Arizona. Elsewhere, a $50,000 grant helped support a new master plan — including future support of local artists — for green space in the town square in Burlington, Vermont. In total, the NEA attempts to give out at least one grant per congressional district, from Maine to California to Alaska, every year, and supports thousands of performances, exhibitions, and artist residencies in places that don't necessarily have access to other forms of private support.
To sum up: In general, the average American voter is much more likely to benefit from a $50,000 NEA program, for which they contributed $0.50, than from the new $60 million plaza that David Koch is funding at the Met steps away from his palatial Park Avenue apartment. That is, of course, if the New York museum's Upper East Side neighbors (and benefactors, no doubt) don't succeed in their plan to keep the plebeians from "hanging out" in front of the museum. It's just too bad the average taxpayer doesn’t have the money to buy political clout.