A Cheap and Easy Target

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

The cost of the National Endowment for the Arts amounts to about 69 cents -- not dollars, just pocket change -- per U.S. citizen per year. Its share of total public spending is so small that in the short form of the federal budget, it is rounded off to zero. Of the nearly 90,000 NEA grants awarded over the past quarter-century, at most a few dozen have sparked any significant public controversy -- and the cumulative cost of all those was less than a cent a person, at a time when people often won't stoop to pick up a penny from the street.

Yet despite this fiscal insignificance and the innocuous, even noble, nature of almost everything it underwrites, the NEA has become one of the most controversial agencies of government. A target for President Reagan on the theory that merit ought to be defined by the populist mechanism of the box office, it spent the past decade spiraling downward from dreams of expansion to danger of demise. Artists and administrators who benefit from the NEA's money and imprimatur concede they have blown the political debate. They allowed the right wing to misrepresent culture as a hotbed of the unpatriotic, the irreligious, the sexually permissive and perverse. "We have let the extremes dictate the battlefield," says Milton Rhodes, president of the American Council for the Arts.

Anti-NEA invective has hit a nerve and thus proved a fund-raising tool for Senator Jesse Helms and other conservatives. Last week it became a rallying point for presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan. Assailing Tongues Untied, a PBS documentary by a gay black who received $5,000 from the NEA via two intermediate agencies, a Buchanan TV ad intoned, "This so-called art has glorified homosexuality, exploited children and perverted the image of Jesus Christ."

It is a measure of how much arts leaders misjudged the effectiveness of such tactics that after two years of denouncing NEA chairman John Frohnmayer as a sellout for his attempts to placate the right wing, last week they were mourning his forced resignation and envisioning his heir as sure to be worse. Says Jack O'Brien, artistic director of San Diego's Old Globe Theater: "If President Bush got a message in New Hampshire, we did too." A chilling sign for arts leaders is that some liberals now join in doubting whether government should finance ideas. It was the talk of Washington cultural circles last week that ABC correspondents Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts endorsed abolishing the agency on David Brinkley's Sunday news show.

In two turbulent years, Frohnmayer enraged artists by suspending a few grants on political or sexual grounds and by requiring all recipients to certify in writing that their work was not obscene, a term even the U.S. Supreme Court has trouble defining. He then irked conservatives by dropping the certification and reinstating some taboo artists. He tried to appease two sides utterly uninterested in compromise -- one ablaze with the First Amendment, the other afire with populist indignation at forcing citizens to support unwelcome ideas. He was also contending with congressional demagoguery and, inside the agency, with a deputy and potential successor, Anne-Imelda Radice, widely regarded as a watchdog for the right.

In the melee, artists belatedly realized, they were lured into arguing the free-speech rights of a fringe few rather than the central value of culture in defining a society. Says Andre Bishop, artistic director of New York City's Lincoln Center Theater: "We have been between a rock and a hard place. Rallying behind endangered groups produced a big problem. Not rallying behind them is unthinkable."

Ostensibly the struggle has been about a handful of works meant by their creators to challenge and shock. Underlying these confrontations is a philosophical battle over the nature of government. The rationale for withholding NEA monies because some substantial segment of the population finds a work objectionable (while another substantial segment applauds) is, in essence, the same as the rationale for withholding funding for abortion or even abortion counseling. The idea is that after electing leaders and paying taxes, a citizen still ought to retain a moral veto.

This can be viewed as a healthy vestige of New England town meetings. But it can also be seen as part of the unhealthy wider erosion of consensus. Rather than a pluralist tolerance in which one seeks only to ensure that one's side is heard, anti-NEA campaigners seem to seek a monopoly in which no other values can be affirmed by government. Says Robert Dugan, public affairs director of the National Association of Evangelicals, which represents 45,000 churches: "Unless the President can get someone who will stand up to the arts community and be firm with the liberal elite, the end will come. The NEA asked for it by rubbing our noses in it."

What their noses were being rubbed in was a reminder that in a heterogeneous society there are other, often antagonistic, points of view -- with equal entitlement to respect. It is ironic that the NEA battle has been so much misunderstood by artists. It is not about money or common sense, but about symbols -- and thus its intensity affirms the true importance of culture.

With reporting by Ann Blackman/Washington and Daniel S. Levy/New York