All Arts is Local: How Can the NEA Save the Arts From Itself?

Quickly now. You have 3 seconds to answer, and you can’t look it up:

Is it the National Endowment for the Arts or the National Endowment of The Arts?

The NEA has performed well – as a political football, as a sometime token funder, and as the closest thing to a ministry of arts that America chooses to put out there. It was never intended to fund full programs, nor is it inclined to support current nonprofit arts activities, choosing instead to create programs that have the Chair’s national goal and ask local arts organizations to support that goal.

In attempting to “provide access to the arts in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. territories” with a budget of only $162 million dollars (that’s an eye-popping 49￠ per person per year), all the NEA can do is drips and drabs. To put that into perspective, the US Defense Department spends $437 million just on its military bands’ instruments, uniforms, and travel expenses each year – 270% of the NEA budget. Of course, like the $85.5 million of recruitment money spent annually on the US Navy’s “Blue Angels” and Air Force “Thunderbirds” program (not counting $50 million for maintenance, $5.2 Billion for the planes themselves, fuel, salaries, storage, and various other costs), the Department of Defense is well known as a black hole for pork-oriented budget busting. The money goes everywhere except the troops. But that’s another story.

When you hear politicians on either side talking about the NEA, you would think that its costs serve as the difference between federal bankruptcy and glorious surplus, between moral putrefaction and the heart of the first amendment. There are conservative thinktank reports from 1997 supporting its eradication that are still making the rounds (the conservatives don’t tend to update their data – that would be what liberals do). The former president (gosh, it’s nice to say that) twice tried to eliminate it. Arts-oriented groups continue to rebut, dispute, and beat back those dated diatribes with more current diatribes of their own.

So much air space and printed material for such a tiny piece of the budget.

In the March 2020 COVID-19 Stimulus Bill, a few shekels were earmarked for the arts. Remember that the bill provided more than $2,000,000,000,000 (trillion) in relief. Much of that – as we know now, $900,000,000,000 (billion) – went to corporate welfare. That’s almost half.

Nikki Haley, who fancies herself the next leader of the 70 million domestic terrorists who represent the GOP, responded thusly:

Enough with the preamble. The answer is “for.”

Meaning, of course, that the Endowment was intended for art. It is not a keeper of art. But neither is intended to be a supporter of nonprofit arts organizations. Just art.

Art has empirical value for a large population. To the Endowment, it is an end.

Nonprofits – even arts nonprofits – solve a societal need. To the nonprofits, art is a tool, not an end.

So I found it weird that the NEA’s latest narrative, “The Key to Reopening,” a poorly-titled (poorly-intended?) report, was gleaned from random conversations with leaders of US arts-related organizations located in Cincinnati, Washington (DC), Birmingham (AL), Tucson, Pittsfield (MA), Houston, Lincoln (NE), Saranac Lake (NY), and Staunton (VA). Some consultants were contacted as well. It is not a national discussion of the Post-COVID art scene, as it purports to be. It is just a series of ideas.

The first idea out of the box is the one that tests the absurdity levels of government paternalism, even in the wake of a NEA’s leader whose tenure was borne from a seditious GOP administration infamous for appointing destroyers of vision to its agencies and departments.

Strengthen ties with your immediate community. Aligning arts programming with local community needs is paramount, whether through indoor or outdoor programming, virtual arts engagement, or a mix of opportunities.

So, if I understand this correctly – and I think I do – the National Endowment for the Arts has asked arts organizations, all of which exist in a community, to strengthen their community ties. The truth, however, is that the Endowment merely wants to sound knowledgeable and commandeering so that it can lay claim to the art, not the impact.

Tip O’Neill was famous for saying, “All politics is local.” It was the title of his autobiography, for Pete’s sake. To paraphrase the former Speaker of the House: “All arts is local.”

Suggesting an arts organization strengthen its ties to the community is analogous to suggesting that a bicyclist use a bicycle. Taken further, given that the National Endowment has no skin in the community relations game other than to tout “community events” as warm and fuzzy reminders that the arts are important, the analogy is that of a delivery service spending time, money, and collateral on telling its bicycle messengers that they really ought to strengthen their ties with bicycles. These were two of the Endowment’s examples illustrating the idea of strengthening the community:

Bill Stephan, executive director of the Lied Center for Performing Arts in Lincoln, Nebraska, led an effort to bring a mobile music stage to neighborhoods in the city of Lincoln. He remarks that it was “just really wonderful to see so much happiness that the arts were able to bring.”

Nathalie Thill, executive director of the Adirondack Center for Writing (Saranac Lake, New York) describes an outdoor “reveal” party for poems that had been painted on the sidewalk. “We used this paint that you can only see when it’s wet,” Thill explains. “It’s also something that parents can do with their kids on rainy days. They were going stir-crazy and so it’s like, ‘Let’s go find the poems in town.’” After a video recording of the event was picked up on social media, Thill characterized the reaction of locals as, “’I can’t believe I live in the coolest town ever!’”

Happy. Cool. Neat-o.

Is this the most important gaffe in the history of the NEA? No. It’s trivial compared to cutting funding to individual artists. That, clearly, was the worst idea.

I’m not calling for the NEA to go away. Far from it.

Perhaps, instead of a rickety, overly-dramatic diva of an agency called the NEA, we should take the opportunity of a welcoming national government to create a system whereby artistic entrepreneurs – nonprofit and for profit – are welcome to seed money in the form of grants or low-cost loans. In return, the art must prove impact that makes the society more just.

Whether those entrepreneurs act for a nonprofit or for themselves is immaterial, although if their nonprofit cannot prove impact that makes the society more just already, it should probably close the doors so that someone else will.

Simple. Elegant. Noncontroversial, except to arts organizations that don’t want to prove impact. And do we really care what they want?

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