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Funding Excellence?
| Article
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19657 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1991 |
1,305 Words |
| Author
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James F. Cooper
James F. Cooper is editor of American Arts Quarterly and art
critic for the New York City Tribune. |
"I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty. I look forward to an America which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business. I am certain that after the dust of centuries has passed over our cities, we too will be remembered not for our victories or defeats in battle or in politics, but for our contribution to the human spirit."
-John F. Kennedy, on the proposed establishment of a national endowment for the arts (1963).
A small exhibition consisting of less than two dozen artworks attracted unusual media attention this past spring. NBC-TV News staffers lugged video cams to the fifth-floor New York City gallery of Sherry French, where producer Jennifer Konecky interviewed participants of To Grant or Not to Grant. Earlier, a team from the Public Broadcasting System conducted similar interviews with the artists. French herself was interviewed for several shows, including the McNeil/Lehrer Report. What was so special about this little art exhibition?
The exhibition, explained French, offered an opportunity for the public to see works in a style often denied funding by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The still lifes, landscapes, and figurative works by artists such as Steve Hawley, Jack Beal, and Jeanne Duval also attracted favorable mention from the Wall Street Journal. An earlier editorial in the Journal observed that the root problem in government funding was "mediocrity, not obscenity."
In Minneapolis, an exhibition of classical Realist paintings at the Minneapolis Institute of Art provoked negative reactions and even threats from local artists and institutions enraged by the first substantive challenge to their hegemony in the area of government funding to the arts.
In defining art as "confrontational" and "shocking," the endowment rejects aesthetics as a criterion. By favoring one school of art (Modernism) over another (Realism), it violates its own charter. Jack Beal, one of the participants in To Grant or Not to Grant, calls the NEA the "most powerful practitioner of censorship in the arts today," and charges that NEA staffers "discriminate" against representational art. Beal is cofounder of the New York Academy of Art, whose application for a modest educational grant was refused in 1989 because, in the words of the director of visual arts programs for the NEA, "teaching students how to draw the human figure is revisionist ... and stifles
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