NEA loses its head, but keeps its health

        Dana Gioia is going back to his poetry.

Jacobs/AP

The National Endowment for the Arts, which he led as chairman for five years, may thus go headless for a short time. But chances are, it won’t be gutted again any time soon.

The agency that Gioia took over in 2003 was an eviscerated mess. Fourteen years earlier, conservatives – famously led by North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms and other politicos interested in scoring points with members of their Bible-Belt base – had diverted public attention away from issues of real national importance such as  the Iran-Contra affair  and the growing national debt by staging a moral uproar over the NEA’s funding of what they deemed blasphemous and obscene art by such artists as Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano.

This overt and protracted challenge to the NEA’s ability to decide what art was important and excellent culminated in 1990, with the trial of the NEA Four - performance artists including Karen Finley who sued the NEA over grants for which they had been recommended by the agency’s own peer-review process, but were denied by then-NEA Chairman John Frohnmayer because of the controversial subject matter of their work. The case, National Endowment of the Arts v. Finley,  ultimately went to the Supreme Court, where artistic freedom lost in a ruling that supported Congress’s 1990 criteria that the NEA uphold ”decency and respect” in choosing art and artists to be funded.

Though the ACLU found the ruling to be “essentially meaningless,” it nonetheless resulted in the NEA getting out of the business of directly funding artists.

This was the mud- (and chocolate, if you know Karen Finley) spattered ring into which Gioia walked: in one corner,  the inflamed public, stirred up by politically powerful and self-righteous leaders making an easy moral target of art that most Americans had never even seen; and in the other, a bruised and disillusioned national arts community, their artistic honesty chilled to the bone by the NEA’s politicization by the right.

Artists had learned a hard lesson about public funding – that when public money is involved, limits on freedom of expression will be imposed. Gioia didn’t make the mistake of trying to persuade artists otherwise. Instead, the poet-businessman set about finding a role for the NEA that would still benefit the arts and artists without alarming taxpayers.

He discovered two: national promoter of arts education and supporter of state arts agencies. Gioia turned the NEA into a benign patron of public learning about nonthreatening classical art, creating touring programs and exhibitions on Shakespeare and American art treasures that no doubt seemed bland and compromised to the avant garde, but reassured citizens that an education in the arts was a good and valuable thing for their children.

By providing money to state arts agencies, Gioia safely distanced the NEA from the political dangers of directly selecting artists to fund and instead put the money into the hands of grassroots experts who could do the job more effectively because they knew best how to both honor, and gradually expand the boundaries of, taste and tolerance in their immediate communities.

It took wisdom, patience and subtle creativity to rebuild the NEA in an image that is both pleasing to the average American and quietly supportive of the nation’s artistic frontiers. Gioia did a good job. Because of him, the NEA has regained its health and may be able to serve the arts, artists and the country in more adventurous ways over the next four years. May he write in peace for many years.