The National Endowment for the Arts does not deserve a premature burial, but it’s fair to say things aren’t looking good for it, at least in its current form. While the NEA as it has existed for the past 60 years is being hollowed out by design, it’s entirely possible that not unlike the people inhabited by a collective of alien pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the building and the name may live. But in doing so, it will be a shell taken over by something entirely different.
Having watched the NEA survive some four decades of attacks on its existence, surviving thanks to support from both sides of the aisle, it is startling to think that this could be the true turning point, and that Donald Trump will do what Jesse Helms, Newt Gingrich and their ilk could not. If it remains at all, it will be as a sham vehicle through which the administration will fund its favored projects, such as non-Equity shows at the Kennedy Center and Trump’s sculpture garden of who he deems to be heroes.
Around the country, not-for-profits proudly and rightly declare that they will not kowtow to the draconian regulations that still might afford them access to federal funds. They post their stands as white on black texts on social media coupled with calls for the public to make up the difference in money lost. No doubt anyone who has supported arts or humanities programs have seen these stances and requests in recent week. Long-serving, dedicated staffers depart the NEA this week in response to the gutting of the agency.
That makes this a moment when it’s worth examining why the Endowment has proven, at long last, so easily and quickly compromised. For that, we turn to the term “endowment” or more specifically the root of it, “endow.” Dictionary.com defines “endow” as “to provide with a permanent fund or source of income,” and an “endowment” as “the property, funds, etc., with which an institution or person is endowed.” As an example, as Harvard has come under a barrage of attacks on its policies and independence, we have heard so much about their financial underpinning: their $53 billion endowment, which spins off income through investments that supports the work of the college, allowing such programs as financial aid for those in need.
Unfortunately, in the common use of the word, the National Endowment for the Arts is a misnomer. It is not a fund drawn upon each year to support arts programs and institutions. Rather, it is a federal agency, funded through the federal budget each year for its operations and grantmaking. It is that annual appropriation which has made the agency so vulnerable, since each year a budget must be passed in Washington. For many years the NEA has been a favored target for performative ideological cost-cutters looking for supposed waste. The most progressive, even outré, projects funded by the NEA have long made it a locus for the censorious, railing against works like Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” or the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, important art but not really representative of the majority of what receives NEA funding, which covers a wide range of organizations in cities and towns, from adventurous to the most family friendly. Over its lifetime, the NEA is estimated to have distributed $5.5 billion in grants.
At the same time Trump, Musk and their wrecking-ball crew were undermining the NEA, NEH and CPB, major philanthropies were steering funding away from the arts as well. As Helen Shaw wrote in her galvanizing article for The New Yorker in April, “When the need seemed greatest, several private philanthropic foundations pulled out the rug. Three of the largest arts funders in the United States—the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Doris Duke Foundation, and the Ford Foundation—stopped supporting many components of the arts infrastructure in New York that they helped create. Their reasons were various, but the upshot was the same: extreme turbulence, which has affected organizations big and small.”
With the NEA hobbled and the foundations looking to direct their funds elsewhere, this begs the inevitable question: now what? Yes, every arts not-for-profit can redouble their fundraising efforts, and perhaps in this first fiscal year without NEA funding people will step up – screenwriter John Logan gave $40,000 to Berkeley Rep’s new works center to make up for lost NEA funding – but will the increased giving of recent months be a solution that can be relied upon year after year, or one-time thing?
While federal funding will always be a goal, and perhaps in four or eight years we might see the government funding agencies revitalized, since they are but a rounding error in the federal budget, maybe it’s time for the establishment of a true arts endowment – a foundation dedicated solely to the support of US arts and culture, independent of the government and established in such a fashion that future generations could not turn its attention to other needs. It would, inevitably, grow slowly, but as generational wealth passes into new hands, perhaps some of that largesse could be deposited into an entity with a culture-based mandate and articles of incorporation which prohibit a change – save for the inclusion in the future of new forms of arts expression – to other uses.
There’s no question that if successful, especially in the initial years, funds would be given to this foundation, this endowment, that would not be immediately available for arts organizations. But in this moment of contraction, perhaps that’s the best time to weather a change for the long-term goal of a sustaining arts endowment distinct from political pressures and the vagaries of who is in office. If we continue to simply hold out hope for a revitalization of the NEA, we will miss this moment to recalibrate the means of funding the arts, if we don’t take matters into our own hands when the federal government remains to easily manipulated when it comes to our fate, we may be consigned evermore to a constant and likely Darwinian contest for funds, donor by donor, organization by organization, as the vehicles to which we have been accustomed by support are destroyed in the name of partisan ideology and simply left to fend for themselves by the very organizations which helped so much of the current arts landscape come into being.
Maybe this idea is a stretch, but we’d better start coming up with options while waiting for what now seems inevitable.
