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Friends, Republicans, Democrats,
Lend me your ears.
I come not to bury the arts, but
to praise them.
I come to praise excellence in the arts,
as the standard to guide an embattled
National Endowment.
For excellence is an honorable estate.
And we are all, all honorable...
With no apologies to the distinguished English gentleman, I write to emphasize as strongly as possible that excellence is the fundamental goal of the efforts of our government to support cultural progress. Excellence was the central proposition in the legislation I prepared more than 30 years ago to create a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and a National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities. As one who was present at the creation, I can testify that this was the true purpose in founding the endowments and making them worthy of national support.
Isaac Stern, the great musician who attended the first meeting of the National Council on the Arts set up to provide private citizen guidance to the new endowment, had this thought very much in mind when he wrote:
"It was a very special day for all of us. Many of my colleagues were world-renowned artists, others well-known leaders in the arts. Each one had known exciting and moving occasions in their disciplines. But this day was unique, for we were joined together in an extraordinary mission. Our task was to help develop excellence in the arts and to make that excellence more widely available and accessible to all our people."
That was the reason for the precedent-setting program, the first of its kind in our history. Excellence and access to the best, given today's controversies, is worth emphasis again.
In 1962, while working with Claiborne Pell, a lifelong friend who was then a newly elected senator from Rhode Island, it became my task to draft a new public law to give government attention and support to the arts. In my report on the legislation in preparation for floor debate, I stressed excellence: "While evaluation in terms of such an abstract and subjective standard will necessarily vary, the committee (i.e., all members) believes such a standard to be sufficiently identifiable to serve the broad purposes of the Act, and congressional concern with the cultural values involved."
Thus, the government program was launched with a sense of excitement and commitment and an expectation that the mission could be achieved. Panels of private citizen-experts were formed under the new law to review applications for assistance and make recommendations to the National Council. Excellence was paramount as the criterion for judgment in the minds of all concerned.
Before an NEA existed, activity in the arts was concentrated along the eastern seaboard, from Washington to Boston with New York City as the center; in and around Chicago; in a few places in Texas, mainly Houston and Dallas; and along a corridor in the Far West, from Los Angeles to San Francisco. The support was entirely from private sources, and growth was negligible.
If it was demonstrable that some metamorphosis was already occurring, the impact of the NEA would have been lessened. Such was not the case. It was then, and is by now, abundantly clear that the NEA had a major impact on what became a remarkable time of expansion. In less than two decades, the number of symphony orchestras in the U.S. quadrupled, the number of opera companies grew at about the same pace, the number of resident professional theaters increased 15-fold and dance companies multiplied by at least 20-fold. Today, the arts have grown mightily and can be found all across our country -- in cities, in hamlets and small towns and in rural areas. At the same time, private support has grown by almost 40 times from 1965, the year of the endowment's start, to a total now of more than $10 billion a year.
In the first 17 years, the annual NEA budget grew from $2.5 million to $165 million a year, the final $55 million of it during my tenure as chairman from 1977 to 1981. It has been said that the term of Roger Stevens, the first chairman, put down the roots essential to the endowment's future; that during second chairman Nancy Hanks' two terms, the endowment saw its largest period of expansion; in my time it received a great many needed dollars in federal appropriations.
The original legislation established state as well as federal funding for the arts to encourage help from state legislatures. As federal appropriations grew, so, too, did support from the states -- from an original $2.7 million in a year to figures far exceeding the federal contribution, which was set at 20 percent of the NEA budget.
Regrettably, the federal appropriation has remained stuck at $165 million since the late 1970s. But the arts, given momentum, assistance and ever widening audiences, have become a vital force in our national life. The singular importance of the NEA in this exceptional growth is manifest.
Why? Because the premise of the founding legislation was to stimulate other private and public giving, never to replace it. A matching formula of federal support was prescribed. One federal dollar invested in the arts brings in at least four other dollars -- chiefly from private sources, including corporations and foundations but, above all, from individuals.
We used to call the NEA program an experiment, sometimes the great experiment. Foreign visitors came from the United Kingdom and the former Soviet Union, among other places, to inquire and learn about our work. We explained how the program was based on our laws governing tax exemption and American philanthropy, how it related to the vast majority of our cultural organizations, established on a not-for-profit basis. We were late arrivals. Other governments, especially in Europe, were far ahead of us in aiding the arts. But their systems, involving much larger sums than our own on a per capita basis, also involved outright subsidies, with government as the sole source of funding rather than a limited partner. Visitors liked what they heard -- and we were catching up.
But at issue now is whether the effort is worthwhile. Is excellence in the arts important to our citizens and to the largest number that can be reached? My answer is a resounding yes; but is the answer satisfactory, philosophically and politically?
The first congressional hearing to consider NEA funding in 1966 was presided over by Interior Subcommittee Chairman Winfield Denton who was from rural Indiana. Powerful and thoroughly conversant with the complexities of Interior Department programs, Denton suddenly had the endowment placed in his jurisdiction because the House didnŐt quite know what to do with it.
Chairman Stevens presented a statement that I, as his deputy, had helped him prepare. As Stevens read to the bottom of the second page of 17, the venerable gentleman conducting the hearing appeared to meditate so profoundly that his head lowered and his breathing grew measured. Stevens, indignant, whispered to me for guidance. Sensing a disastrous wake-up call and its potential effect on our congressional relations, I whispered back that it was simply a case of deep thinking in progress. At the end of page 17, when Chairman Denton opened his eyes, he said the statement had been "illuminating" and asked if Stevens could expand on the second paragraph of page four for the record. Stevens complied.
Word was passed to me from the committee that the proposed arts program was (a) incomprehensible and (b) the worst boondoggle the chairman had ever encountered. In his view, it merited zero funds. A negative opinion of that sort voiced by a chairman of in the House, was tantamount to the demise of the NEA before it ever got going.
I requested a meeting to restate our case, persisted in the request and in due course was given an appointment of only five minutes. I was told it wouldn't do one speck of good to plead for the NEA. One five-minute meeting was followed by others until a day when I was greeted with a slight smile, called by name and invited into the chairman's private office.
"I'm running for re-election," Denton said.
"I know," I responded.
Gazing at me, he began talking about a trip to his district over the previous weekend. He traveled in an old car on one of the many country roads until he reached a fork with a dirt track sloping off to the right. There he spotted a handwitten sign that said "Art Auction." He continued: "This fellow, Biddle, I said to myself, has been trying to brainwash me for weeks. Maybe I owe him a trip down the hill."
At the foot of the hill was an old barn. He entered. Facing him was a small painting of another old barn that he thought looked exactly like the barn on his grandmother's property when he was young. He asked the price. A young man with long hair seated on the floor nearby rose and replied: "Five dollars." "Well," said the chairman, "I gave it to him, and he gave me the picture. And here's the remarkable thing. There must have been 200 people in that old barn. One by one they came up to me and said, 'Congressman, we've known you for years, and we never thought we'd live to see the day when you bought a painting!'" He paused. Then he said, "You're right. There are votes in this!"
The arts speak in many voices. Their unique benefits can be divided between the tangible and the intangible. There are volumes of statistics about the first. The arts, for example, are intrinsically connected to economic growth. Take Winston-Salem, North Carolina. First came ballet, symphonic music, museums and galleries, a school devoted to developing artistic talent. Then came new businesses and new residents, not just from inside the state, because the "quality of life" -- the cultural environment -- had become known as especially inviting.
The arts provide revenues. Even though arts organizations are tax-exempt, artists pay income taxes. A study in Rhode Island showed that the NEA had helped in the development of over 180 new arts organizations, most of them small, but with almost 2,000 new employees who paid close to $20 million a year in taxes. "In my state that's the size of big industry," said Senator Pell. The arts also involve everything from photographers' flashbulbs to the bricks and mortar of a new cultural center. And the arts are perhaps our most significant tourist attractions. To the vote-conscious, economic benefit is often the most compelling argument.
The most compelling to me, however, is in the realm of the intangible. On one official trip to Houston's arts institutions, I visited a small grantee in an underprivileged area of the city that looked like a desert of poverty. Suddenly, the landscape changed; plots of grass were tended, windows were unbroken. A once abandoned movie theater, a large brick structure, was being transformed, not by machine, but by the hand-labor of many workers. A stage and practice rooms for musicians were under construction. The director, a thin man with an earnest face, reported that the thought about what to do with the building initially had been to create a center for drug treatment and combatting drugs. "But then," he said, "we realized that physical well-being was not enough. We needed something special for the human spirit and turned to the arts." A nearby elementary school building was alive with the brilliant colors of Hispanic heritage. "We had a truancy rate here of 85 percent," the principal said, "before we brought in the arts. Now kids want to come. The arts were like gateways to them, and it's all because of what the parents are doing two blocks away." Experts in the arts to give instruction and help were being provided by the endowment.
The slide backward can be traced to the retrospective exhibit in 1989 of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. With partial endowment support, the show, which featured homoerotic photos, was entitled "The Perfect Moment," a description that was hardly fortuitous for the NEA. From its beginning, the endowment had been subject to controversy, as are the arts themselves, but this time was different and considerably more intense. When the argument broke out over the Mapplethorpe exhibit -- and the simultaneous public outcry over Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ," the sculptured crucifix in bottled liquid -- no immediate action was taken. Action, in fact, was delayed by endowment authorities who felt that once again, as in past controversies, the storm would subside. In fact, the worst storm in the endowment's history had begun, and it continues.
In previous NEA controversies, political critics had used ridicule against the endowment; in the first debate on the Senate floor, opponents tried to kill the basic legislation by calling it unconstitutional. But this assault was different. For the first time, there was profit in the political attacks on the endowment -- benefits for the critics that could be helpful in their election campaigns. By lambasting the NEA, large sums of money could be raised. Charges of supporting obscenity, pornography and the debasement of moral values could be converted into cash and votes. The endowment responded with the evidence that only a minuscule number of its 100,000 grants had caused noticeable disfavor. But the barrel with the rotten apple was seen to be contaminated and the issue became whether to throw the entire contents out.
Most Americans now know about Robert Mapplethorpe. The catalogue of his exhibition informs us that, "Homoeroticism has been around since the beginning of the world." Many viewers, in fact most by far, for the first time saw his theme explicitly portrayed -- and, at least in part, at their expense. "What's this?" asked a Congress awakened by the discovery. A renowned photographer? An artist of reputation and repute? Run for your lives! Courts became embroiled. Supreme Court decisions were invoked. The media took up the hue and cry or tried unexplored avenues of explanation. One grant did it!
After first taking a wait-and-see attitude, the endowment began to change its mind on other grants, then changed its mind again. Vacillation, particularly in Washington, signals indecision and indecision is weakness. The attackers moved forward and captured the high ground. Now, recapture remains uncertain despite the strenuous efforts of a new, highly motivated and capable NEA chairman, Jane Alexander, and the support of special heroes of past battles, beginning with Sidney Yates and Claiborne Pell, Democrats who now find themselves in the House and Senate minorities. Intense controversy often prompts exaggeration, distortion and the notoriety which some would-be artists seek.
Grants are approved or disapproved now in what appears an ad hoc manner: this is permissible, this is not; this is defensible, this must be rejected. The critics, congressional and otherwise, await the next rumor and hope for another gaffe of sizable proportions.
What to do? How can the endowment return to its fundamental mandate, to the affirmation of excellence? A rededication?
Since the Mapplethorpe episode, I have advocated an assembly of the illustrious arts leaders who have served on the National Council on the Arts since its beginning for a full public discussion of excellence in the arts: from the first council, Isaac Stern and Gregory Peck stand out, then a retinue of other leaders who have national and international reputations would be asked to participate. There are at least 35 who have served for terms up to six years; they fully understand excellence and epitomize it in their work.
The thought is to bring the leaders in the arts together to debate and define what should now be done about the arts. Give them all the information they would need or request, including a legal historian. A new statement would be made, focused on excellence, on freedom of expression in a democracy, the responsibility of the artist, the responsibility of those who represent them and the proper role for the rest of us. It would have unique authority, and critics would not find it easy to construct a campaign against it. At the same time the endowment would be strengthening its own principal mission. The endowment is a needed catalyst, a partner, an inspirer.
The NEA has, for example, worked with a variety of government agencies and helped them to expand the benefits of the arts -- and to provide funding for their related programs. In my time, partnerships were forged with the Interior Department to bring the arts into public parks; with the Veterans Administration to bring the arts and artists into hospitals; with the Small Business Administration to help teach artists business practices; with the General Services Administration to expand art in public places; with the State Department to give more emphasis abroad to American creativity; and with the Department of Education. The work has been greatly curtailed, but it can be made to return. The catalyst, we know, works.
The greatest value art gives us is the excellence in it that abides. The pyramids of Egypt, the Acropolis and Parthenon outlast the line of Ptolemys and all the wars of Athens vs. Sparta. From Ancient Egypt and Greece onward, what is best remembered?
In Rome -- ancient or Renaissance -- is it the legions of Julius Caesar, Pompey or Mark Anthony, standing in the forum? Or is it the great masterpieces of Michelangelo?
What will our own day and age contribute that lasts down through the corridors of time?
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