Arts & International Affairs: 2.3: Autumn/Winter 2017 | Page 52

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
icant budget reductions. NEA appropriations have declined by $21.5
million (−13%) in the last three federal budgets.
The NASAA goes on to explain that even these meager funds create jobs, stimulate local
economies and improve education. Put in these terms, the general argument is that if
Americans only knew how valuable these organizations are—and how far-reaching—es-
pecially compared to the much bigger wastrels (i.e. Department of Defense or, in recent
days, the president’s vacation spending), we would all be up in arms and we would have
the good sense to join together to preserve them.
Others insist that the cuts are just a political proxy, such as in the case of CultureGRRL
(Lee Rosenbaum) at ArtsJournal, who writes:
Unfortunately, whenever there’s a call to prune the budget, the NEA
and NEH are low-hanging fruit. They’re worth more for their symbolic
value—an expendable expense when politicians want to appear fiscally
frugal—than they worth are [sic] for their negligible impact on the gov-
ernment’s gargantuan outlays.
And while I do not disagree with this sentiment, “symbolic value”—that is, symbolizing
fiscal prudence—is not, in fact, the only logic under which these cuts are being made.
Indeed, in launching a defense of the NEA (and like organizations) that extols its effi-
cacy as an economic engine, albeit one with deep cultural value, its defenders may be
missing an opportunity to directly contest the arguments that the right is making about
the NEA. The NEA’s opponents are not simply arguing that the dollars we spend are a
bad spending choice; rather, they are revitalizing old culture war tropes, and then hid-
ing behind absolutist claims about limited government. Thus, as artists, academics and
community-level cultural workers rush to save these small organizational and funding
homes—and, by proxy, their merit on the national stage—we should also consider how
we arrived at the current assault.
When the NEA was founded in 1965 under the Johnson administration, 1 with a budget
of 2.4 million, the legislation that brought it (and the accompanying National Endow-
ment for the Humanities) into existence stated:
... the practice of art and the study of humanities requires constant dedi-
cation and devotion and that, while no government can call a great artist
or scholar into existence, it is necessary and appropriate for the federal
government to help create and sustain not only a climate encouraging
freedom of thought, imagination and inquiry, but also the material con-
ditions facilitating the release of this creative talent.
1
This process was initiated by President Kennedy, whose Executive Order 11112 established the
President’s Advisory Council on the Arts in 1963 (Koostra/NEA 2000).
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