The NEA Really Isn’t Welfare for Rich, Liberal lites – The New Yorker

Contrary to claims from President Trump and Fox News, N.E.A. grants also help rural, not-New York, not-wealthy, Trump-friendly districts.CreditPHOTOGRAPH BY CLARK SCOTT / ALABAMA DANCE FESTIVAL

Last autumn, I had a mischievous fantasy that I would fudge my address as Bartley, Nebraska, or Piedmont, South Dakota, on some grant applications in the hope of boosting my odds for success. If every other writer applying to the Guggenheim or the National Endowment for the Arts lives in Brooklyn, or Silver Lake, wouldnt a rural Zip Code give my application a glimmer of geographic diversity? I offer this small confession because many writers, painters, musicians, and art teachers, suffering the proverbial Stockholm syndrome, have internalized the Republican dogma that established artists in coastal cities are hoarding public and private art funds, in a self-serving parochial loop.

The scholar-in-residence at Fox News, Tucker Carlson, spouts this widespread view. On a recent episode of his eponymous show, Carlson insisted that government agencies like the N.E.A. are welfare for rich, liberal lites, and wondered why taxpayers are subsidizing entertainment for rich people. And Paul Ryan has claimed that the art generated by N.E.A. grants is generally enjoyed by people of higher income levels, making them a wealth transfer from poorer to wealthier citizens.

As has been widely reported, Trumps 2018 budget, America First: A Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again, would eliminate the N.E.A. and three other national cultural agencies: the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The combined budgets of these operations make up a negligible part of the total budget: 0.02 per cent. If you are a rich, litist New Yorker posing as a family-values, heartland-loving, frugal populist, however, attacking the N.E.A. seems like just the right thing to do.

Trumps budget director recently punctuated this thinking for reporters. I put myself in the shoes of that steelworker in Ohio, the coal minerthe coal-mining family in West Virginia. The mother of two in Detroit, Mick Mulvaney said, and Im saying, O.K., I have to go ask these folks for money and I have to tell them where Im going to spend it. Can I really go to those folks, look them in the eye, and say, Look, I want to take money from you and I want to give it to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting?

Mulvaney might want to ask his former constituents what they think of government arts money. Before Trump appointed him, Mulvaney represented South Carolinas Fifth Congressional District. Trump won this mostly rural and agricultural district by a margin of eighteen percentage points. Grants awarded to that district during Mulvaneys tenure sound rather necessary and impressive. The City of Rock Hill, population 64,555, was awarded fifty thousand dollars to incorporate locally inspired art, design, and installation in public infrastructure projects. Newberry College received nine thousand dollars so that middle- and high-school band students could attend intensive clinics led by college faculty. And the Arts Councils of Rock Hill and York Counties garnered ten thousand dollars for a touring performing-arts series. Theres more, but you get the idea.

In addition to broadsides coming from the right, some artists harbor a cool ambivalence for the N.E.A., too. If you were a Pakistani-American experimental filmmaker, say, completing a video exhibition pondering the digital optics of military surveillance and the U.S. drone program, would you necessarily want the N.E.A.s resources or imprimatur for your work? If you were a Latina painter from the Bronx, completing a triptych illustrating the boom of federal prison construction and mass incarceration, would you necessarily want the N.E.A.s stamp? But to say that the N.E.A. can be a disadvantage for more politicized artists is not to say that the agency is litist and not worth saving. The Alabama Blues project, which preserves blues as a musical art form through education, has been a recurrent N.E.A. grant recipient, much like the Alabama Dance Festival, which features residencies and performances by many troupes across the South, including Contra-Tiempo, a Latino dance theatre company. And the Catawba Cultural Preservation Project, also in Mulvaneys red district, received fifty thousand dollars last year to help Catawba Indian tribal artisans.

Killing the N.E.A. has, of course, long been a cause clbre for so-called budget hawks and social conservatives. But contrary to claims from Trump and Fox News, and to the insecurities of artists, the N.E.A. is not a federal spigot for decadent city lites. Rather, its grant-making effectively spans the country and helps rural, not-New York, not-wealthy, Trump-friendly districts. Despite the decades-long attempts on the right to paint the N.E.A. as rarefied snobbery welching off the state, forty per cent of N.E.A. activity happens in high-poverty areas. Thirty-six per cent of its institutional grants help groups working with disadvantaged populations. And a third of grants serve low-income audiences. The N.E.A. also helps military veterans, a decidedly non-urban lite population. The agency recently added four clinical sites to its existing seven; these sites provide creative-arts therapies for service members, veterans, and families dealing with traumatic brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder.

On a per-person, proportional basis, smaller and more rural states, such as Wyoming, Vermont, and Alaska, reap bigger benefits from N.E.A. funding than blue-state metropolises. Many rural, poorer areas would be the hardest hit by Trumps elimination of government arts programs. Mind you, that such a disproportionate number of N.E.A. grants per capita get rewarded in Trump-voting districts does not render the N.E.A. worthierof saving; the fact merely points to the conservatives demagoguery and indifference toward government-related successes in their own back yards. The N.E.A. enlivens this countrys theatres, music houses, libraries, veteran halls, and more. While Trump promises to resuscitate our physical infrastructureroads, airports, and bridgeshe angles to gut our cultural infrastructure, by nixing public arts programs.

The N.E.A. was saved in the budget agreement hammered out in Congress this week. But the arts were not on a budget chopping block as a matter of money, of course, but as a matter of faux populism, and as the next iteration of the culture wars. The proposed arts cuts are not an austerity measure; theyre a know-nothing strategy of dominance to undercut humanists, researchers, writers, artists, a thinking public. Removing government support from the arts belongs on a frightening logical continuum of perpetrating disinformation and fake news. The lifelong excuses offered by Trumps circle to cut funding for the arts vex a thinking mind. Before becoming Attorney General, Senator Jeff Sessions, as the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, fired off a letter explaining why he was preparing to slash the budget of the N.E.H., the sister institution ofthe N.E.A. How dare it, Sessions complained, fund the Bridging Cultures program, which distributes books related to Islam to over 900 libraries across the United States. The incensed senator attacked the appropriateness of N.E.H grants tackling big questions that he dismissed. But they are just the questions that anyone living in America, red state or blue, could benefit to ponder. What is belief? What is the meaning of life? Why are bad people bad? and Why do we study the past?

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The NEA Really Isn't Welfare for Rich, Liberal lites - The New Yorker