With government funding comes government control, and government control is always a threat to artistic truth and excellence. The NEA touts its grants as a kind of official stamp of approval for worthy art. But no serious artist wants to be patted on the head by the state. The NEA's votaries, however, have no faith in the judgment of anonymous citizens. They see American art shriveling up unless taxpayers are forced to subsidize arts organizations anointed by the government.
Congressional conservatives hope to zero it out altogether.
The arts will not suffer if they do. The NEA, after all, has not exactly fueled an explosion of artistic genius. Yet NEA partisans warn of a new Dark Age if the endowment is shuttered. Back before anyone thought it was the government's business to subsidize art and entertainment, the dumbest and most philistine democracy in the Western world was incubating an artistic richness of unparalleled breadth and variety. In the 1920s, Mabel Dodge Luhan moved from Greenwich Village to Santa Fe, N.M., establishing an arts center yeasty enough to draw the likes of D.H. Lawrence, John Marin, and Georgia O'Keeffe.