Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, April 19, 1991 TAG: 9104190691
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: John Frohnmayer
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
During the 25 years of its existence, the endowment has made 90,000 grants. Of these, about 30 have been controversial. Still, I would guess those 30 - or maybe just a couple of them - are all most of you know about the endowment. Consider the following:
What it buys:
During the past 25 years, your tax money that went to the endowment has helped bring into being 70 new choruses and 120 new symphony orchestras. Some of the music they have made - music that you have enjoyed - is sacred, some secular.
It has helped pay for 364 new theaters at which you have seen plays, both good and bad, depicting love and hate and joy and envy and success and failure - just like our lives.
Your 68 cents has helped create 2,940 local arts agencies that produce your strawberry festival, bluegrass competition, flatfoot-clogging contests and community sings. Countless of you have, in addition, given your time, dollars and sweat to make these things happen.
And you have spent 68 cents to bring artists to more than 11,000 of your kids' schools - each year reaching 4.5 million children who will know that there is at least one living poet in this country and that those actors on stage and television are real people who probably were kids once too.
A sense of self-worth, of the ability to communicate - that's what the arts teach with your 68 cents, and it is fundamental to all learning, from calculus to drawing.
Who chooses?
A bunch of bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.? No, actually you do. More than 1,200 citizens will sit on endowment panels this year to recommend, on a competitive basis, which applications should be funded. Most of these judges are visual artists or architects or dancers or folk-arts lovers, but they also include a pharmacist from Muncie, Ind., or a minister from Louisville, Ky., because at least one knowledgeable lay person sits on every panel. Citizens on the panels are of all races, from all parts of the country and represent diverse viewpoints.
Funding recommendations are fought over, debated and usually resolved by the consensus of the panel. They are then forwarded to the National Council on the Arts, 26 distinguished Americans who review these recommendations in public sessions and affirm or reject them. You know some of these council members, because you have been thrilled by Arthur Mitchell's Dance Theatre of Harlem (or his dancing, if you were lucky enough to see him). You have been moved by the pathos of an August Wilson play that Lloyd Richards produced. Or you have been transported by the beauty of Phyllis Curtin's voice. But you know the others on the council as well, because they are your friends, neighbors, colleagues - good and decent people who care about our society.
Finally, the National Council recommendations for funding come to me, and I can say yes or no. I decide on the basis of our twofold mission: to support quality arts and to make those arts accessible to the American people.
What do we stand for?
I came to government sharing a common cynicism about government workers. My experience hasn't confirmed it. The government workers here at the endowment are smart, compassionate, incredibly hard-working and, in spite of the past two years of arts wars, amazingly good-humored. I'm sure these people serve our agency so well out of a belief that people become more human through the arts.
Dance, music, drama and design interpret our world in carrying forth its wisdom from generation to generation. As our enabling legislation says: " . . . 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 conditions facilitating the release of this creative talent."
But let's return to those few controversial grants, because even though they are only a minuscule percentage of what we have funded, some people ask: "How does the endowment serve the public interest by making controversial grants?"
First, while the endowment is for everybody, not everything we do is for everyone. With tax dollars you support schools, although not all of you have children. Your taxes build bridges in North Dakota and Arizona over which you may never drive. You may not agree with the agricultural, health, labor or environmental programs your taxes support. It's the compromise we recognize as the social contract.
Second, society grows through living illustrations. Some controversies we resolve, some stay with us - but few are resolved by ignoring them. Sometimes art provides a vehicle - a forum - for that public debate. "Driving Miss Daisy" (the original play was funded by the endowment) prods our conscience gently. Other works prod debate more confrontationally.
Finally, our society is diverse, which is a source of strength as well as a challenge. The endowment's mandate from Congress is not to dictate content, but to seek " . . . artistic excellence and artistic merit . . . taking into consideration general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the American public."
That is exactly what we intend to do. No blacklists, no ideological preconceptions. We will continue to use your 68 cents - wisely, I hope - so that we can leave for our children, and their children, a sense of who we are as human beings, what we share as a nation, and what we have achieved as a civilization.
\ AUTHOR John Frohnmayer is chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. The Washington Post
by CNB