Is the NEA for everyone?

• Author: Spillane, Margaret
• Position: National Endowment for the Arts

Several weeks ago, the great American Social Realist painter Jack Levine turned eighty years old. He was born in a working-poor neighborhood of Boston, the eighth child of an immigrant shoemaker. Yet by the time he was in his mid-teens, he could already draw like a Renaissance master. That's because from the age of nine, Levine's talent was given both space and structure in an after-school art program at a Boston settlement house. Whenever he felt like it, he could stroll over to the Museum of Fine Arts and study the techniques of the Old Masters up close. Later, a Harvard University scholar and artist heard about young Levine's great promise, and he provided the teenager with further education in the materials, discipline, and history of drawing and painting.

Coming from difficult economic circumstances, Levine might have been forced in spite of his splendid training to abandon his fledgling art career and take a job to help his family. But in the Depression, the Works Progress Administration was treating art-making as an occupation, and was providing artists with the opportunity to earn a modest living putting in regular working hours in the studio. Levine became one of America's most articulate and unsparing social painters, in the tradition of Daumier, Goya, and Hogarth.

So what does this story have to do with the current gleeful climate of art-bashing, as right-wingers in Congress try to wipe out the National Endowment for the Arts, which Newt Gingrich has sneeringly labeled "a plaything of pork"? Simply this: art can't flourish just by betting on the sheer force of individual talent to prevail. To survive, art requires both fostering at critical moments, and a community awake to the benefit of having people producing art in its midst.

The kill-the-NEA movement claims that the Endowment hands out checks to artists who are the enemies of mainstream America, that it is sucking cash right out of the pockets of decent, small-town folks, and using it as welfare checks for fancy artists in the urban fleshpots who spit on all that decent Americans value.

However, 95 percent of the Endowment's budget goes not to individuals but to institutions--and not just big-city orchestras and museums, but arts projects in rural community centers, town halls, regional festivals, and other social and civic institutions. The argument that corporate funding should replace federal funding can't stand up in regions of the country where there is no corporate...