Posted on 01/28/2004 6:18:24 PM PST by Captain Peter Blood
BUSH TO SEEK BIG BUDGET INCREASE FOR NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS... Laura Bush plans to announce the request -- for the largest increase in two decades -- on Thursday... Developing...
Appropriations History Fiscal Years 1966 – 2002 Fiscal Total Year Funds 1966 $ 2,898,308 1967 $ 8,475,692 1968 $ 7,774,291 1969 $ 8,456,875 1970 $ 9,055,000 1971 $ 16,420,000 1972 $ 31,480,000 1973 $ 40,857,000 1974 $ 64,025,000 1975 $ 80,142,000 1976 $ 87,455,000 1976T* $ 35,301,000 1977 $ 99,872,000 1978 $123,850,000 1979 $149,585,000 1980 $154,610,000 1981 $158,795,000 1982 $143,456,000 1983 $143,875,000 1984 $162,223,000 1985 $163,660,000 1986 $158,822,240 1987 $165,281,000 1988 $167,731,000 1989 $169,090,000 1990 $171,255,000 1991 $174,080,737 1992 $175,954,680 1993 $174,459,382 1994 $170,228,000 1995 $162,311,000 1996 $ 99,470,000 1997 $ 99,494,000 1998 $ 98,000,000 1999 $ 97,966,000 2000 $ 97,627,600 2001 $104,769,000 2002 $115,220,000 * In 1976, the Federal government changed the beginning of the fiscal year from July 1 to October 1, hence the 1976 Transition (T) Quarter. http://www.arts.gov/about/02Annual/appropriations.pdf Financial Summary SUMMARY OF FUNDS AVAILABLE 1 FY 2002 Program and State Grant Funds 2 $78,835,000 Challenge America 17,000,000 Total Federal Appropriations $95,835,000 Nonfederal Gifts 3 00176,458 Interagency Transfers 3 2,365,504 Unobligated Balance, Prior Year3 2,150,671 TOTAL FUNDS AVAILABLE $100,527,633 1 Excludes salaries and expenses and program support funds. 2 The FY 2002 appropriation includes $25,118,000 for support of state arts agencies and regional arts organizations and $6,805,000 for support through the underserved communities set-aside, and reflects reprogramming of $915,000. 3 Only grantmaking funds, including unobligated commitments totaling $516,061. http://www.arts.gov/about/02Annual/financial.pdf
(8/1/89)
Andrew Ferguson
Assist. Manag. Editor, National Review
[Extracted from NATIONAL REVIEW, 8/4/90]
Washington, D.C. -- Bureaucrats in the arts, like their brethren elsewhere, are the Greta Garbos of democratic society: all they want is to be left alone. They labor in a tiny vineyard, a hermetic subculture of thousands of artists and dozens of customers; here, a show of fingerpainted toilet seats hung on the walls of a county welfare office; there, a nude dance performed in the basement of a Presbyterian church. Their obscurity is their happiness--that, and the $150 million they annually dispense through the National Endowment for the Arts.
Every so often, however, there's a leak in security. Controversy--the bureaucrat's nightmare of nightmares--inevitably ensues. There was the flap this spring, for example, when Senator Alfonse D'Amato discovered that a photographer called Andres Serrano had used $15,000 of NEA money to finance Piss Christ, a photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine. And then Congressman Dick Armey of Texas heard about Robert Mapplethorpe.
Mapplethorpe died in March of AIDS, celebrated, as he had been for a dozen years or more, as a major artist. The Christian Science Monitor (even!) had early on tagged him "one of the most original of America's younger photographers." Mary Baker Eddy, phone your arts desk: Mapplethorpe's leitmotif was "homoerotic and sadomasochistic imagery"--one of his more celebrated pieces, for example, showed a man urinating into a pal's mouth, while another featured the artist himself, doubled over and pantless, with a bullwhip dangling from his orifice of choice--as well as photos of "children in erotic poses," a form of personal expression more commonly known, when not federally funded, as child pornography. These pictures and more coagulated in a traveling show sponsored in part by the NEA, to the tune of $30,000.
The exhibit--which also included, for aesthetic effect, scores of pictures of flowers--was scheduled to arrive at Washington, D.C.'s Corcoran Gallery in July.
On June 8, Congressman Armey and 108 co-signers sent a letter to Hugh Southern, the acting chairman of NEA, asking, in effect, what the hell was going on. Noting "this is not the first time we have had concerns about the NEA funding inappropriate materials," the congressmen said they understood that "the interpretation of art is a subjective evaluation, but there is a very clear and unambiguous line that exists between what can be classified as art and what must be called morally reprehensible trash."<
Had it not been backed up by the power of the purse, the letter would surely have been laughed off as the thundering of Neanderthal lunatics or the posturing of pols (which in some cases it doubtlessly was). Under the circumstances, however, the Corcoran decided not to show the Mapplethorpe exhibit after all, reasoning that the proximity of Mapplethorpe's subidized shutterbuggery to irate congressmen might endanger NEA funding.
The Corcoran's decision sparked the predictable outrage from the Washington arts crowd: "appalled . . . rightwing . . . outright cave- in . . . censorship of the most vulgar kind . . . McCarthyism . . . muzzle freedom of expression"--the heavy breathing almost drowned out the cliches. A hardy amalgamation of artists and gays and lesbians and aesthetes gathered outside the gallery, chorusing, "Shame! Shame!"
Cocktail parties were held. There was talk of boycotts, although of what, precisely, no one seemed sure. The directors of the hapless Corcoran seemed at first surprised, and finally hurt: all they had tried to do, after all, was keep the money flowing to the very same people who now reviled them for their prudence.
In the wake of Mr. Armey's objections, Sidney Yates (D., Ill.), the art establishment's mouthpiece in Congress, has undertaken to ban indirect funding from the NEA, a practice which he blames for the Serrano and Mapplethorpe contretemps. Conservatives on the Hill have greeted the reforms, along with the Corcoran's self-censorship, as a small victory.
But do they understand how small it really is? There was something almost quaint about Mr. Armey's letter, with its talk of a "very clear and unambiguous line" separating art from rubbish. For it is one of the primary premises of the art world that this line doesn't really exist--that it is in fact a kind of cramp in the consciousness of the unenlightened (read: middle-class American) mind. "If art is to remain something other than a blue-chip commodity," hollered one of the speakers at the rally outside the Corcoran, "it will challenge and offend, especially those whose power rests in the status quo."
This new one, proposed by Bush, is for FY 2005.
Did I say that??
I think I have stated on this thread already that I don't like this idea of this spending
You want to *itch about it .. go for it .. but your argument about the good old days of Clinton and the GOP and how things were better then are out there.
Please don't make me defend Clinton. But Clinton did not ignore the NK nukes, he negotiated a crappy deal and they cheated. I have long thought that a few of the airline crashes were in fact terrorist hits. I just figured the feds just didn't want to admit it. 911 was just too much to hide.
Drudge looks as if he is really gunning for Bush lately, what's up with that?
or Mexican flag.
The same press that would happily condemn what you and I stand for in most cases? The only reason why Smith got any ink at all was Bush Bashing. You know it and so did the the reporter who filed it.
Vote for a Democrat, get liberal fiscal policy.
Vote for a Republican, get liberal fiscal policy.
Only difference is the amount of the deficit, which is less in the case of the Democrats because they would overspend without a face-saving meager tax rate reduction. We are doomed.
Administration officials, including White House budget experts, said that Mr. Bush would propose an increase of $15 million to $20 million for the coming fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1.
Do these "aides", "administration officials" and "White House budget experts" have a name or are they unnamed sources?
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