‘Public funding … carries with it the risk that the state will try to instrumentalise artistic creation,’ music professor says
Government agencies like the National Endowment for the Arts have been funding politically-charged arts projects at universities that further “progressive, revisionist history” and “promote obscenity,” according to a new report by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.
The report adds to concerns some scholars have expressed about government funding putting political pressure on artists to create art with a specific message.
“Public funding, while in principle accessible to any professional artist, nevertheless carries with it the risk that the state will try to instrumentalise artistic creation,” Canadian composer Samuel Andreyev told The College Fix in a recent interview.
“Whether this inevitable loss of freedom is worth the attendant opportunity is a decision every artist must make for themselves,” he said.
The National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the Institute of Library and Museum Services are the main government agencies that have provided grants for various arts projects since the 1960s, according to the report.
Out of the four, the NEH is the leading organization funding arts projects favoring a leftist political agenda, according to the ISI report.
For example, the NEH gave a $50,000 grant to a Duke University professor for the book, “Democracy in Chains,” which “attacks economists who advocate for smaller government,” the report states.
The book by Professor Nancy Maclean caused some uproar within the academic community, with some scholars saying it was “poorly researched,” according to the report.
Other academic institutions also have received money from the NEH for projects that further “progressive smear campaigns” and “tribalist visions of American culture,” according to the report.
In 2022, for example, the University of California Riverside received a $270,000 grant to create classes about “Latinx history, hip-hop, and contemporary Filipino American art.”
Taxpayers are funding ‘highly ideological’ art
John Burtka, president of the ISI, told The College Fix the NEH and NEA have been funding “a litany of projects that relate to … race or gender-related studies.”
“It’s mostly in the form of professors asking for research grants to write a book or to perhaps produce in the arts side, produce a particular exhibit or to even create the art itself that has a highly ideological character,” Burtka said in a recent phone interview.
He said the four agencies have an “outsized impact” since each spends roughly $1 billion annually in conjunction with state matching grants.
“The federal government should not be funding … art or … scholars in the humanities that are specifically using that money to advocate for highly ideological projects that most Americans wouldn’t agree with and … undermine the core foundations of American society,” Burtka said.
Burtka said the agencies should keep the original founding principles of America at the forefront for their grantmaking criteria. The art that they fund should foster a “cultural renaissance” and encourage a return to “true, artistic beauty,” he said.
“It’s sort of a subtle impact, but it’s significant, that this just kind of shapes the entire cultural ecosystem,” he said.
While not all of the taxpayer-funded projects have been overly political or “wasteful,” the ISI’s report states the NEA has a “terrible track record of using hundreds of thousands of tax dollars to support obscene and/or simply idiotic art.”
Perhaps the most well-known example, in 1987, the NEA awarded a grant to support artist Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” which was a “crucifix submerged in a jar of the artist’s urine.”
Additionally, the ISI’s report states the Center for Public Broadcasting has funded content that “pushes far-left ideological agendas” and the Institute of Library and Museum Services has paid for university “LGBT advocacy” projects.
In 2019, the institute gave the University of Arizona a $383,901 grant to “partner with LGBT communities for research,” the report stated. It also awarded the University of South Carolina a $357,367 grant in 2020 to fund “LGBT advocacy,” according to the report.
Grants are based on ‘artistic merit,’ agency says
Elizabeth Auclair, spokesperson for the National Endowment for the Arts, responded to the report by saying the agency is “committed to supporting arts projects for the benefit of all Americans.”
“All NEA grants are made solely on the basis of artistic excellence and artistic merit as described on the NEA website and as required by Congress,” Auclair said in an email Thursday to The Fix.
Auclair said the agency’s grantmaking process includes a “panel of arts experts” to “make recommendations on applications” before they are assessed by the chair of the NEA and the National Council on the Arts.
She also said the NEA is “the largest funder of the arts” nationwide and is a “catalyst of public and private support for the arts.”
The other government agencies did not respond to The Fix’s requests for comment about the report over the past two weeks.
Meanwhile, Andreyev, a musician and professor at the Strasbourg Center of the University of Syracuse, told The Fix artists should be careful about viewing art through a political lens, especially when receiving external funding.
“Artists in the western world are nearly always free to create whatever they like — provided they aren’t asking anyone external to fund it,” Andreyev said. “The moment money comes into the equation, some amount of freedom is inevitably lost.”
The composer said Alban Berg’s “Wozzeck,” Luigi Dallapiccola’s “Il prigioniero,” and Saariaho’s “Innocence” are prime examples of when composers successfully incorporated political elements into their musical pieces.
However, Andreyev said “there have also been some extremely bad works of art that have been propped up with this or that political justification.”
“Like any other subject, it is possible for political subjects to be handled sensitively by an artist, provided there is a strong enough element of abstraction and symbolism so that the work does not become merely journalistic,” Andreyev said.
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