Who (Nearly) Killed the NEA?
Art in America, July 2001, pp. 27-29. A review of Jane Alexander’s Command Performance: An Actress in the Theater of Politics and Michael Brenson’s Visionaries and Outcasts: The NEA, Congress, and the Place of the Visual Artist in America “[Pronouncements like Mayor Giuliani’s call for a commission to determine decency standards] have been known to leave in their wake a significant moral residue that lives on to haunt the very institutions that appear to have succeeded in surviving the censure mounted against them…the N.E.A. exists today as an enfeebled federal bureaucracy that very few people in or out of the arts give a damn about.” Hilton Kramer (New York Observer, March 14, 2001) Hilton Kramer’s remarks reveal an ethical conflict of interest in his failure to disclose his role as morality policeman in the right-wing assault on the National Endowment for the Arts–he spurred the elimination of critics’ fellowships in 1984–but his conclusion about the current effectiveness of the
