BlogBack: Author David Smith on NEA Funding

I appreciate you describing me as "cautious and ambivalent," which I am. I do tend to worry about the effects that controversy has on the Arts Endowment in the eyes of the public, for I believe that troubles of the sort that the agency ran into in the early 1990s serve to make people question the suitability of the government supporting the arts, and, worse, make them question, even doubt, the important role that art plays in civic life.

My ambivalence I think comes from my belief that publicly-funded art serves a different purpose than privately-funded art, and that the best role of the NEA is to make more people appreciate art, allowing them (I hope) to make it a bigger part of their lives. Finally, I come down on the side of the original designers of the NEA who believed that its beneficiary ought to be the public at large, rather than individual artists.

Sometimes I think I must be the only person around who doesn't have a problem with the NEA not giving individual grants but who also wants the Endowment's budget to be much larger.