National Endowment for the Arts chief Rocco Landesman keeps saying he’d like to restore NEA awards to individual artists — and he, of course, is not alone. Guess what? The NEA does give awards to individual artists — and I’m not sure it should.
Maybe the hot, humid weather in NYC has made me cranky, but the NEA press release that arrived late Thursday, announcing lifetime achievement awards in jazz, heritage and opera, has stuck in my craw like gum on a shoe.
The awards were seemingly well-deserved: they went to the Marsalis family (Wynton is at right), Philip Glass, Martina Arroyo, Eve Queler, and several other well-known artists. Well, that’s nice — until you read that these people received a total of $450,000, or $25,000 each.
As the press release says:
Among the group are four Grammy Award-winners (McCoury, Mandel, Marsalis, and Keepnews); a MacArthur Fellowship recipient (Jackson); a Golden Globe awardee (Glass), and a Pulitzer Prize recipient (Marsalis).
This raises a host of questions:
Should the federal government be honoring artists in this way? It doesn’t, as far as I know, give lifetime achievement awards to, say, philosophers, or historians, or lawyers, or medical researchers, or most other professions.
If it does give lifetime achievement awards, should they carry a monetary award? The Oscars, the Emmys, most Pulitzers, and plenty of other prestigious awards are awards, period — with medals or statues, perhaps, but no money. Is this the best way to use the NEA’s limited budget?
Would the awards be just as prestigious without the money? I don’t see why not. $25,000 probably means little to most of these awardees, but it means a lot to other NEA recipients — in many programs. NEA is known for piddling out small amounts to many organizations, giving them a so-called stamp of approval that allows easier fundraising elsewhere.
And, as far as I can tell, the National Medal of Arts — “the highest award given to artists and arts patrons by the United States Government” — involves no money.
Should the NEA re-evaluate the jazz-opera-heritage awards program? You know what I think — yes, it should. I don’t see why the money is justified, and it can be better applied elsewhere.