Not your father's NEA
The outstanding culture critic Roger Kimball, writing for National Review Online, reminds us that things have changed significantly for the better at the National Endowment for the Arts under President Bush. Kimballs points out that new director Dana Gioia "has transformed that moribund institution into a vibrant force for the preservation and transmission of artistic culture. He has cut out the cutting edge and put back the art. Instead of supporting repellent 'transgressive' freaks, he has instituted an important new program to bring Shakespeare to communities across America. And by Shakespeare I mean Shakespeare, not some PoMo rendition that portrays Hamlet in drag or sets A Midsummer Night's Dream in a concentration camp." In addition, Giola "has hired a number of able deputies who care about art and understand that what the public wants is more access to good art — opera, poetry, theater, literature — not greater exposure to social pathology dressed up as art. After a couple of decades of cultural schizophrenia, the NEA has become a clear-sighted, robust institution intent on bringing important art to the American people."
None of this, Kimball acknowledges, necessarily means that the government should fund the NEA, much less increase its budget. However, I think it does make President Bush's decision to increase funding less deplorable, and points to another reason why Bush is preferable to a Democrat -- the replacement of Robert Mapplethorpe with William Shakespeare.
