At President Donald Trump’s direction, the National Endowment for the Arts terminated millions of dollars in grant funding to arts organizations across the country this month, including several in Michigan. Across the board, these organizations took to their Instagram stories, denouncing Trump for politicizing the NEA.
The reality is, liberals politicized the NEA far before Trump, using it as a tool to promote left-wing politics in the arts, with everyone else shut out. For example, two notable institutions in Michigan received NEA Grants for overtly political art exhibitions.
The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit’s grant to install a memorial to gun violence was rescinded in the recent cuts. The Grand Rapids Art Museum received $50,000, the maximum amount, for their recent exhibition of the work of Christopher Myers, textiles and sculptures dealing with immigration.
Credit to their grant writers, who knew how to play the game. Grant applications are easy to manipulate, to frame in a way that suits the fixations of the committees. You can frame an art exhibition however you’d like, talk up one aspect or another, and once they cut the check, reporting requirements are extremely minimal.
All you hear is seething when the grant money dries up, but everyone forgets the broader context. In truth, the NEA has been a political football for decades.
President Ronald Reagan too proposed cutting the NEA in the 1980s, mainly for budgetary reasons. Then, a 1989 NEA-funded retrospective exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s work scandalized a few congressmen.
Mapplethorpe, a controversial photographer who had died of AIDS a few months prior to the exhibition, was known for images that walk a fine line between beauty and obscenity: flowers, models, celebrities, nudes.
His photographs from New York’s 1960s BDSM leather scene are his most infamous and hard to look at. They are, indeed, obscene—Mapplethorpe would be the first to say so.
The exhibition proved widely scandalous, and it turned the NEA into a central figure in the culture war. Restrictions were imposed on the content of grants, limiting “obscene and indecent” material, and most individual grants to artists were cut.
Several controversial artists had grants rescinded as a result, and lawsuits raged. The NEA Four, as they’re now known, went all the way to the Supreme Court. The court ruled against them and upheld the decency clause, claiming it did not inherently limit First Amendment rights to freedom of speech.
Many in the art world speak of the incident anecdotally as the first demise of federal art funding in America. Adjusted for inflation, NEA funding peaked at $500 million in 1981, was slashed in the early 1990s, and has hovered around $200 million since.
Now, the culture war continues—in the present day, the institutional struggle is waged mostly over racial, sexual, and identity politics: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). It’s the favored cause of limousine liberals and champagne socialists, and Trump is waging a crusade against it.
If you wanted NEA money as a nonprofit arts org for the last decade, you simply had to write your grant as if it had a racial/sexual identity or left-wing political component. Otherwise, you’d never be approved by the liberal-wine-aunt grant committees.
Many organizations talked up their political aspects, whether they truly cared or not. I sure did, in a clever way. I received a $10,000 grant for an art show once, most of it funded indirectly with NEA money.
I just wanted to make cool film photographs, landscapes. But I wanted the grant, so I talked up the “current ecological situation” in my application without using the words “climate change,” though I’m sure the committee read it as such.
I played the game, and if I’d applied this year, perhaps I too would be coping with rescinded grant funds.
That’s the real embarrassment for these organizations. They’ve been caught with their pants down. All grants dealing with anything even remotely adjacent to liberal identity politics are being terminated. Maybe they believed in it, or maybe they just played the game, but either way, the jig is up.
The artists and art organizations are seething, but they have no one to blame but the ideologues who forced them to play this game in the first place. Liberal bureaucrats intentionally manipulated the NEA and made sure that all of the art it funded suited their own beliefs.
Notice how little sympathy there was for artists who didn’t align with the favored causes of the Left who had their grants rejected.
It’s no surprise then that Trump openly muses about cutting the NEA entirely. Why let taxpayer money fund your opponents? There’s a certain logic to just gutting the whole thing.
The reality is, there’s no clear way to ensure that NEA funding is distributed apolitically.
The best art is often controversial, and so are the best artists. Mapplethorpe’s flower studies are sublime, for example, but was it right for public money to fund an exhibition of his bondage photographs?
Perhaps the best outcome is getting federal money out of the arts altogether. You’re free now, grant writers. Go make some actual art.
Forcing private investment, a return to renaissance models of artistic patronage, could be a good alternative.
However, the NEA has been a potent tool of the Left, and it could be for the Right as well. Maybe it shouldn’t be abandoned.
Forget all pretenses of neutrality, and use it to fund patriotic works, new public monuments, artworks that uplift the American spirit.
Consider it a prerogative of each new administration: They get to fund the art they want. Everyone gets a turn—let’s see what some right-wing artists can do.
Bobby Mars is art director of Michigan Enjoyer. Follow him on X @bobby_on_mars.
