Title: Ten Good Reasons to Eliminate Funding for the National Endowment for the Arts | The Heritage Foundation
Headings: Ten Good Reasons to Eliminate Funding for the National Endowment for the Arts
Ten Good Reasons to Eliminate Funding for the National Endowment for the Arts
Laurence Jarvik
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Content: The government can best support the arts by leaving them alone, offering background assistance through the tax system and the enforcement of copyright." 21
Reason #4: The NEA Lowers the Quality of American Art
NEA funding also threatens the independence of art and of artists. Recognizing how government subsidies threaten artistic inspiration, Ralph Waldo Emerson declared that "Beauty will not come at the call of the legislature.... It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men." 22 Recent critics echo Emerson's creed. McGill University Management Professor Reuven Brenner has declared: " The NEA's opponents have it right. Bureaucratic culture is not genuine culture.... It was the unsubsidized writers, painters and musicians-imprisoned in their homes if they were lucky, in asylums or in gulags if they weren't-who created lasting culture." 23
Indeed, to many of the NEA's critics, the idea of a federal "seal of approval" on art may be the "greatest anathema of al