American Canvas: a roundtable on the 1997 NEA report

Michael Brenson

On October 13, 1997, the New York Times ran a front-page story with the bombshell headline "Study Links Drop in Support to Elitist Attitude in the Arts." The study is American Canvas, a 190-page book published by the National Endowment for the Arts and intended, in the words of its now-departed chairman, Jane Alexander, to look at the "ecology of the arts process . . . and at different models for stabilization and survival" (4). The Times story set off a feeding frenzy in the national news media. Many journalists were eager to subject the endowment and artists to the contempt that the media and politicians had poured on them in 1989, when the endowment crisis began. What made the Times article so shocking to many arts professionals who had exhausted themselves fighting for the endowment's survival was its assertion that the endowment was now placing the responsibility for the current crisis in arts funding squarely on the shoulders of the art world. No one and nothing else shared the blame, not Jesse Helms, the Christian Coalition, museum boards, the news media, or the NEA itself.

After spending hours with friends trying to clarify the assumptions behind the Times article, I began to wonder how younger arts professionals who had not been combatants in the culture wars would respond to the book. What would fresh voices say about issues I and many others had cared about so deeply, for so long, that we may no longer have the distance to frame them in ways that can inspire fruitful conversation? I thought of the Curatorial Studies Program at Bard College - the only curatorial program in the United States exclusively concerned with contemporary art - where I had taught a writing course in the spring of 1997 and would be teaching another in the spring of 1998. I found the students thoughtful, candid, and unpredictable. I had no idea what their responses to American Canvas would be.

The book was based on six regional forums held in 1996 (Columbus; Los Angeles; Salt Lake City; Rock Hill, South Carolina/Charlotte, North Carolina; San Antonio; Miami). In each one, arts professionals and civic leaders were asked to consider the beneficial effects of art on communities. The challenge, the book states, "is to transform the arts in the civic context from their present status as amenities that are added once the necessities are taken care of, into one of the primary means of addressing those necessities in the first place" (167). The book's attack on the complacency of the art world was welcome. So was its wake-up call to arts organizations, which must learn to work together. Some of its stories about the effects of art on the everyday lives of struggling people were inspiring.

But the book is immediately confusing. The role of the author, Gary O. Larson, is unclear and uneasy; and an explanation about him and his voice is never provided. In addition, in her introduction, Alexander does not explain why the book was published at this point - the month she resigned. In another Times article published that October announcing her resignation, Alexander blasted conservative critics for "attempting to capitalize on public outrage over a minuscule number of controversial projects that had received Federal support." But that anger is nowhere to be found in the book, which reserves much of its hostility for large arts institutions without having the sense to recognize how self-defeating it is to essentially exclude them from a national conversation about art and community. Published roughly two years after the endowment eliminated grants to individual artists to ensure its survival, the book avoids the issue of individual artists almost completely. In short, with all the admirable ideas and sentiments expressed in it, we could not take anything in it at face value. What is American Canvas? Why was it written? What does it say about the endowment now? Why is it obsessed with community? What does community mean? The following roundtable was held in New York in November 1997.

- Michael Brenson

My name is Alejandro Diaz. I'm from San Antonio, Texas. I've been a working artist for about fifteen years and a gallerist for the past two years. I have a space in San Antonio called Sala Diaz dedicated to exhibiting very current work by young artists and intermixing that with the work of older, more established artists. We represent artists from the United States, Mexico, Europe, and Australia.

My name is Judy Kim. I studied art history in college and worked for about two years at the American Association of Museums in the Government and Public Affairs Department. Then I worked in the Department of East Asian Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art before coming to Bard.

My name is Michael Brenson. I'm an independent critic and curator.

My name is Jessica Murray. I also studied art history as an undergraduate and worked for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, both in the Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, and then in their affiliated art school, in exhibitions and public programs. Now my partner Joel Beck and I run Salon 75, a curatorial space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which has been open for about a year and a half. We show new artists in all media from both Europe and the United States.

My name is Malgorzata Lisiewicz. I'm from Poland. Before I came to the Bard program, I worked as a curator at the State Gallery of Art in Sopot. Before that, I graduated from the art history department at the University of Adam Mickiewicz in Poznan, also in Poland.

Brenson: I'm glad we have a chance to discuss American Canvas, a book that does change the artistic landscape in this country to some degree. I look forward to anything you have to say. I want this to be a free-wheeling discussion that can go anywhere you want it to go. I think the best way to get into the book is to ask each of you to describe what you see as its strengths and weaknesses.

Diaz: The strengths of the report for me were its emphasis on education and on the lack of education in the arts in the United States. The weaknesses were the way in which the report perceived artists. There seems to be this myopic understanding of what artists do, who they are, and what their function in society is. The report assumes that the artist's role is to advance the moral good of the community, to bring people together. Perhaps it is. But art is more complex and doesn't always take as its principal concern the moral opinions of its day. I'm skeptical about this feel-good attitude the report projects. It tends to homogenize sentiment and individual values. It's also interesting that in a report which addresses the function of art in people's lives there is no discussion of aesthetics or beauty.

Kim: One of the strengths of the book is its assertion that art is in everyday life and that it's not just in a museum or in a symphony orchestra building. And that we need to realize that it's not just the well-known artist who needs to be recognized. Also, like Alejandro said, I really appreciate the education aspect. As for the weaknesses, I don't understand who they wrote this for, or what the purpose of the book was. It is from the NEA, yet they did not talk about themselves at all. Before I read it, I had read the articles in the New York Times, and I thought that the report was going to be more about the problems that the NEA has been having in the last eight years or so. I thought it was going to talk about their restructuring a couple of years ago, and that maybe they would try to answer the way they've been attacked. I also don't think the book's well written.

Brenson: Can you say what that means?

Kim: There are a lot of contradictory points. The writer, Gary Larson, even when he quotes somebody and then switches back to his own comments, definitely has a point of view. But is that the NEA's voice, or is it the forums'? And then I have problems with specific points the book is trying to make. One thing that makes me sound very Republican, which I'm not, is when the report discusses how corporations need to give money. For me, that's not the corporations' job. That's philanthropy. It's great if they do it, but the onus is not on them. And the book talks about the American spirit and the common culture, and there's one passage about a speech in which Clinton says something about America being the beacon of light and liberty? Wake up! This idea stems from an unrealistic and idealistic view of what the real America is. In the last chapter, the book has this challenge to art to act. They say what artists and communities can do. What about what the NEA can do? The NEA is putting the responsibility and the blame on the artists and their communities. The NEA is beyond scorn in this respect; they have left themselves out completely.

Murray: When we got into the education passage, I felt like it was a breath of oxygen. Like suddenly you were in somewhere that made sense. I agree that there should be art programs in every school, and I see them as integral to how people learn and how they think and how they are creative. But the book fails to make the distinction between the importance of learning the creative process - having that as part of your everyday life through education - and what making art means for professionals. You go to the gym and you work out, but you're not a professional athlete. I think that the government should support arts education and art in an excellent way, and that's going to be an elitist way. That's going to be like any sports person or any scientist. It's going to be in a way that maybe we don't completely understand or appreciate, but that is outstanding in some way. Judy raised the issue of corporations. The book said corporations just want to make a profit. Corporations give to organizations because it helps formulates their identity, just like anyone who gives a gift. A birthday present from one child to another is an expression of themselves. Corporations are no different. And since corporations and private people do fund 99 percent of what's going on in the arts, I think we really need to say thank you, as a start.

Lisiewicz: When I read the book, I didn't like it from the beginning. I have problems with every aspect of it. With the language, with the rhetoric, with the author, with the implied reader, with the discrepancy between the values that the book tries to promote and the values hidden in the structure of the text, with the simplification of many of the issues, and with the global approach.

Brenson: When you talk about your problem with the language and the values presented and those hidden, what do you mean?

Lisiewicz: First of all, I have to say I'm coming from a particular context, a middle-European context - postcommunist, marked by communist times. This kind of rhetoric is already very problematic for me. There is so much about how art is about civic responsibility, good citizenship, civic pride, and I think these are terms that should be defined and used very carefully. If somebody would switch the word Russian for the word American, nobody would even bother to read this book in my country. It just sounds like purely nationalistic propaganda that's not trying to grasp the issues. The book is like good preaching. The tone in which it is written assumes already that somebody knows better even than those in whose interests the book is speaking for. It assumes that it knows the best prescription to solve many problems, including community problems, minority problems, and so on. It keeps repeating the same kind of truth, very superficially, without developing it further. Even the use of the term community - what does this term mean? There are so many different communities. Each community has a specific power structure. I can think about the Bard community. In this part of New York, the structure of community changes radically with every second mile. I can think about my local community in Poland, where the political process of decentralization of ownership of art institutions that has been taking place is resulting in a situation in which more powerful subcommunities - more powerful because they are often grown on the former system and are resistant to any changes - have been exercising their power in the decision-making process about contemporary art. As a result, the Polish art scene has witnessed during recent years a set of unfortunate decisions driven by conservative forces more powerful than pro-contemporary art activists in major art museums. Therefore what community means should be very carefully defined. Whereas in the book everything is so quick and easy. I think nowadays in this age of the inflation of the word, we have to be very careful how rhetoric is used.

Brenson: When you talk about the way this book reminded you of the years under Soviet role, I assume that what you mean, along with the repetition of noble-sounding words that are not defined, is the book's view that art must serve some kind of social good and the notion that this social good must be sanctioned by the State.

Lisiewicz: Yes. I had a problem with this totalitarian attitude toward art, communicated silently through the book, even if it claims to speak on behalf of communities. I do believe that art should try to find ways to reach communities and different audiences, but it cannot happen just by saying this out loud. The discussion should start at a completely different level; it should be about how to make a change happen, about structures and mechanisms that define actual art functioning. Setting up the goals, even the most noble and beautiful ones, without a deep, thorough, and honest analysis turns everything into pure rhetoric, which is unproductive.

Brenson: The institutional art world is almost entirely left out of this book. Visual artists are the ones identified with the crisis in the endowment, but almost no visual artists were included in these meetings. And there are no critics, no curators, no art historians. The book takes swipes at institutions and museums all the way through while drawing a clear dichotomy between artists who work in and with the community and what institutions do. Why did the NEA essentially leave out artists? I find just in the question of language alone that that's a real lack, because when you come across the words of the performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena, they have a poetry and concreteness that has an ability to convince. The artist's voice is almost completely left out here.

Kim: I think they were trying to distance themselves from the controversial artists. One of the articles that came out just after the book appeared [Andrew Ferguson, "An Era of Tiny Commotions," Time, October 27, 1997, 132] talked about Karen Finley and the chocolate and the sweet potato, and the NEA is trying to say, hey, we're not about that. We're about these other things and communities, and about artists who hook up with churches and serve soup.

Diaz: Malgorzata was pointing out that American Canvas has this utopian idealism behind it. When you're putting the blame on the artist, you're not going to invite him to your party. You don't want any anomalies when you're speaking about utopian ideals. They are trying to distance themselves from the visual arts because of things like Piss Christ, and they're putting the blame for the problems of the NEA on those specific instances. It's set up to be an internal conversation without many interruptions, and there's very little debate. There's very little discussion about the visual artist and his aesthetic skills. There isn't even any consideration given to how artists relate to the community. It's just assumed that they do. Right now I'm showing Karen Finley at my gallery in Texas. I have a problem with seeing how her work is supposed to relate to my community, yet I think it's meritorious work. What does a white, educated performance artist from New York have to do with poor Mexicans in the south side of San Antonio? Not much.

Murray: This emphasis on the performing arts is very deliberate because it fits in with the super-emphasis on the community and everyone agreeing. With the performing arts, you sit in an audience, and you listen or watch, or both, and then you clap or don't clap, whereas in a museum you can look at a painting for as long as you want or not at all or go into a gallery and immediately turn around and decide to leave.

Brenson: You're suggesting that while they're presenting a point of view that is on the surface emphatically democratic, they might be denying the importance of a form of experience that is equally democratic, if not more so.

Murray: Right, which is the individual, which is what America is supposed to be based on. And also there's a serious problem with the idea of the neutral ground, where everyone comes together and agrees. It's not about that at all for me. It's about presenting things that are challenging or uncomfortable or frightening or transcendental. Art is about special experiences. I think that's one of the reasons museums are crowded with people. I go to the Met and I see Byzantine religious objects, and the galleries are packed with people of all different ages, speaking all different languages. I think people are very interested in museums because of that individual experience.

Brenson: Clearly we all believe this book is not what it pretends to be. Let's see how far we can go in clarifying what we feel is really going on in it.

Lisiewicz: For me, the way the art of the minorities is presented is troubling. Always this art was defined in relation to some kind of falk art, traditional art. Often when "other" cultures are at stake, falk art is the form of art that is mentioned, as if alternative, more experimental, let's say "high" forms of art were produced exclusively by the dominant culture. And actually it is never acknowledged that these communities participate in so-called high art production. In the chapter on "Transmitting Our Cultural Legacy," the notion of "authenticity" is used as a criterion, but the term has been revealed elsewhere as highly problematic, often having a discriminatory effect toward cultures to which it is applied. It is problematic even more if one takes into consideration the intense discussion in the art world about breaking high/low distinctions, which the book claims to want to do, again without a due problematizing of the issue.

Diaz: The report suggests that art exists in many places outside the institutions of the art world, which I believe. But this is not something new. In the Mexican neighborhood in which I grew up, front yards were the places where people manifested their individual artistic expressions. They were and continue to be the Baroque art of my culture. But the report talks about artistic expressions which occur naturally in the community essentially as a novelty; they almost make it seem like a vogue of multiculturalism. I question why the NEA is placing such a strong emphasis on funding these manifestations of art in daily life. I wonder what this might mean for the fate of artistic expression in these communities. The relationship the NEA is interested in forging with the community seems forced. The community, which has always valued and continued a tradition of its own artistic expression, without government money, is now being validated at a time when the existence of the NEA is being questioned. The bottom line is that artists, in order to be able to express themselves, don't necessarily have to rely on government money to do so. The report doesn't mention people opening galleries in their homes, people making art while making a living on waiter's wages. The report doesn't talk about spaces that have promoted the artistic expressions of their communities without ever turning a profit and don't even bother to become non-profit organizations in order to seek NEA money because they don't want to be told that they have to promote an ascribed idea about what the government believes defines that community.

Murray: There's a very interesting relationship between corporations and the commercial world, and what they call non-profits or the art world. It's not as black and white as they describe it. The people who do have money - like corporations and the commercial art market and patrons - are made out to be the bad people who are against non-profits or against artists. But the commercial world, the design world, for example, and the art world, relate and cross over with one another. I think American Canvas sets up this dichotomy to play down the financial power and influence that artists have both in their own work and in the other ways they may contribute to society. They work as architects, designers. They create software and buy and sell real estate.

Kim: When they talk about corporation money and say that when you get money from them, you have to give back something in return - it's the same thing with NEA money and artists. Perhaps in the days when the NEA was not under such scrutiny, that relationship was not so similar to corporations. But it has definitely become more so. They talk about how everything we do is art and mention birthday parties. Jessica and I were talking about this last night on the train: if I apply for grant monies, I could have a birthday party, if they're saying that that is art. Are they going to give me money? I don't think so.

Diaz: Although adopting this stance and these ideas and beliefs, I'm not convinced they really believe them. I'm not convinced that they really believe that underground minority groups of artists really should be considered equal to art-market professionals in the museum world.

Lisiewicz: There is an example to illustrate this. In the chapter on "Americans and the Arts," there is described a mural project organized by a church, with kids, who were supposed to paint over half of the mural painted before by local gangs. The project was supposed to create a visual distinction between drug-related graffiti, an act of vandalism, as the book calls it, and the children's image that was supposed to resist despair. This example reveals to my mind the ideological profile of the book. How it doesn't want to recognize or acknowledge that this gang graffiti is a legitimate cultural expression as well, and it should be under consideration as such - not in terms of destruction and death versus creativity and life. It really tries to simplify certain issues. How these distinctions are created and how to get beyond them are buried.

Brenson:The book feels like a response to the trauma created by the controversy that erupted in 1989. It was identified with individual artists and the visual arts program. Instead of trying to go through those traumatic situations and deal with them, the NEA has skirted them. The book has the feeling of the kind of battlefield trauma that makes it so hard for shell-shocked soldiers to relive what happened to them that they define their lives in different, even opposing terms. The NEA avoided the nightmare it has lived through by building up this elaborate polemic for community, against conflict, that is an escape from a trauma that they do not feel they are permitted to confront. As a result, for me, the book feels dishonest. The problem is that a lot of stuff in it is irrefutable - the walls between many museums and communities, the concern with what people who care about art as a field need to do to establish a solid base for art in this country. Part of the challenge is sorting all this out.

Kim: The ideas do address some crucial issues, and I agree with some of them, but the book seems dishonest to me as well. This issue of education and arts being a regular part of the curriculum and not an extracurricular thing - I do believe in things like that, and I wholeheartedly think that if art can make a bit of social difference, that's great. But whether or not we need the NEA to tell us to do that - American Canvas is almost like a handbook of what artists and communities can and should do, and that's part of the problem. It goes back to what Malgorzata was saying, of how ethnocentric this really is, and it sets up oppositions and hierarchies. Even though I agree with some of the ideas, it's very hard to swallow, and I keep going back to the question, "Why does the NEA need to exist?"

Murray: It's so anti-American. The American dream is the dream of the individual. People are awestruck by Michael Jordan because he's a fantastic individual, and he's great at what he does. I just got this vision of every child in America making art out of popsicle sticks and by the time I got to the end of the book, I just felt like I was choking. I feel American Canvas's aim is to control and stifle the imagination. After all, real vision can be powerful, uncontrolled. It would be a sad state of affairs if America was limited this way. If it lacked individual expression, lacked ever being able to express sorrow or anger or . . .

Diaz: Hatred.

Murray: Hatred. That's right. Or racism, or whatever, because without expressing those things you never work through them. At one point they said that art institutions should be more like hospitals, churches, and libraries. Well, first of all, hospitals have their own problems; and the art world, thank God, is not like the medical profession. And churches, in a lot of ways art provides some kind of spiritual place for people where religion has really fallen short, especially for our generation; and although libraries are wonderful, in a lot of ways museums are a more active place for people to be in. It's a visual world that we live in.

Brenson: Do you think they're preparing for their own demise in this book, because it does feel that they've given up the fight.

Murray: Absolutely. They take no pride in what art is or what art could be. That's what I meant about their vision of education. In the beginning, you agree, that's good, they should teach art in every school, but then as you get more and more into what they're really saying, I don't believe Jane Alexander is excited or impressed by art at all.

Brenson: Why do you say that?

Murray: Because there's this fear to be excited by something that might challenge people to think and might challenge people to feel things that aren't clean cut.

Lisiewicz: It seems like self-fear. The book points out how artists should be conscious of involvement in social and political forces, but it never considers how institutions, including itself, the NEA, are also part of those forces and have to find their own place within them in order to go on. It proposes solutions, but it completely withdraws itself. For example, it never even explained who Serrano and Mapplethorpe are, what the controversy was about.

Brenson: And what people did, how they behaved in relation to them.

Lisiewicz: Exactly. It already assumes that the audience of this book is people from the art world. And at the same time, it says that the art community must find a way to simplify and clarify its message.

Brenson:Do you react also to the insistence on translation, on the belief that what artists do has to be translated so that the people in the rest of society will understand what it is?

Lisiewicz: I agree totally, but the idea that the art world should simplify the message is to me completely unacceptable. And it's not the role of the artist but the institution to create this participatory kind of environment for everybody. And I mean this in a broad sense. Communicating art to the audience doesn't mean to simplify an artistic message but to give people a possibility to choose and enjoy even the most complicated and sophisticated forms of art by providing them a singular as well as a lifelong access to education and knowledge, by giving them the possibility to develop their own sensibilities. And this is the moment where I believe money is most painfully at stake. And I mean this both for those who make art and those who are its audience. The book is extremely offensive to the arts in its denial that the intrinsic value of art is pleasure. It's a unique experience. The book doesn't acknowledge the real power of art.

Murray: It does in some way, though, because it's written as a sort of propaganda. You don't write in this way unless you feel you need to control or whitewash something that is powerful. It's so much about fear. They're not including art historians, critics, visual artists. They don't want to open up these boxes.

Diaz; In the case of Serrano, the NEA really didn't come to the defense of that work. It just ran in the other direction and then turned around, and now it implies he's one of the reasons why we've been having these problems.

Brenson: I just want to remind everyone that Piss Christ was part of an annual traveling Awards in the Visual Arts show that selected ten artists every year. Serrano was one of those artists. Piss Christ was not commissioned by the NEA. It was part of a selection of Serranos that was one component of that 1989 exhibition. From the literature you would think the NEA directly funded that work. It was just one piece in a fairly insignificant show.

Murray: But Michael, that's your perspective. For me, that's when my involvement in the arts began. In 1989 I graduated from college. I was majoring in early modern French art. I wrote my thesis on Watteau, so my interest in contemporary art hadn't even really started. My perspective on the NEA began with that. I don't remember when it ever was a good thing. The only good thing about the NEA to me was that it made you think critically about what you were doing. It was a foil, if anything.

Brenson: Would you have preferred that they take a stand on the side of these artists and on the side of individual expression if it had meant bringing down the endowment? Do you think in retrospect that this kind of fierce advocacy would have served artists and art better than what Jane Alexander did, which was to do everything possible to stay out of trouble and allow the endowment to survive?

Murray: I don't know. That's a tough question. I have a gallery, and I think we do great things there. It never crosses my mind to get any public funding. It's like Alejandro said: it would compromise what he wanted to do. There's almost no money anyway.

Diaz: In my case, coming from a low-income, minority neighborhood, formally declaring my gallery a non-profit space would stigmatize me. It says, okay, I'm this poor Hispanic and so I have to stay this way, and I have to play the martyr in order to get my pittance from the NEA, and I don't want to profit. Well, that's also practicing a kind of hierarchical or caste idea of society. I'm not interested in maintaining notions about poor Hispanics in the United States as they would be desired in the vision of the NEA.

Murray: That's a really interesting point. My partner at Salon 75, Joel Beck, is ten years older than I am, and he won an NEA grant about ten years ago, and he used it and made more paintings. But he said to me he would never apply for an NEA grant now because even if he won the money, it would be a stigma. He would never want to include it on a resume. Its connotations are so negative that he wouldn't want the money.

Diaz: With American Canvas the NEA is trying to create rules and regulations for something that they really don't know very much about, which is art. I don't feel like there is any real investigation into the powers and capabilities that art has, and that's why people in my generation felt it was shameful to receive an NEA grant, because we felt that the only thing they were going to find acceptable was comfortable work. There was an understanding that the NEA was really out of touch with what it meant to be an artist in the United States and what artistic expression is about, and today that even seems stronger.

Lisiewicz: Alejandro said that he feels that artistic production is within this realm of freedom. I do not believe in it. I believe that art is always political no matter what it is, and the artist should acknowledge this fact. I'm not saying that the political comes first and then the practice, but it should be acknowledged, and this is the whole problem with this book.

Brenson: The statement that all art is political has become a platitude. In what way, for example, is an abstract painting or a figurative sculpture inherently political?

Lisiewicz: Once it leaves the studio, it enters a very precise system. What language it speaks, how it enters the system, what ways it reaches the audience, what kind of audience it reaches, who is supporting it, who is not. It's never a pure fact. It's always part of a system, and this is why statements like the one by John Sullivan [of the Theatre Communication Group] that "we need enclaves where ideas are not driven by capital . . . where ideas emerge for other purposes than the advancement of capital" makes no sense. There is no space not driven by capital. Capital enters every level, even if you talk about federal, state, or private money. What could be very useful is to analyze the interrelationship between the modes of support in different countries and the art phenomena themselves. That would be much more valuable than trying to solve all the problems of the universe at once.

Kim: There is danger, too, about making art a regular part of the curriculum through grade twelve. Who's teaching those kids? When they say draw a tree, does it have to have green leaves? There's a danger of people coming out, like Jessica said, with popsicle dolls that all have to look the same.

Brenson: I think the assumption of the book is that they wouldn't.

Murray: I guess that's what I meant when I said I was choking. I feel like between the lines there's definitely this problem with how they think art should be communicated. That goes all the way to the educational level. In the American Canvas model, I don't feel like children are really going to be able to express themselves, because then they'd grow up, and they might become art historians and critics, and then they might make contemporary art that questions things, and where would we be then?

Diaz: It is important to educate people in the United States that there is no set way in which the artist functions within the community. When you look at the recent Keith Haring and Andy Warhol exhibitions at the Whitney and the Jack Smith show at P.S. I, those artists were very much a part of their cultures; however, it may be in ways that people don't necessarily understand, and I think part of the challenge is educating the public to the fact that club culture is something that is important in the development of a young, homosexual artist. I think about things like that when I think about educating how the artist is involved with the community.

Brenson: Do you think that the NEA should still exist?

Diaz: Not if they're going to politicize aesthetics the way they are.

Kim: I think there should be an agency to support the arts but not as it stands now.

Lisiewicz: I do believe that the NEA should exist because it's a very important as a source of money. I have problems with how it functions, but I believe that art needs more institutional support.

Murray: In its ability to push art in education, it's important. It's also important in that it inspires some kind of dialogue about the relationship between art and society, the individual and the group. But in a lot of ways American Canvas is a depressing document, because it's saying that the government doesn't believe in art or in individual expression anymore. That may not be what Jane Alexander's intention was, but that's how I see it. The people who put this together don't take any pride in the power that art has.

COPYRIGHT 1998 College Art Association
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