Avant-Garde Art Has New Bankers

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 17, 2000 | by Stephen Goode

When Congress cut the budget fop the National Endowment for the Arts, conservatives predicted the private sector would step in and fill the financial void. And they were right.

Five years ago, when the newly Republican Congress slashed the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts, or NEA, in half to $98 million and put an end to most grants to individual artists, critics cried foul. Creativity in America would suffer, they said. The blossoming of art that tens of millions of dollars in federal and local grants helped foster would come to an end.

That didn't happen, of course. American art, in its frequently dizzying variety, can be found almost everywhere, often flourishing. What did happen was predicted by a few conservative observers and almost no one else: the emergence of a private group willing to step in and take government's place in financing the projects of controversial artists deemed too hot for the NEA to handle.

It was NEA support for artists such as Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe, among several others, that had caused Congress to cut the endowment's funds. Serrano is known for his color photograph of a crucifix submerged in a jar of his own urine; Mapplethorpe for his graphic homoerotic and sadomasochistic imagery.

But who would come up with funds for the way-out stuff if government wouldn't? A group called Creative Capital, for one. Founded in January 1999 after more than two years of planning, Creative Capital, which is based in New York Ci-ty's Greenwich Village, offered its first grants -- totaling $563,700 -- in January of this year to 75 artists nationwide. The winners were fished from a pool of 1,807 applicants and fairly evenly distributed among artists in four general areas: visual arts, media art, performance art and emerging art (which includes fields such as Website design). Only four states weren't represented among the winners.

The 75 awards were a far cry from what the NEA offered individual artists during its peak years -- the late 1980s, when the endowment awarded about $10.5 million a year to more than 750 artists, or even in fiscal 1995, the last full year of NEA grants, when it received 9,036 applications and gave $7.1 million to 616 artists.

But it was nonetheless a major start. "We didn't have a clue there would be so much interest," Creative Coalition's executive director Ruby Lerner tells Insight. "We expected 800 applicants, maybe 1,000." But they got more than 1,800.

Funding, too, poured in. The Warhol Foundation (named after the late artist Andy Warhol) promised $400,000 for three years. (Creative Coalition uses rooms rent-free in the Warhol Foundation's New York City building.) The Ford Foundation followed with $250,000 for four years. Other donors include the Peter Norton family, Heathcote Art and the Lily Auchincloss Foundations, among more than 30 others. Donations total more than $5 million, and the foundation hopes to reach $40 million.

But the nearly $600,000 awarded this year was a long way from the estimated $20 million lost in individual grants when federal monies dried up, Lerner notes. "No private-sector funding can replace that kind of money," she claims. But it nonetheless allowed the fledgling foundation a certain amount of leeway.

It also was welcome news to many conservatives, who are pleased the controversial art is being paid for privately rather than with taxpayer dollars. "Private groups are stepping up to the palette to support the weirder stuff," intoned the Family Research Council's Robert Knight in his syndicated column a year ago. Creative Capital "has been formed with the intent to sponsor themes the NEA may be reluctant to support."

And Patrick Reilly of the Capital Research Center, a Washington-based conservative think tank, who has studied the new foundation closely, tells Insight that what Creative Capital shows is that "private funding is available for very controversial art," even when some of that art's most ardent supporters thought it wouldn't be, or that if it were it would be in short supply.

How weird is the art Creative Coalition supports in this first year of its grants? Some of it is fairly strange by most people's standards. The foundation funded $10,000 to David Hancock of Saint Peter, Minn., for his "The Sisters of Eve," described as "an interactive theatrical event about a New England town that has disappeared." The central character of the piece is a dwarf hermaphrodite who is a "crackpot historian," claims she is the sole survivor of the hurricane that destroyed the town and needs to prove that the town indeed once did exist by creating a museum of its artifacts. The grant will be used to "write, create the dioramas and curiosities of the museum and begin development workshops."

Hancock's project is likely to strike many as odd. Still, Creative Capital honestly can claim (as it does) that its grants have gone to a variety of projects impossible to pigeonhole. The largest single grant -- $20,000 -- went to Wendy Jacob of Cambridge, Mass., for her "Squeeze Chaise Longue," an overstuffed chair (onto which Jacob has put inflatable arms that snugly hug anyone who sits down in it. It's supposed to be especially attractive, even therapeutic, for autistic children, who often feel very comfortable in its grasp.