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from: Edward Rothstein

Is the NEA Spineless?

Posted Wednesday, March 10, 1999, at 2:20 PM ET

Dear Sarah:

Maybe we can hold off on Kubrick a bit, because I'm thinking about writing a Times column about him and I want to try, in presidential fashion, to keep my life "compartmentalized."

So I was wondering if I could raise a politically charged issue from today's paper. On the front page of today's New York Times, Julia Preston contributes a story that combines one area of your expertise with one area of mine. A quick summary: The NEA chairman, William J. Ivey, has canceled a previously approved $7,500 grant to the El Paso-based Cinco Puntos Press for publishing the English translation of a children's book by Subcomandante Marcos, "the political mastermind and military strategist of the Zapatista guerrillas of southern Mexico." The author's photo shows a guerrilla sporting a black ski mask and ammunitions belts; a blurb on the book (courtesy of Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls) hails the "dignity" and "grass roots" of the Zapatista movement. A rights payment is going to the original Mexican publisher, Colectivo Callejero, "which supports the Zapatista cause."

After hearing about the cancellation (which was due to concern that some of the money would be going to the Zapatista cause), the El Paso publisher, Bobby Byrd, called the NEA "spineless." He said: "The book is essentially about diversity and tolerance, everything the NEA is supposed to stand for, and they just don't have the courage to publish it."

I would be interested in your putting the Colectivo (and Marcos) in perspective. But from an American cultural perspective, Bobby Byrd is right. Just not in the way he thinks.

The NEA is spineless, not because it is canceling this grant but because it has defined itself, over and over, as being "essentially about diversity and tolerance" and not about the arts. This is a problem that cuts across party lines: There are few in Congress or the White House who have any real notion of what a noncommercial, high artistic tradition is about (and I don't just mean European-based traditions).

In recent years, politicians on both left and right have attacked the NEA as elitist. Well, the NEA should be elitist. But like so much else in contemporary America, it is beholden to an ideology of democracy that is applied across the board in all forms of enterprise, measuring dollar distribution by ethnic group, gender, genre, and geography. It has been a political organ for distributing funds, not a patron of the arts.

Providing support for a foreign guerrilla group's interests--even if we grant that group legitimate grievances along with grass-roots dignity--may be pushing things. But on the terms the NEA has defined for itself, Byrd has a point.

What do you think? Or should we swerve back to lighter fare?

Best,
Ed

the breakfast table
entries
123456789101112131415
from: Edward Rothstein

Is the NEA Spineless?

Posted Wednesday, March 10, 1999, at 2:20 PM ET
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Sarah Kerr is a regular contributor to Slate. Edward Rothstein is cultural critic at large for the New York Times. He writes the paper's "Connections" column on alternate Mondays (technology-related columns archived here) and is the author of Emblems of Mind: The Inner Life of Music and Mathematics.
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