[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 59 (Thursday, March 30, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4840-S4841]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   JOHN SILBER ON THE ARTS IN AMERICA

  Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, in a thoughtful article in the Boston 
Globe entitled ``Funding the Arts Enriches the Nation,'' John Silber, 
president of Boston University, provides an eloquent reminder of the 
importance of the arts to the spirit of our Nation. President Silber 
effectively rebuts the negative myths about the National Endowment for 
the Arts and states the necessity and desirability of continued funding 
of the arts. NEA represents only one-half of 1 percent of the Federal 
budget. The program it funds and disseminates to neighborhoods and 
communities across America are eminently deserving of this moderate 
level of Federal support.
  I commend this article to my colleagues and I ask unanimous consent 
that it may be printed at this point in the Record.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                 [From the Boston Globe, Mar. 20, 1995]

                  Funding the Arts Enriches the Nation

                            (By John Silber)

       The 104th Congress has brought with it an open season on 
     federal support for culture. Members of the congressional 
     leadership have proposed defunding public broadcasting, and 
     two former heads of the National Endowment for the Humanities 
     testified that it ought to be terminated and advised the same 
     fate for the National Endowment for the Arts.
       The most common charge made against public broadcasting is 
     bias toward the left, and those who would impose a death 
     sentence on two endowments continually trot out the same 
     horror stories.
       With regard to the NEA, the cases in point are some items 
     in an exhibit of Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs, an 
     alleged work of art called ``Piss Christ'' by Andres Serrano 
     and a piece of blood-spattered performance art by Ron Athey.
       The NEH has subsidized a ludicrously tendentious set of 
     standards for the teaching of history and has funded the 
     Modern Language Association, the professional association of 
     literary scholars, as it deconstructs into vulgarity and 
     irrevelence.
       These genuine horror stories are not so much the doing of 
     the endowments as irrepressible eruptions of contemporary 
     culture. It is very likely they would have occurred without 
     government subsidy. We live, after all, in an age when John 
     Cage was taken seriously as a composer.
       But these are only the horror stories. The solid 
     achievements of the endowments are ignored in favor of their 
     few sensational mistakes.
       The NEA has provided startup funds for a vigorous movement 
     of regional theaters and enriched the
      musical life in the nation through the support of orchestras 
     and other performance groups. The NEH has, among other 
     activities, supported some of the most distinguished 
     programs on public television, such as ``Masterpiece 
     Theatre'' and ``The Civil War.''
       Such successes have enriched the intellectual and artistic 
     life of millions of Americans, and they have been far more 
     influential than the comparatively few failures.
       Nor is it true that PBS is, as a whole, a liberal enclave. 
     There are, of course programs on PBS made from a liberal 
     perspective and sometimes this perspective amounts to a bias 
     that distorts reality. But PBS is also studded with programs 
     produced from a conservative perspective.
       And the great majority of PBS programs are about as free of 
     ideology as is humanely possible. Consider one recent case, a 
     history of the Cold War called ``Messengers from Moscow.'' 
     The final episode of the series was made up largely of 
     interviews with Soviet politicians, bureaucrats and generals. 
     Most of them agreed that the Soviet Union had been a fraud, 
     and that the US challenge, orchestrated largely by Ronald 
     Reagan, had brought the Soviet system down and made them see 
     reality.
       Jimmy Carter appeared as the man who first terrified the 
     Soviets by considering the neutron bomb, and then was 
     snookered into abandoning it by a massive propaganda assault. 
     A Russian general explained that had the neutron bomb been 
     deployed, the Soviet strategy of overwhelming NATO with tanks 
     would have been rendered useless.
       This politically incorrect program was produced by a PBS 
     station with major funding from the NEH. It is representative 
     of federally subsidized culture at its objective best, and it 
     is impossible to imagine it on commercial television.
       [[Page S4841]] If we extended the standard of perfection 
     now being applied to PBS and the endowments to other 
     institutions, we should have long ago terminated the 
     Congress, the State Department, the presidency and every 
     known agency of government. In addition we should have 
     eliminated all hospitals, schools, colleges and universities 
     and dealt with all churches as Henry VIII dealt with the 
     monasteries of England.
       The NEA has frequently endorsed the motion that the sole 
     duty of art is to provoke and outrage. Great art will, 
     sometimes, do exactly that. But that is a consequence, not an 
     end. Monet outraged many of the bourgeoisie, but that was not 
     his intention, only a result of the impact his vision of 
     light had on people raised on a diet of academic realism.
       Public broadcasting and the Endowments consume only \1/
     50\th of 1 percent of the federal budget. By helping to 
     preserve and disseminate culture they have contributed value 
     far exceeding their modest funding. Terminating these useful 
     agencies on the basis of a few sensational mistakes will do 
     little to balance the budget but will deprive the country of 
     much value.
     

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