Politics and art

George Will:

"This is just the beginning," Yosi Sergant told participants in an Aug. 10 conference call that seems to have been organized by the National Endowment for the Arts and certainly was joined by a functionary from the White House Office of Public Engagement. The call was the beginning of the end of Sergant's short tenure as NEA flack -- he has been reassigned. The call also was the beginning of a small scandal that illuminates something gargantuan -- the Obama administration's incontinent lust to politicize everything.

Sergant's comments, made to many individuals and organizations from what is vaguely and cloyingly called "the arts community," continued: "This is the first telephone call of a brand-new conversation. We are just now learning how to really bring this community together to speak with the government." Wrong preposition. Not "with" the government, but for the government.

Did the White House initiate the conference call-cum-political pep rally? Or, even worse, did the NEA, an independent agency, spontaneously politicize itself? Something that reads awfully like an invitation went from Sergant's NEA e-mail address to a cohort of "artists, producers, promoters, organizers, influencers, marketers, tastemakers, leaders or just plain cool people."

They were exhorted to participate in a conference call "to help lay a new foundation for growth, focusing on core areas of the recovery agenda." The first core area mentioned was "health care."

The NEA is the nation's largest single source of financial support for the arts, and its grants often prompt supplemental private donations. He who pays the piper does indeed call the tune, and in the four months before the conference call, 16 of the participating organizations received a total of nearly $2 million from the NEA. Two days after the call, the 16 and five other organizations issued a plea for the president's health-care plan.

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The Chicago Way comes to the arts community? Politicizing art is not new. The folk groups of the sixties made a lot of money doing it, but they were not taking it from the government. Groups like Peter Paul and Mary and singers like Joan Baez put their politics into their music. It did not hurt them commercially at the time. If artist have talen and a message they can get it out without a government subsidy. One of the things that was different about these groups is they were generally protesting the government rather than acting as PR agents.