Portrait of the artist as a young waiter. Feed the muse from a real endowment

摘要

The National Endowment for the Arts, our federal funding agency for culture, has an anomaly in its name: the word endowment. Since it was founded in 1965, the NEA has never been a true endowment —that is, a huge fund whose earnings in interest and dividends are used to support the arts. Rather, it is funded like most other government agencies, through annual appropriation by Congress. This affords conservative lawmakers a yearly opportunity to grandstand about the occasional bizarre NEA-sponsored work of art as a pretext for slashing the agency's funding. Consequently, the NEA's budget has plummeted from $176 million in 1992 to under $100 million today. The only way to stop this death spiral is to abandon the NEA and create a true endowment, funded by a short-term tax on entertainment, including the cultural corner that conservatives complain about most: Hollywood.