How NEFA Cripples the Visual Arts and Its Legitimacy

 The oxymoronic New England Foundation for the Arts does virtually nothing to fund or expose the Visual Arts in New England. "That can't be", you say. Wrong.  Wrap your head around the fact of the matter.

Having a Hard Time Getting Funded, Go Away

An argument can be made that just because visual artists are treated like unworthy and unwanted competition for funding consideration in the New England region - there is always the opportunity to apply for grants and funding from the National endowment for the Arts (NEA) directly.  And that's true but missing some critical context.

All of the other regions at least pay lip service to funding the Visual Arts and its aesthetic ecosystem of related practice. Artists who receive even perfunctory recognition at the regional level can also apply nationally and have something in their back pocket as a local reference. NEFA offers no such opportunity.

And for New England artists this means that they are not only competing for national recognition but that they are doing so against artists who already have a foot in the door.  If there is a complete disrespect for one's art at the regional level the why oh why would the NEA give you the time of day?

And While NEFA is at It, F.uck the Galleries Too

The local Art Gallery scene in America consists of seat-of-the-pants funding and all-hands-on-deck volunteerism.  

All of the aforementioned funding recipients have in-house, payrolled, grant writers. Few, if any, galleries and community venues have anyone who qualifies to help (see Rule #1).

The monopoly of dance, theater, and performance funding by NEFA is nothing short of money laundering.

The majority of funding is awarded to first, private school programs, occasionally State programs, and lastly the occasional, politically connected smaller venues. These well-endowed or tax-payer funded  University entertainment venues usually have budgets that fully fund the next year's offerings.  NEA funding is cycled back into their program funding priorities.  This is an obvious windfall for performing arts programs.

Woo hoo! Rule #1: Life. Ain't. Fair.

Pragmatically, that leaves ALL of the Visual Arts, Writing, Conservation, Folk Art, and myriad other galleries left to go fish for funding elsewhere.

For the record, art galleries are where all the platitudes are either practiced or ignored. The word community is synonymous with local art galleries.  Patrons looking for cultural mirrors of their community will find it here or not at all.

Body Blows

The NEFA Resilience Funds that were awarded as a consequence of Covid were feeble at best. The funding largely targeted arts administration. The description of the grants and amounts awarded sound like pissing in the ocean to change the tides.

*TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS!*.  All they want to do is continue stable employment for a diverse full-time staff as well as 18 teaching assistants, provide technology, and reach 400 lower income kids. Ambitious?

The diversity of the staff is irrelevant to receiving funding.  Reaching 400 lower income kids is irrelevant to the funding. The biggest question here is that this example is a copy of numerous such requests.

The obvious need is for a virtual presence from which to broadcast arts programs. Period.  What was required is that NEFA itself would negotiate, fund, and train all New England Galleries with an autonomous web footprint, a paid subscription for social media meeting spaces, and some single source technical assistance. That would have been a cost-effective, ever-so-virtuous solution under the circumstances. Missed opportunity.

Resiliency Revisited

The concept of Disaster Capitalism is ubiquitous these days when natural disaster suddenly and unexpectedly shuffles the deck of normalcy.

NEFA's malfeasance in regard to Visual Arts extends much further. The New England States are home to thousands of historical and socially significant artifacts that range from buildings, functional institutions, burial grounds, and other social treasures.

Extreme weather, misguided natural resource management, and self-inflicted incompetence are compounding the risk that all of these cultural assets are in danger.

Visual Arts funding is one aspect of sustaining a healthy aesthetic infrastructure but promoting healthy gallery practices, restoration and future proofing of all of New England's brittle treasures, creating feedback and fundback loops so that local artists and artisans participate in the funding is critical.

Resiliency funding must be an ongoing program dedicated to the New England gallery infrastructure.  The Private Universities and State Schools should not be skimming these funds away from non-profits and individuals who enrich the region.

So at least one question is, "Why is NEFA so incompetent and mismanaged?"  Administration is not an art.   

American Art, Hostage to the Political Opportunists

 Some Context - Hostage to Whom Exactly?

Professional artists live in a state of near constant precarity. The immediate and long term viability of making a living or even continuing to make a living is always in question.  And so, applying for available grants and other funding opportunities is always an option assuming the artist or artist's assistants can navigate these murky and duplicitous social currents.  In this particular article, I'm constraining the discussion to government funded opportunities.  The broader range of potential funding will be addressed in a future entry.

Government involvement in the Fine Arts aesthetic realm by definition is a surrender of artistic autonomy to a bureaucratically directed, ingrown, unaccountable, and cluelessly tasteless crony appointees. The proof is in the funding pudding that includes, administration of the program, dispensation of funds, and the wholesale incompetence of the program's design.

While the artist suspends their misgivings and doubts their surrender to the system of application and subsequent processing is largely an exercise in self-denial.  The sordid history of the program, if one bothers to look, can be summarized as "Don't go away mad, just go away!" The program is a slush fund for large arts organizations, unscrupulous academic fiscal dippers, incestuous connections, and the shadow suggestions of prima donna influencers.

Heads I Win, Tails You Lose

There is occasional evidence of trickle down funding that slips through the cracks but it is loose change compared to the institutional takeaway bag.

Rather than rehash the arguments that are eternally recycled about the waste of actual money, the more important contagion that the National Endowment for the Arts succeeds in infecting into the very framework and self-acknowledgement of Fine Art is the political not-so-subliminal suggestion of what the art must represent either in presentation or in descriptive, documentary genuflection and specificity.

Artist and organizations are put on notice whether they score funding or not that they must and will modify their behavior, their aesthetic advocacy, and their administrative demeanor to conform to the presumptive Big Brother authority of government funding for any consideration. In other words, even the tease of available arts funds is plenty enough to bend the aesthetic arc of creativity in the arts to politically imprint the needy artists attracted to the fiscal honeypot.

The 'F' in NEFA Doesn't Mean What You Think It Means

The Visual Arts Screwing in New England

Forgive the obvious.  The world is changing.

New England, once famous for Yankee Ingenuity has been abused and maliciously plundered by NEFA.  

The Visual Arts, Design and Design Thinking, and the inheritance of Folk Traditions, craftsmanship, and our past artifacts and architecture are the essence and and visionary influence that stimulate growth. (More on all of this in a future article.)

Today the vaudevillian painted faces of Woke, forever navel-gazing, self-traumatized performers are prioritized over vision and ideas that sustain the creative engine of ingenuity. New England is being dumbed-down and entertained into a creative coma. This has got to stop.

Actual Samples of Previously Funded New Work New England Projects

"Young students wear N95 masks and sit at their desks."

and 

"Two folks sit on the floor and caress between two speakers."

and 

"A screen shot of a bunch of images on an iphone. Pictures of a woman dancing in a field in a red wrap."

Huh?

Okay.  If the only qualification for the concept of new is, "I recently pulled this out of my keister" then, sure... "new work". I don't mean to pick on these alone, there's tsunami of this stuff you can look up.

OTOH, aren't there bigger fish to fry when it comes to art, curation, museums, galleries, and so on?  I think so.

Most obviously is that whoever is judging the quality of this stuff is working in a sensory deprivation chamber because we should be hearing a scream by now.  The goal of NEA funding no matter who administers it should be to ratchet up the quality of work being funded and not encourage recursive mediocrity.

That can be fixed by employing individuals who actually know and study art instead of mind numbing, sociological pathologies. Couple that with a feedback loop and some transparency as to the criteria that these works qualified for acceptance and we are that much closer to honest brokerage of the actual art submitted. I'll circle back to transparency before too long.

The Humiliation of Practicing Art

The NEA is in LOVE with the word "equity".  Hugs and kisses to all the artists that embrace equity and repeat the slogan over and over and over in their submissions. MmmmWah! Equity!

This and two handfuls of politically correct platitudes are required of everybody and as James Joyce noted years ago, "H.C.E., here comes everybody!"

Part of the hostage scenario is that artists are being held responsible for social ills and being made human sacrifices for society's real and imagined debt to the masses who think reparation checks are in the mail.

The practice of art has nothing to do with politics.  Let me repeat. The practice of art has nothing to do with politics.  You don't believe it because the NEA and the special interest propaganda advocates have convinced you otherwise.

A cook at a famous restaurant is not intimidated into insuring the equity of the meal purchases and preparation. The cooking staff need not compete with the United Nations. No.

Yet artists are expected and, let's face it, required to salute this Woke whoreshit and somehow incorporate it into their proposals. Makes us all feel so, um, free.

Instead

Instead, after NEFA is metaphorically administratively flushed, something along the lines of a re-imaging of the organization must take place.

First, foremost, and somewhat shockingly the organization must commit itself to art and - gasp - artists. And not just any artists - New England artists, architects, designers, imagineers, art writers, historians, public speakers, museum consultants, gallery rescues, and so on. Yes. All of that and more (More to come).

And Universities with huge endowments, say Wesleyan -

"In fiscal year 2022, Wesleyan's endowment dropped by 4.6%, ending the fiscal period at $1.56 billion. 

This was the first year of losses since fiscal 2016." - need to tap that slush fund (FIRST) long before applying for arts funding.  That drop though, so sad.

And the artists who must be given priority must be New England artists for exposure within the region and in other regions.  Likewise, other regions should be promoting their local artists nationwide.

Another high priority order of business must be transparency, ease of application with a bare minimum of intimidating rhetoric about somebody's latest political itch.

Whatever takes the place of NEFA needs to define equity as the recognition that art is a profession and NOT a social services agency. And it is not a slush fund for insiders.  Administrators need term limits not lifetime life rafts to float downstream for the rest of their lives."  

Add your own ideas to the comments.

The Criminal Negligence of the New England Foundation for the Arts

First, Organizational Context

The New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA) is one of six State and Regional Arts Organizations organized under the National Assembly of State Arts Organizations and the U.S. Regional Arts Organization. I'm enclosing these links both as reference material and as factual assertions for the arguments that follow.

Regulation, Virtuous Cultural and Identity Politic Litmus Testing, and Funding

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is a stakeholder and Daddy Big Brother funder for all of these organizations.

There are regional and state funds that also support these arts funds and they all wrap yet another layer of "community" sentiment and political intimidation - a topic for a broader discussion in this link - to the rhetoric of applying for arts grants.  There is also a hefty degree of good will and good intention - another topic for later discussion - involved.

And lastly, there are a parade of corporate sponsors and giving individuals who do more than "care" about the arts but actually donate to their anticipated and fully expected promotion by all of the organizations previously listed.

Art, The Final Frontier

One would think that this fine, oiled hierarchy of goodwill and responsibility for promoting the arts might have a source of truth for establishing a minimum agreed upon set of artistic categories  or buckets of interest that, regardless of final labeling and marketing, would broadly represent arts.

For the sake of argument let's defer to the NEA as the source of such a list.

This listing represents NEA art Funding and Grants that exist on the National (and -nod,  wink - international level). Because the NEA represents a metaphorical bottomless pit of unaccountable, voluntary and involuntary taxpayer funding, it deserves and will later get a more thorough examination in this series.

To remain focused on the immediate topic, that is, the criminal negligence of NEFA in serving its demographic arts - *cough* - "community", the immediately startling difference between NEFA and all other Regional Arts organizations is the wholesale absence of ANY Visual Arts funding... nada... none... AND!, it gets worse.

NEFA is myopically almost exclusively funneling its resources into Theater and Dance and Performance work (and in identifying this, all of these are legitimate art practices).  Take a look.

 The topics dictate the scope of opportunity necessary to participate. By maliciously neglecting and eliminating Visual Arts the categories of at least Design and Folk and Traditional Arts are also retarded from full ability to participate.

So you ask, How can this get worse? Glad you asked. Any even cursory audit of who qualifies for the funding has a a set of aesthetic and social profiles and one of the blinding profiles is that the recipients are largely entertainers and over-amplified Identity Politic performers. 

But hold your breath, it's turtles all the way down.  In many, many cases, these performers are not local acts or performers.  The recipients of the grants appear to be curators or arts organizers closely coupled to arts organizations who have no intention of promoting community artists.  Instead, they are entertaining the community artists to death or to immigrate to some other, more arts friendly, region.

And underpinning much of this, is the fact that NEFA is subsidizing private companies and academic institutions with money intended for the professional development and practice of the regional artists to whom its targeted. Search for grants awarded to Wesleyan University and you will find a staggering sum of resources that for all intents and purposes are nothing more than subsidies for student body recreation and activity funds.  The same is true for other venues.

More troubling is that these performances - dance, theater, advocacy - charge admittance fees, prioritize their student bodies for ticket access (at discounts from the public), and, for all the rhetoric about equity, do nothing to adjust the ticket prices to acknowledge that public funds were ALREADY dedicated to the performances.  And by discriminating participation first to young, educated college attending students, the "community" both of local artists and local art supporters, is not being served -it is being marginalized and neglected.

New England,  America's Visual Arts Desert

NEFA is to Visual Arts in New England as climate change is to our burning forests.  There is no vision and no accountability to be found anywhere.  Oh, yes, we can fill out a complaint form here and there - more pain in the ass than they are worth.  And that form will get sucked into an administrative shedding machine that for the past forty years of NEFA's existence could not see what's obvious to anyone that looks.

NEFA needs a wholesale reorganization - all new administration and all new definition of art in New England.