NEA First Inquiry -NEFA Concerns

 NEFA Concerns

Fromkrasicki@protonmail.com <krasicki@protonmail.com>

Topublicaffairs@arts.gov, oig@arts.gov

CCkrasicki@protonmail.com

DateThursday, April 4th, 2024 at 12:17 PM

Yesterday I called the NEA and spoke with someone who advised that I send an email to document my concerns.

I am semi-retired at the moment, a lifelong artist, I've dedicated quite a bit of time to unpacking and disentangling American Arts funding nationally and at local levels. I consider this the first of what I expect to be more correspondences as the feedback cycle will generate additional questions and areas of research.

Today I want to address two specific areas of inquiry and concern. One is the governance of NEA's regional affiliates. In my case, the New England Foundation for the Arts.

My understanding from yesterday's phone call is that 40% of all NEA arts funding is distributed to these regional affiliates. If I assume that to be true, then as an artist I can apply directly to the NEA for Federal grant money which is sourced from 60% of the total NEA budget allocated for that purpose and that I can apply to my regional Arts affiliate for grants sourced from some percentage of the 40% of the budget made available to a specific region. Importantly, in order to apply for such grants or opportunities,

I must somehow both navigate to and through the application process AND be provided some set of understandable instructions for successfully doing so.

AND, implicitly, anyArtist should not be coerced into political loyalty oaths, political identity litmus tests, illegal constraints on the creation or content of my proposal, or other illegitimate expectations. Equally, implicit, is the clear and unambiguous understanding that the art being proposed or advocated for consideration will be evaluated strictly on its own merit and accepted or not based on those metrics. Presumably, American citizens over the age of 18 is the only qualification and that the solicitation for grants or whatever is for art​.

Please do correct my understanding of how the NEA funding operates is any of this is wrong or sadly mistaken (and I'm not naive enough to believe that, in practice, there's a broader range of interpretation by certain individuals administering the programs).

Assuming that as a context that anyArtist can expect and given that the only​access to NEFA arts funding is through NEFA's web portal, anyArtist has absolutely no other alternative for application for funding, grants, and so on.

However there are differences between the NEA's broad spectrum of art opportunities and NEFA's regional subset. I documented those differences in on my art criticism blog; https://artscrub.blogspot.com/2023/08/the-criminal-negligence-of-new-england.html

Nothing has changed. In essence, the NEA - instead of ensuring a consistent funding distribution model based on professional practice, say Visual Arts - distributes funding opportunities by geography and geography is implemented on that local level by funding power brokers who can constrain (or more accurately operate a money laundering operation) because they abuse the system to empower themselves to. The corruption of opportunity is contagious to even finer grains of more local funding on the State level (a different discussion). Numerous categories of professional art activity are missing.

And this speaks directly to my first empirical complaint - the NEFA site is a, for lack of a better term, woke hellhole of political advocacy, racial and identity politic litmus tests and more. There is nothing balanced and there is no avenue for a professional anyArtist to navigate a neutral, unbiased, nonconformist application process. Conservative or disinterested artists are wholly discouraged to apply or even think that their applications - barring a word salad of magic associations - will ever be taken seriously. This is a big problem.

The problem gets even bigger when anyArtist examines the NEFA Terms of Use for the (reminder) only portal to apply for the 40ish% of regional funding. The TOU is self-referential as a legally binding agreement yet contains numerous passages that are entirely capitalized. In digital form, the convention of using all caps is to be screaming - needless to say, not a typical legally formulated convention to my knowledge.

More to the point, the TOU is unusual in that it attempts to insulate NEFA from all and any accountability for their implementation and administration of federal (and State) arts funding. Many of its assertions appear to be, at face value, entirely an attempt to subvert the legal rights of artists to engage in legal remedy. Only one other region, the South copies the TOU (badly - misspellings and maybe other quirks).

Section 12d, essentially eliminates your ability to access the funding opportunities:

" BY ACCEPTING THESE TCU, YOU WAIVE AND HOLD HARMLESS NEFA FROM ANY CLAIMS RESULTING FROM ANY ACTION TAKEN BY NEFA DURING OR AS A RESULT OF NEFA’S INVESTIGATION AND/OR FROM ANY ACTIONS TAKEN AS A CONSEQUENCE OF INVESTIGATIONS BY EITHER NEFA OR LAW ENFORCEMENT RELATED TO YOUR USE OF THE SERVICES. IF YOU BELIEVE THAT CONTENT REMAINS ON THE SERVICES WHICH VIOLATES YOUR RIGHTS OR THESE TCU, AS STATED IN SECTION 15, YOUR SOLE AND EXCLUSIVE REMEDY AGAINST NEFA SHALL BE TO TERMINATE YOUR USE OF THE SERVICES."

I don't know why no one reads or realizes that this amounts to intimidation and the normalization of the abuse of the legal system by this arts organization.

OTOH, other regions (see MidAtlantic Region) acknowledge the legal rights and remedies available to artists in their TOU for geographical domain portals.I will publish this as an open correspondence on my blog artscrub.blogspot.com and update it with your feedback. My long term intent is to create a HOWTO set of instructions for anyArtist to follow to apply for funding opportunities so this is a work in progress, one small step at a time.

regards,

Frank Krasicki

Sent with Proton Mail secure email.