I ran into the administrator from a local arts organization and the issue of soliciting government funding came up. "All I want to do is put a coat of fresh paint on the walls and I'm forced to fill out applications requiring all this Woke shit about diversity, gender, and on and on. The building just needs a fresh coat of paint!"
There's a particularly obscene set of grants given by the Connecticut Office of the Arts called Artists Respond because of the dysfunctional and functionally malicious application of the National Endowment for the Art's (NEA) organizational criteria for Artistic Merit and Artistic Excellence to the criteria for grant evaluation at the individual artist or fellowship level. Both Merit and Excellence are wholly bleached out of the equation in favor of "Community" (e.g. Woke social issue engagement) criteria. The result is that artists requesting funding are pledged into laundering public arts money into progressive (Woke-Democrat-friendly) issue advocacy.
On a statewide basis this violates ethical and legal conventions by misappropriating these funds for political advantage.
Let's unpack the scope of duplicity, incompetence, and outright disingenuous bad intent involved.
In Your Everyday Art World, Lane Relyea documents how by the mid 1990's capitalism transformed the product made by artists into Projects (Operational Business Units). Reputational Networks of Art collaboratives began to supersede the ability of artists to self-promote or compete with the cost of legal representation required to establish a business footprint.
And this appears to be the origin of the NEA's usage of the term. And this is important for artists to understand. The vernacular for describing art is no longer merely that you are creating a worthwhile piece of art or craft or performance. The individuals evaluating these grant and fellowship applications think in terms of project-speak. The expectation of the star chamber judges is based as much on your good standing in an exclusive reputational network of fiscally incestuous relations. For example having Yale on your CV even as a one-night-drive-by provides plausible credibility.
When asked about the multitude of religions on earth, mythologist Joseph Campbell remarked, "There's a lot of ways to get it wrong." At the national level, the NEA establishes Artistic Merit and Artistic Excellence definitions that are primarily tailored for organizational requests for funding. Tightly coupled to arts organizations are communities they may serve with specific requests.
The first way that the pretense of Merit and Excellence goes sideways is when the assumption is that all organizations are somehow community ambassadors for a cause. Many organizations just need to paint the walls. There's no real political or social spin that is necessary except that it is coerced with increasing intolerance by the application expectations at every lower level. And at every lower level of funding administration are ever more incompetent, cover-your-ass midwits.
Not only are organizational requests for funding nuanced yet treated with Kafkaesque indifference, these evaluation metrics are applied to individual artists who in no way shape or form are responsible for, representative of, or otherwise likely to engineer social change objectives for a vaguely-woke-ambiguous social cause, say, *climate*.
At the national regional level I have already documented how badly broken the New England Foundation for the arts is.
Let's look at how badly those NEA quality metrics get mangled in CT using the Artists Respond biyearly arts grants as an example. If you open the FY23 (latest) Grant Recipients list, you'll see the damage.
There are 81 artists who got funded and all but one had to pick a social justice cause to frame their request for an art grant. The claim made about these grants is that they serve a "community" interest but that's an obvious lie. The vast majority of these pre-seeded categories are progressive social justice advocacies driven by Democrat special interests.
In other words, assuming that arts funds should ever be subsidizing the interests of political parties, why aren't there categories for safe borders, lower taxes, deregulation, right to life, and so on? All of these are equally legitimate and maybe even more so.
And as a fine artist my larger problem is why aren't these categories based on art and aesthetics? Why not Promote Abstract Art, Art for Art's Sake, PostModernism for Everyone, or a million other art related advocacies. After all, Everything is not Art - if it were, nothing would be art and artists themselves become anybody with a social axe to grind.
The use of cognitive bias to coerce artists to distort their art to conform to politically expedient objectives is a criminal enterprise - extortion.
A Grants Writing for Artists, April 2024 document contains another subliminal suggestion:
Step five on slide three is ominous. Artists who don't "look" (conform) to that above woke profile may as well pound sand. This is an exclusive club and you're not in it.
There's a lot of ways to administer art funding wrong. This is just a teaser.
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