Essay: NEA "Research Agenda" - Another Money Pit

This essay references The National Endowment for the Arts Research Agenda - FY 2022 - 2026.

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) funds an Office of Research and Analysis that claims to keep and report statistics about the arts ecosystem. It becomes increasingly apparent that arts ecosystem refers to a slew of government agencies that suck the soul and funding intended to advocate arts and artists for themselves.

The agency heavily relies on the usual suspects - "the design and conduct of studies addressing priority research topics through the social and behavioral sciences" - in other words academia unrelated to, well, the arts.

This paper cites concerns about

• health and wellness for individuals; cognition and learning; and U.S. economic growth and innovation
• healing and revitalization of communities
• diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in the arts
• adapting and responding to social, economic, and technological changes and challenges to the sector

In other words jack shit concerning artists, art, or artist issues - a wholesale end run around actually promoting the welfare of artists and their ability to create excellent art. My ongoing research into the NEA's policies and practices exposes lots more of this.

These agendas come and go, nothing more than academic ATMs that finance NEA junkets and worthless, disposable research papers, one after another.  Burp (cha-ching)!

 The research started over a decade ago and this latest batch of DEI infused wisdom is only in its second year of the latest "5 Year Plan". 

The NEA has just hosted a junket for research authors who apparently were funded above and beyond their academic salaries to create - not a public document - but a privately owned and distributed book of their -cough- "research" findings.

As usual, my interest is piqued when the discussion has to do with education of artists, MFAs, and the visual arts in general.

Here Joanna Woronkowicz talks about her book, Being an Artist in America: How Artists Build Careers and What Society Can Do to Support Them.

I couldn't help but look her up on Rate My Professor.  She apparently is paid to instruct a course on Statistics that she - based on the ratings - doesn't show up to teach and whose teaching assistants are clueless to act as proxies. She also accused some students (who plead innocence) of plagiarism.

Putting that into context already raises suspicions about the quality and veracity of the book (unpublished to date).

In the YouTube documentation of the NEA Meet the Authors event she talks about the unintended consequences of Arts policies over time. Assuming this observation is true and based on fact, why has it taken over twenty years for the NEA to continue to fund and practice the creation and administration of these policies.  Why aren't these people being fired and why aren't corrections being made?

When it comes to the mass production of students graduating with MFA degrees and life altering debt, she has this to say, Art School Loans. This is all well known material and if her concern about bang for the educational buck were sincere she might consider performing her own teaching duties - just because $$$.

Most disturbingly are her policy recommendations that include this; Cost and Benefit. I suspect that art students are not the only ones straining government welfare programs. 

Given this research, it seems to me that an easy and obvious recommendation might be to fine each and every current employee of the NEA immediately and start fresh.

And part of starting anew  must include independent studies of arts and artists in America. Enough of the self-serving academic community whose quality of work is manufactured to be ignored by everyone aside from tenure committees.

https://www.arts.gov/initiatives/nea-research-labs

Essay: The American Artist as Pariah

The character and identity of all artists, but more specifically American artists, has been culturally misappropriated by woke political forces. These include the hegemony of academic "studies" professionals who pose as curators or administrators, radical feminists whose "Smash the Patriarchy" initiative is all that matters, and the innumerable special interest groups who supplement their own program finances by openly redirecting arts funding for political social engineering campaigns.

And it is not only the definition of art and artists that has been conflated with a single woke political profile.  The idea of community is also being appropriated to promote racism and identity bigotry and resentment. in melting pot America, community used to refer to integrated urban neighborhoods or country towns and villages.  In both cases, the common denominators were shared social concerns and a dedication to making those interpersonal social units more prosperous for everybody. Working, civil communities countywide can be identified by "not in my backyard!" mantras. In other words, this community manages just fine on its own because its worked at it and has earned its peace - that doesn't qualify it as a candidate to save the world. In fact, Native Americans might argue that "not in my backyard" is their historical meme.  

Contrast that conceptual model with the politically motivated woke narrative that claims that they *are* out to save the world.  But in order to do that saving,  segregation, suspicion, innuendo, reverse bigotry, political tribalism, decolonization, and a Pandora's box of psychological anger and fear needs to be utilized to achieve that goal.

In the context of art and craft, community no longer refers to the community of art and crafts practitioners, it refers to special interest groups who appropriate artistic roles and vernaculars to express their anger and bottomless greed for more funding to promote their holier-than-thou cause - "funding for mine, but not for thine".  Not for thine refers to any art practice that isn't loudly, obnoxiously selling some aspect of the woke identity agenda. This concept of community comes prepackaged with a word salad vernacular,  look-and-feel signaling ornamentation, a demographically tested narrative of need and historical abuse, and a plausibly digestible, socially redeemable intent.

While there is a cohort of woke-mind-virus inspired true believers, most artists just want to make art.  And making art or creating craft has nothing to do with politics, personal identity issues, or saving-the-world.

For highly successful artists, few of them need to care about any of this. But that is a tiny number of individuals. And this is why government funding dedicated to the arts is so critical to ensuring the autonomy of artists and new ideas.

The current Biden administration has allowed and empowered the National Endowment for the Arts to embezzle funding dedicated to the arts for identity politic and Democratic National Committee priority and promotion.  Significantly, union interests have as much or more representation in the NEA process than actual artists do.

Artists (conservatives, liberals, independents, and the indifferent) who would not pass the litmus tests involved must either hold their nose and fake interest, distort their art to fit a narrative, or otherwise hack their way through the process. The damage is external as well.

The funding of anti-Trump/anti-conservative, aesthetic hate speech through the National Endowment for the Arts and its subsidiaries is nothing short of criminal. Despite the presumption that all artists are woke and political, and unified in hating conservatives, the NEA suppresses and muzzles the truth.

Artists should never have to submit proposals for art funding through virtual gateways whose subliminal message is to conform or else and this is true nationally. The evidence is empirical when the administrators post identity politic profiles as their qualifications for the job.

The integrity of Arts funding has to be decolonized of politics and thoroughly regulated for these kinds of political subversion.  

  

National Embezzlement of the Arts - Part 2

 I succinctly described my initial efforts to file a complaint of discrimination against the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and/or the New England Foundation for the Arts earlier. I still have not received any feedback from any of them.

While searching for a political contact who might somehow trigger one or any of these agencies to wake up, something pointed me to the Wikipedia entry for the NEA. And there as is said, "the plot thickens".

So there it is.  There are *six * ex officio members of Congress who are embedded in the NEA and presumably interested in the health and integrity of the organization!  Woo Hoo!

I clicked on the link and it took me here.

Lo and behold, there are only three ex-officio members in the final year of the Biden administration.

I tried contacting all three of these chuckle-heads and what I immediately found out was that despite the fact that all three -cough- "govern" the NEA, not a sticking one of them is responsive to anyone who is not in their gerrymandered orbit.

The first problem is that two of the three links don't work at all.  I tracked down good links. Their actual web pages filter out by zip code anyone who can't vote for them. I managed to hack the zip code problem only to be met with dead end indifference.

Senator Baldwin was the only email response I received and it was a final one.

Pingree and Thomson are out to lunch. Both being wholly oblivious.

And so, there seems to be nowhere to turn except to my own worthless Senator Blumenthal whose integrity I have serious doubts about.

It's been over a week since all of those contacts. 

I decided to watch the March 2024 Public meeting of the National Council of the Arts and found the evidence of political embezzlement and misappropriation in plain sight. 

The Arts have been hijacked by a woke cohort whose subliminal goal is to promote the DNC narrative and to strangle any opposing viewpoints.  Money intended for artists is redirected to a hundred social engineering initiatives that promote unnecessary and wasteful administrative job creep nationally. Everyone and every project takes priority over supporting artists themselves.

National Embezzlement of the Arts - Part 1

 I started my research into the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) earlier this year based on the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA) and CT state arts grants.  The point of the research was to simply understand how tax-payer funded Arts grants to individual artists such as myself are administered.

That research resulted in discovering innumerable unethical and likely illegal administrative practices being conducted nationally, regionally, and in the hydra of local malpractices.

On April 3, I called the NEA office to inquire how to make them aware of what I was documenting. I was told to email the public affairs and office of the Inspector General which I did. On April 9 I added additional material in a second email. I received absolutely NO FEEDBACK whatsoever.

On May 1, I requested that both divisions simply acknowledge that my emails were received. Public Affairs replied with a robo-response that implied that the organization likely ignores all incoming mail on these channels.

The obvious conclusion is that the National Endowment for the Arts is self-insulating and that there is no serious autonomous Office of the Inspector General auditing the operation.

In the interim I have attempted to solicit information from numerous tax-payer funded Arts organizations - a few of which are listed above.  Scott Wands at CT Humanities is the sole individual who ever responded.

All of the websites list phone numbers that, when called, don't get answered - leave a message - when leaving a message is attempted, you are informed the phone message box is full - send an email.  Sending the email is ignored.  It is unclear if anyone on the Arts payrolls ever works their job. Emptying the phone messages daily should be a no-brainer.  Reading the inbox and spam email folders is also a no-brainer. NOT DOING THE JOB YOU ARE PAID TO DO is malfeasance.

Given the wholesale dysfunction of the Arts network, the next most logical step is to lodge a discrimination complaint for both the lack of opportunity and the unacceptable conditions under which to pursue opportunities for grants and awards from these entities.

Yesterday I called the CT Human Rights and Opportunities Commission  to inquire as to where to file a discrimination complaint against NEFA which serves multiple states and is administered through a Boston office. I was directed to the federal Equal Employment and Opportunities website but hit a deadend. My complaint didn't neatly fit any of the obvious categories and so I selected "other".

The EEOC blindspot has to do with opportunities involving arts grants, funding, and arts administration. I called them and spoke with Rachel Aniston who said that although it wasn't covered by the EEOC that "some other" government agency regulates and governs Arts organizations.

She said that the answer must be listed on USAGOV.gov and if not there then the Federal Coordination and Compliance Division (FCC) of the Department of Justice.

Finding nothing on the USAGOV website, I called their number and was eventually speaking with an operator who was incapable of doing anything other than reading the USAGOV website talking points to me without adding any value.  Another deadend.

I located the information for the FCC and called their generic number.  It rang for three minutes and hung up.  So I called the Title 06 HOTLINE, it too rang for three minutes and hung up.  

There is little question in my mind, that the Arts and Arts funding is an unintentionally rogue set of operations that function out of sight and out of mind and as such are functionally unaccountable except to their own make-believe Offices of "Inspector Generals".

As such they represent a tax-payer money sink that has been illegally appropriated for Democratic party solicitations, special interest honeypots, and exclusive higher education institutional abuse. And there is nobody enforcing the ethics, the veracity, or the governance of this operation.

I'm going to share this with some politicians who should wake up to this.

Updates will follow. 

NEFA's Common Ground - A Mass Grave for Artists

Creative Ground has become the defacto warehouse being designated by the New England Foundation for the Arts as a registration destination for an artist's profile of availability. The Connecticut Office of the Arts (COA) claims it "uses it to find artists for projects, including public art opportunities".

Creative Ground is a NEFA "project" which, as you can easily imagine, is a cluster-phuck of bad ideas shoehorned into a website that features a handy-dandy database of  [Norm Macdonald voice] "the world". 

By the "world", I'm euphemistically referring to every possible art related person, place, or thing in New England relating to art, humanities, education, health, child care, merchandise, or identity politic grift that they could identify. This is the short list, btw.

I was recently sent an email telling me to update my profile and I did. I already had one from years ago when I probably got a similar message to create a profile because it would ensure being seen by the state as an artist with work to sell.

You quickly find out that the completeness of your profile is used to rank your position in the sequence of search results that is returned to a user using the database.  I'm being kind in calling it a database.

As of May 20, 2024, the database contains approximately 32053 database results. 

Having spent my career working with developing and designing databases, I wanted to test the hypothesis that an architect from CT wanting to locate an artist who would qualify for the 1% arts money in a new construction. This, after all, is the pretense of the exercise.

Being a visual artist, I searched for "Painter". On the first page of 10 search results, there were 3 individual painters returned, 2 retail stores, and 5 professional associations. The next page returned 4 painters and 6 associations of painters. Subsequent pages devolve into community organizers and dancers who "work with painters", and dross.

To make a long story short, this database is worthless when it comes to locating, say, a fine arts painter whose work might satisfy decorating the walls of a University Humanities building.  An architect or arts associate would need to slog through pages of search results whose ranking is not based on relevance but on a misguided completeness metric. And although these search results yield a link to a fairly attractive looking profile page, the lack of uniformity of content is maddening.

The search problems are both in the database design and the parsing of search material. And root cause analysis goes even deeper to reveal that the problem is in the people creating the database specifications.

The NEFA administrators are unqualified to design databases, they are infected with the woke mind virus , and they subscribe to institutional arts special interest kickbacks.

The largest group represented in Professional Discipline is Visual/Crafts a category that NEFA provides no grants or funding for individual artists. Yet fine art and crafts are not the same thing at all. Yes, a cohort of Contemporary Art individuals do their best to entangle the categories this adds no value to a database that is intended to be used by individuals to identify very specific requirements.

The 32053 search results number is a drop in the bucket. In the Visual Arts/Crafts category, over 49% of the individual profiles are tightly coupled to teaching.  Furthermore, of the 159 profiles, only 20% are men. In other words, NEFA's database is virtually devoid of any kind of regional visual arts representation at all.  And those who are represented are an ingrown cohort of educators who as a profession are largely women.

Why the gender bigotry? And why is this database, assuming it imported all of each New England's State's individual databases of artists, so sparsely populated?

As this database scales, if it ever does, the interface will become impossible to navigate or make sense of. imagine being an artist on page 30 of the ranked search result? Or page 130?  Today, the database is a fool's enterprise meant to distract artists from the misrepresentation NEFA inflicts on visual artists. It is an expensive graveyard of misguided arts administration.

Criminalization of CT Artists by Proxy

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.

The Uniparty Arts Money Pit - A Work in Progress

 The acronyms in this diagram refer are:

NEA - National Endowment (euphemistically) for the Arts

NEFA - New England Foundation (euphemistically) for the Arts

DECD - [CT} Department for Economic Community Development (e.g. a special interest group run by and for casino gambling)

COA - CT Office (Euphemistically) for the Arts 

DRSO - Designated Regional Services Organization (CT is divided into "service" regions)

This topology of organizations manages to mismanage multi-millions of Federal, State, and local taxes in addition to funds donated to promote the Arts community (e.g. actual, living, breathing artists). This investigative series that started by simply attempting to understand if there was a single source, uniformly administered way to apply for an arts grant or fund to -gasp- make some more art.

By the time money is awarded to actual, living, breathing local artists the grand total awarded to a cohort of artists is equivalent to less than one single State of Connecticut bureaucrat (about $100,000 per year) with no benefits. The awards to individual artists is $1000, $3000, or $5000 dollars, the quivalent of a week's to a few week's pay of that same sample CT State employee - don't spend it all in one place.

The deeper I dig, the more obvious it is that this money is illegally being funneled into a single political party's narrative. An apolitical fine artist not only doesn't stand an honest chance of  consideration but is doomed to witness money intended for arts to be squandered maliciously on the corrupt and unethical subversion of that funding for illiberal political gain. 

Use this link to follow my investigative series into all of these organizations, their malfeasance, and their brazen criminal practices.

 

  

A Penny for Your Artful Thoughts

 As I research government art funding, something (aside from the illicit use of taxpayer money) that is suspiciously curious is the difference in funding levels between different kinds of artists, writers, and so on.  This raises a true question of equitable funding - in other words, you're a writer, I'm a visual artist both seeking a grant to produce 'art' over the same period of time. Is the funding the same or different?  Let's take a look under the covers.

In the wake of the 9/11 victim death toll, the government had to determine a fair compensation to those whose loved ones were taken during that event.  A equitable fiscal calculation had to be made and it was.

Similarly, with recognizing that National Arts funding exists (and there is plenty to discuss about that fact), what is the value of a grant that will speculatively produce something of human societal value?  

The argument I will explore involves the difference between a visual artist and a fiction writer. Both artists need time to create their work and the first drafts or experimental prototypes may need refinement so an arts grant of, for example, $1000 just for subsidizing living expenses for a few weeks is equitable - a visual artist and a writer on a day to day basis have common expenses.

Where there is a difference however is in material expenses, visual artists (generally speaking) have expenses that writers (even digitally leaning) simply don't have. Browse the cost of paints, brushes, or home depot materials required to create something and this fact is obvious.  Yet there doesn't seem to be any recognition of this difference at any level of government arts funding at all. In other words, a request for arts funding should solicit the size of a requested grant AND an expenses stipend. 

In a previous essay, I commend the National Endowment for the Humanities for objectively soliciting, describing, and dispensing their funding.  But something else they do that is different from the operations of the Arts Funding apparatchiks is that their grants have a temporal duration.  In other words they fund humanities scholarship for months or even a year.  Its not the same as tossing a small lump sum at a writer and wiping the administrative dust off their hands.

The NEH can (if they desired) make an argument that NEH research writing is different from NEA fiction writing. Here I'm using NEH and NEA as a allegory for every ladder rung of administrative entity that funds their respective grants.

My counter argument (and I've been making art for over a half century) is that creating original work as opposed to curating, refining, and synthesizing existing research is every bit as time-consuming and exhaustive as research.  The NEH's grant framework makes perfect sense and the NEA has nothing comparable (at least in my survey).

To clarify the difference, an NEH researcher can solicit a $6k/month funding for whatever duration they choose within funding guidelines and NEA grants have no such funding option. To understand the insulting indignity of this difference compare and contrast the CT State artist grants of $5k, $3k, and $1k awarded here. Keep in mind that NEFA has NO visual artist options to even apply for a Regional grant at all. NEFA launders national arts funding to exclude everyone aside from special interests from accessing those funds. 

The State of CT's cluster muck of arts, humanities, "development", and "tourism" entanglement is an administrative masterpiece of wasted energy, money, and legitimacy. Somebody, somewhere/anywhere really needs to audit these mofos.

In previous essays I questioned how a dead artist, Sol  Lewitt somehow managed to become a statewide money sink for arts funding.

Then there's the evaporating wall mural on the Lewitt building in New Britain.

So imagine my surprise when I'm looking up the individuals responsible for handing out the funds.

Presumably, anyone with conflicts of interest recuse themselves from participation but I can't help but feeling that ensuring accountability in CT is as difficult to grab hold of as a greased pig. 

  

Tip-Toeing Through CT Arts Grants

 In researching *how to* apply for government arts grants (my art career plan B), I started with local grants and that exercise exploded in my face and escalated to Regional and Federal levels of interest. It is unavoidable. And it's circular.  I'm back to the CT State mosh pit of Arts funding.

As a software engineer there's a conceptual framework that ought to apply to the awarding of Fellowship grants or institutional funding is "As above, so below". For sports enthusiasts this translates to "The goalposts shouldn't be moving." In CT anything can happen.  Let's dive in.

The CT Artist Fellowship Program 2023 Recipient List is here. The accuracy of the information appears to be approximate on closer inspection. My interest as a visual artist was to attempt to identify some kind of pattern of award and what I found was a rich, superficial diversity of identity politic types. Any discrimination in that regard appears co-incidental - I poked through a number of years. I had no real ability to speak to viewpoint diversity.

What I did find are a few backdoor things that imply that the rules for Fellowship qualification are not rigorously enforced.  One problem was actual residency (being a New England artist isn't someone necessarily paying CT State taxes) and the second problem is the greased pig identity problem of whether or not such a person really exists.  Later.

Of the 69 Fellowships awarded, I teased out that 31 of the 69 artists listed had something to do with the Visual Arts - my particular special interest. So I really took a close look at those and sampled a few others to confirm the problem I found.

And that problem involves the fact that 15 of the 31 Fellowships went to instructors or employees in Higher Education institutions. Six of those 15 are associated with Yale and 9 in other higher ed schools.

I think a similar ratio of Fellowship particulars will play out with the rest of the non-Visual artists listed.

As feedback that could and should alert the DECD that the system is broken. If a quarter or more of the Fellowships being awarded are going to the graduates of the world's richest University and another quarter to graduates of exclusive institutions, then Federal and State money intended to promote equity is in fact being money laundered back into the pockets of the rich.

What my research has helped me to do is conclusively define who the "underserved" CT artists actually are.  The underserved community consists of anyone who did not graduate with an MFA from Yale or other exclusive institution.  This is worth unpacking.  It is not patriarchy, racism, systemic government breakdown or any other popular victim narrative that suppresses a livelier arts culture in CT (and maybe New England), it is social class education.

The total amount of money at the end of the spigot for actual artists struggling to create a maker budget is half of that more or less $200K yearly payout. ALL the rest of the arts funding is administrative overhead - we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars.

But we can't be done yet,  What about institutional funding?

"The pandemic and COVID-related restrictions have hit these organizations hard. Theaters and other performing arts venues were recently given the go-ahead to open to the public as part of the state’s Phase 3 reopening plan but only at 50% capacity, further undermining their ability to turn a decent profit.

In a news release, Connecticut’s Flagship Producing Theaters, a consortium of theaters that includes Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, Goodspeed Musicals, Hartford Stage, Long Wharf Theatre, Westport Country Playhouse and Yale Repertory Theatre called the grant program “a welcome step toward helping theaters recover.”"

So what the hell is the Yale Repertory Theater doing in this mix? Make this make sense. Was there ever some doubt that F'n YALE was in danger of going under?  And the State put some qualifications on this funding that YALE, of all places, would have absolutely no problem maxing out should they so choose.

Google:

And about 5% of that is spent funding Yale:

So what condition is Yale Rep in these days?

"“I think her legacy is already operating out there in the field,” said James Bundy, who as dean of the Yale School of Drama and artistic director of Yale Rep has worked alongside of Nolan for 17 years. “It’s in all the leaders that she’s had such an important role in training.” Nolan, who announced her decision back in October and is succeeded by Florie Seery, has seen the theatrical landscape evolve first-hand from her multifaceted position at Yale. As a shrewd managing director and innovative educator, Nolan is as responsible as any one person for how theaters operate across the commercial and nonprofit spectrum countrywide.

Naturally, her influence started in New Haven.

“We were a $16 million operation then,” said Nolan of Yale Rep’s operating budget, “and $40 million now."

DECD funds Yale Rep approx. $43325 per year (2018 - today, likely long before 2018 as well). These Directed Local Funds got even funkier in 2022 and 2023 when some kind of 2 year state carry forward windfalls were added $129,975 and $86,000 were added to the funding. SWEET. Go Yale.

Compare and contrast.

Friends of mine compare applying for arts funding as a crab bucket exercise.    There's no such intention here.  This process is highly flawed and needs fixing. I hope these essays clarify some solutions.

My first recommendation is that if funding is going to involve residency then that residency have a threshold of three continuous years in the State. Residency less than that limits the grant to its lowest possible award.  This rewards long term resident artists and limits academic drive-bys.

Second, add aliases. The gaming of identity masks the number of applications, awards, and residences that craftier agents use to obfuscate their history.

Encrypt all personal characteristics of the applicant. Let the quality of the art speak to the virtue of the application and the individuals involved.  Nobody wants their awarded funding to be diminished by the innuendo that they "didn't earn it" (DEI).

 

Federal Art Funding Done Right

 In the 1960's Major League Baseball expanded and added back another New York team, the New York Mets.  Needless to say as an expansion team the talent was razor thin and their colorful and entertaining coach Casey Stengel quipped, "Doesn't anybody here know how to play this game?"

That sense of humor is not lost on any artist attempting to locate and apply for a arts grant or other funding opportunity from the State of CT, the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA), and to some degree the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).

Aside from the clusterMuck of confusing and misleading website and - cough- "portal" interface problems, it is a full time chore for anyone who is not already associated with a mainstream arts organization, a University, or otherwise inside track to simply navigate, recipe-wise, 'how do I apply for the damned thing and how can I be sure my application will be treated fairly'?

I'm chipping away at making sense of this stuff in a series of essays and inquiries that I hope will concise road map that any artist can follow.

What has caught my attention and has answered the question of "Can the Federal government do a good and truly honest job of creating opportunities for creatives whose instructions are reasonable, whose solicitations are free of cognitive and political bias, and who advocate and practice an even handed evaluation process?"

The improbable answer is YES.

In researching arts funding you will inevitably encounter cross references to the National Endowment for the Humanities. Sometimes that cross-reference is misguided.  In a couple of cases, an arts administrator or political advocate for funding wants to co-opt or deflect responsibility for funding something having to do with writing or related matter for funding as a Humanities project. NEA and NEH serve two autonomous and unique cohorts that only co-incidentally share some of the same creative juices that applicants are looking to exercise.

On the NEH website there's a webinar that's been recorded with tons of very useful, specifics about who the Humanities serve and what the scope of that stuff is as this slide shows;

Taken at face value, artists such as myself can claim some of that territory as our own but what NEH makes clear throughout their material is that the generation of art is out of scope - that stuff belonging to the responsibility of the NEA, NGOs, and private parties

Again, as an artist, I find comfort in this kind of clarity. This means that funding opportunities for stuff I do or hope to do is in the scope of the NEA and not here.  HOWEVER, my expectation as an artist is that everything that applies to the Humanities in terms of an expected field of neutrality WILL apply at the NEA.

Let's compare and contrast what i found in the NEA budget and performance plan:

Wait, WHAT?

I'm going to analyze the NEA's malfeasance in this regard in a separate essay. Obviously, every single form of psychological intimidation appears to be "the plan" at the NEA.

But this post is about doing it right and for the sake providing how its done right let me provide additional references and links from NEH that conclusively prove that government can work responsibly and fiscally soundly.

The NEH grants webpage is a breath of fresh air - lots of truly well-developed recipes for successfully submitting an application for the funding you hope will be chosen.

The YouTube channel for NEHgov is rich with additional videos that make life easier for funding applicants.

see: Connecticut Humanities Grants

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

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