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. 

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.

 

  

The Department of Eternal Victimization From No Such Thing

 There is an episode of Arrested Development in which the Bluth family promote a fund raising campaign for TBD. TBD is exactly what you think it is - to be determined.  By the end of the episode an even more absurd but plausible disease is substituted and the crowd riots insisting TBD is far more important.

The Art World has managed to manufacture a factory that mass produces TBD studies, causes and reparational aspirations.

I encountered one that every once in a while makes the rounds and it is the meme that access to art is highly restricted, too expensive, and intellectually damaging for all the poor souls who are denied access. I mean this is a tragedy that escaped even Shakespeare. Oh, my god.  How do we live with ourselves as artists while *this* goes unchecked?

Of course this belongs to the Artistic Justice Warrior's arsenal of no-such-thing urgent existential problems.

Digitally, almost every major museum has its entire collection of works online.  No cost. None.

And most, if not all, museums nationwide and elsewhere offer periodic free admission entry.  It may be first Saturday or by specific date, or by celebratory event but your closest museum certainly can be accessed for FREE!

And if the claim of any social group is that they are - heavens to Mercatroid - marginalized, unrepresented, or otherwise disturbed even, every local art gallery has a door that is open during hours of operation that... opens to let you inside FOR FREE! Furthermore, anyone who represents YOU (and you know who YOU are) can exhibit when the gallery has an open call for art.

Furthermore, and this is secret knowledge, the art community has never practiced discrimination against anyone with rare AND unrepresentational (of the community) exception.  There is zero need for the unnecessary expense of fancy EQUITY, DEI, or other virtue signaling inoculations. 

So why do these cottage industry nonsensical "causes" attract flash mobs, angry identity politic movements, and nothing-better-to-piss-and-moan-about opportunists?

The answer points to a much more difficult problem that involves arithmetic.

Pick a category of art.  I've researched visual art for years so let's use that as an example and your mileage will vary with your own research. The Guerrilla Girls have long claimed that biological women are under represented and marginalized and with every passing decade they claim "little has changed".

Well I've used the best information I could find and Women visual artists represent 40% of all visual artists in the United States. I have logged years of juried art shows in NY and New England and performed the arithmetic.  Women's art is accepted more than 65% of the time year after year and I suspect this has been the case stretching back decades.

Nothing's changed?! Underrepresented? I define these accusations as fraud and abuse.

We suffer from a social disease that is caused by having our sensibilities imprinted with the idea that art is discriminatory and artists are bigots of one kind or another. It isn't true now and it wasn't true then. historical disparities and injustice are eternally redundant and never one-dimensional.

Grifters and opportunists will always find ways to distort and abuse the dissatisfaction of individuals to create ever larger and directed attacks on the other.  The arts community needs to decolonialize our shared intellectual space from these bastards (radical feminists at the forefront of that shitlist).

They over-represent and misrepresent us.

Do your own arithmetic.  What percentage of whichever art category does your favorite identity group of artists represent to the whole? Your concept of fair representation will introduce itself to reality.

2024 CT+6: Guerrilla Girl Body Count

 Jurors: Eric Aho, artist and Brian Galloway, Owner/Director of the William Scott Gallery, Provincetown, MA

Work by 76 Women and 33 Men accepted

Bound By Creativity, Imprinted with Victimhood

 On page 112 of Hannah Wohl's Bound By Creativity book, the assertion that women and others are under-collected because they are under-represented in galleries is made without any further evidence.  The author, claiming deep and thorough research of the subject matter, is wholly imprinted with the meme that women are and have been victims of gallery neglect.  Its an assumption as certain as the sun rising the next morning.

Readers of this blog can do the arithmetic for themselves.

The lie is far too profitable to investigate or accurately report.

 

The Danforth "Juried" Art Show Problem

I haven't submitted any work to the Danforth Museum in Massachusetts for a number of years now. They have an annual "juried" show that is local enough that it caught my interest and so, a few years ago, I submitted a piece and waited for the selection sheet.  My work wasn't chosen - fair enough.

But what caught my attention was the incredible volume disparity of women's work to men's work. The difference was staggering - something like 2 to 1 in favor of women's pieces.  And to put that number in perspective, at around that time I was doing a contract in Pittsfield, MA and had attended an artist talk at the Leslie Ferrin Gallery.  The artist was a woman who taught Fine Art at one of the local Universities and was represented in a New York gallery.

The talk involved women's representation in galleries.  The speaker said she had had few problems in her career with outright discrimination and really had little trouble finding gallery representation. Leslie Ferrin added that while she made every effort to promote women's work, two factors affected the proportion of exhibited women's work in her experience.

First, most of the artists walking through the door were men.

Second, women's art, despite the quality, simply didn't sell as well. Selling is what keeps the doors open.

That talk provided a much needed context a few years later in reading The Gorilla Girls criticism of women's representation in "the Art World".  The implicit reasoning might be that a 50 - 50 representation would be fair based on population estimates.

But would galleries be unfair if 70% (an arbitrary guesstimate) of the artists walking through the door were men and they dedicated 50% of their space to women?  Maybe not.  But it would be equally understandable if the split was, in fact 70% men over time - all things being equal.  And yes, there would be exceptions in all kinds of ways for any given event... but over time who walks through the door and who sells would likely be representative of the cohort.

Arithmetic and not statistics (per se) is all that's required to make sense of these things.

This then brings us back to the astonishing disproportion of women's art being "juried" into a museum show in 2016.  That's right, 2016.  While I didn't submit work to Danforth, I do get their emails and they wisely advertise who got into the juried show - great advertising. So who got in?

Yet again, two thirds of the accepted work was by women (70% to be more precise).  So I looked up a few more catalogs.  In 2011, almost exactly 67% were women.  In 2013, approximately 65%. In these cases I just grouped obvious men an women's names and put dubious gender under men.  The number is close enough for scrutiny.  My guess is that the arithmetic will hold throughout the run of shows.

Going back to an earlier point, that percentage would legitimize itself if 70% of the Danforth entries every year were consistently from women.  But that is hard to imagine.


Furthermore you may be thinking there's a feminist purity principle involved.  Of the men's work juried into the show, many ran galleries or had prestigious local credentials.  No one obviously important had their toes stepped on.

So the net effect is that of the 33% men's representation, far less than that was representative of new, young, or unknown men.

It's not unfair to say that this subverts the intent of juried exhibitions in aesthetic, political, legal, and social ways - none of the consequences good.

Every artist has a tight budget so submitting work to shows costs money, time, and alternative opportunity cost. The (maybe worse than) reverse discriminatory empirical evidence means that artists who apply in goodwill with an assumption that their work will be judged fairly wasn't and isn't. Any artist can tell you that they can live with rejection but not with suspicion of a rigged system.

As for the definition of "juried" show, I don't think anyone imagines a situation where every year men's art and women's art is separated into two unequal groups - cherry picked for influence on the men's side and another criteria applied to the women's group.


As I look at this, I wonder how widespread this practice is and will become - it's not healthy at all.
IMO, such shows should provide some easy numbers; how many applied and how many of each gender. It's not an absolute metric and all art shows will have wild deviations.  But over time these deviations will balance themselves far differently than those at the Danforth.