National Endowment for the Propagandists
The National Endowment for the Arts is actively participating as a propagandist agency for the White House. Sound harsh? In the forty-plus years the group has been around, when was the last time you recall it shilling for issues on behalf of, or in parallel with a President? (In all seriousness. I’d love examples of it doing something like this in the past.) This month, it happened. Patrick Courrielche, former employee of the NEA Director of Communication, participated on a conference call on August 10th set up by the NEA, the White House Office of Public Engagement, and United We Serve. On the call would be, as he writes, “’a group of artists, producers, promoters, organizers, influencers, marketers, taste-makers, leaders or just plain cool people to join together and work together to promote a more civically engaged America and celebrate how the arts can be used for a positive change!’”
Artists are now being encouraged to work with The Man? Not since World War II have we seen this kind of coordination between a White House and Artists. Or, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, though I’d argue, the “real” art was anti-Kremlin. Now we have a call from on high for artists to work to further the agenda of Hope and Change.
Backed by the full weight of President Barack Obama’s call to service and the institutional weight of the NEA, the conference call was billed as an opportunity for those in the art community to inspire service in four key categories, and at the top of the list were “health care” and “energy and environment.” The service was to be attached to the President’s United We Serve campaign, a nationwide federal initiative to make service a way of life for all Americans.
It sounded, how should I phrase it…unusual, that the NEA would invite the art community to a meeting to discuss issues currently under vehement national debate. I decided to call in, and what I heard concerned me.
The people running the conference call and rallying the group to get active on these issues were Yosi Sergant, the Director of Communications for the National Endowment for the Arts; Buffy Wicks, Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement; Nell Abernathy, Director of Outreach for United We Serve; Thomas Bates, Vice President of Civic Engagement for Rock the Vote; and Michael Skolnik, Political Director for Russell Simmons.
In my lifetime there have been calls for the defunding of the National Endowment for the Arts. I’ve been on both sides of the issue. Encouragement of the arts, in and of themselves, is a good thing. Humanity is bettered by a healthy exposure of art. So some backing by the taxpayers is alright, I believe. However, this “arrangement” between the administration and the NEA is just horrible. Were I a member of the NEA in some capacity, I would scream for them to stop. The group is being co-opted by an administration for its own political purposes. Imagine Dick Cheney going to the NEA and saying they needed to get out there are whip up support for the Iraq War. How offended would arts groups be? Would Rock the Vote ever support a Republican administration’s agenda? Talk about wrong on many levels.
- Rock the Vote used to be cool. Now it’s working with The Man.
- Artists are inherently anti-establishment. This coupling is anything but.
- Joe Biden hangin’ with MTV. Enough Said.
Worse, in the long-term, for the NEA, is the ammunition this little venture into servitude gives to opponents of the agency who have long-believed this kind of funding-by-the-taxpayers is wasteful.
[...] got audio of the NEA contradicting itself, too. Oops. Courrielche’s concluding thoughts mirror my own in an earlier GOP post: the NEA is handing its critics fresh, valid points of criticism to use against the [...]