It seems Rocco Landesman, the head of the National Endowment for the Arts, didn’t get the memo, literally.
On September 22, stung by controversy over the administration’s effort to turn the arts community into proselytizers of its very special brand of hope and change, the White House issued a stern warning to all government agencies: Keep politics out of the arts.
The White House denied that was ever the intent. Many in the media, as is their wont, took the Obama administration at their word.
But not the website Big Government (which broke the story) and the
Washington Times. They demonstrated that from the earliest days of the presidential transition, Barack Obama’s political operation sought to entrench the arts community in its “outreach” operations. Bill Ivey, Obama’s transition adviser on the arts, admitted in June: “I wanted to see some real connection between administration objectives and the capacity of all the cultural actors in government. I made some progress. I got some agreement.”
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That “progress” mostly came in the form of enlisting arts groups — groups that received stimulus money — in Obama’s national-service agenda.
Three days after Landesman was confirmed as the head of the NEA, his communications director, Yosi Sergant, told NEA grantees in a conference call: “I would encourage you to pick something, whether it’s health care, education, the environment — you know, there’s four key areas that the corporation has identified as the areas of service.”
Two days later, a host of arts organizations endorsed Obama’s health-care plan: “We call on Congress to pass: A health-care reform bill that will create a public-health option. . . . There is little time to waste . . . ” Of the 21 groups signing the statement, 16 had recently received grants from the NEA or were affiliated with organizations that had.
Sergant was thrown under the bus, and the September 22 memo put an end to the story for the supportive media.
But the story continues. Last week, Landesman gave the keynote address to the 2009 Grantmakers in the Arts Conference. In fairness, Landesman did not reaffirm the White House and NEA’s obvious initial intent to turn the allegedly independent government agency into an adjunct of Obama’s “Organizing for America” operation. He was more subtle than that.
Instead, Landesman embraced a timeless tactic of power politics. He debased himself with incandescently vulgar obsequiousness to his supreme leader. “There is a new president and a new NEA,” he proclaimed. “This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln. If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar. That has to be good for American artists.”
