L.A. Festival to NEA--Thanks but No Thanks

The Los Angeles Festival, saying even its cash woes could not justify signing a National Endowment for the Arts anti-obscenity certification, rejected a $30,000 federal grant Thursday, but said private donations are expected to make up the shortfall--starting with a $1,000 personal check from Mayor Tom Bradley.

Rejection of the NEA money was apparently the first concrete result of a decision by endowment chairman John E. Frohnmayer to spurn a recommendation from the NEA’s advisory National Council on the Arts that Frohnmayer eliminate the controversial obscenity certification.

Festival officials said deletion of the requirement would have completely altered the decision to reject the money.

At a City Hall press conference attended by Bradley and festival officials, festival director Peter Sellars emphasized that while the arts organization felt compelled to turn down the NEA money, the festival was not attempting to cast itself as “morally superior” to artists and arts groups who are continuing to accept NEA money.

Sellars also urged the arts endowment’s political enemies not to interpret the festival decision as evidence that the arts endowment is unnecessary to American cultural life. “At this moment in history,” said Sellars, “there is a tremendous urge for artists to stand up” to political pressures to restrict the content of artworks the federal government can legally support.

The move to spurn the NEA grant was agreed to in a unanimous vote of 10 members of the festival board Wednesday night. The vote came two weeks after the festival disclosed it was considering rejecting the NEA money.

The nation’s legitimate arts community, noting that existing federal and state laws already bar obscenity, has taken the collective position that the NEA requirement is superfluous and insulting--amounting to the equivalent of a McCarthy-era loyalty oath. More than a dozen major arts organizations have turned down NEA money as the protest has developed.

Maureen A. Kindel, the L.A. Festival board’s chair, said the $30,000 NEA grant--from the endowment’s Inter-Arts program, which specializes in supporting innovative, multidisciplinary work--would have been applied to festival events featuring about 100 or the more than 500 foreign artists scheduled to participate. All of the events involved in the NEA grant involve foreign performers, she said. Nine hundred local artists are also participating.

The festival opens Sept. 1 and runs through Sept. 16. Kindel and Sellars said that the festival would almost certainly have accepted the NEA money if Frohnmayer had gone along with a recommendation to delete the requirement that grantees sign anti-obscenity certifications.

Frohnmayer’s decision to reject the recommendation to dispense with the oath was reached late last week. He justified it by noting that lawsuits challenging the oath are pending before federal courts in two cities.

Kindel said that in the hours after the Wednesday evening board meeting, $12,000 in donations to counteract the NEA grant rejection had been received by festival organizers. In addition to the $1,000 check from Bradley, the festival received another $1,000 from City Councilman Mike Woo.

At the press conference, Bradley, declaring that “I’ve taken a strong position on this matter in the past,” said that the festival would “have to use any money that we’ve got simply to stand firm (against) intrusions into the freedom of expression by performers.”

Woo said he felt that the NEA’s political situation had made it clear that “it’s not enough to just make statements (about preserving artistic freedom of expression,) but we have to back it up from our own pocketbooks.” Kindel said festival organizers hoped to recover the remaining $18,000 of the shortfall caused by the NEA grant rejection by sometime today.

Two weeks ago, when festival officials were informed about the requirements for the NEA grant, they were $200,000 short of reaching their $4.7-million budget. Since then, the budget has reportedly been upped to $5 million.

Officials have dodged questions about how much more money is needed, or whether the shortfall has been lessened. But they say they will probably be raising money up until the opening day of the festival.