American Canvas: A Roundtable on the 1997 NEA Report

Abstract

On October 13, 1997, the New York Times ran a front-page story with the bombshell headline “Study Links Drop in Support to Elitist Attitude in the Arts.” The study is American Canvas, a 190-page book published by the National Endowment for the Arts and intended, in the words of its now-departed chairman, Jane Alexander, to look at the “ecology of the arts process … and at different models for stabilization and survival” (4). The Times story set off a feeding frenzy in the national news media. Many journalists were eager to subject the endowment and artists to the contempt that the media and politicians had poured on them in 1989, when the endowment crisis began. What made the Times article so shocking to many arts professionals who had exhausted themselves fighting for the endowment's survival was its assertion that the endowment was now placing the responsibility for the current crisis in arts funding squarely on the shoulders of the art world. No one and nothing else shared the blame, not Jesse Helms, the Christian Coalition, museum boards, the news media, or the NEA itself.