INDEPENDENT COMMISSION 441 F Street, N.W., Room 305 Washington, D.C. 20001 202/638-0069 202/638-5074 (fax) Embargoed until: 10 A.M. Tuesday September 11, 1990 BIPARTISAN INDEPENDENT COMMISSION UNANIMOUSLY OPPOSES SPECIFIC CONTENT RESTRICTIONS ON NEA-FUNDED ART, URGES SWEEPING REFORMS IN ARTS ENDOWMENT SYSTEM WASHINGTON, D.C. (Tuesday, September 11, 1990) — A unanimous 12-member bipartisan Independent Commission named by President George Bush and the Democratic and Republican leaders of Congress today called for major reforms in the grant making procedures of the National Endowment for the Arts while opposing specific legislative restrictions on the content of art funded by the NEA. In a joint statement at a news conference here, the Independent Commission's Co-Chairmen, John Brademas and Leonard Garment, said: The Endowment is charged with one of the most complex and delicate tasks that an agency of government can perform in a democracy. On the one hand, it must seek to offer a spacious sense of freedom to the artists and the arts institutions it assists/ from such freedom grows the capacity of the arts to expand our horizons. At the same time, the NEA must, if it is to maintain public confidence in its stewardship of public funds, be accountable to all of the American people. With its discretion to spend public money, the Endowment must make sure that its policies and procedures are fair, reasonable and thorough. Insuring the freedom of expression necessary to nourish the arts while bearing in mind limits of public understanding and tolerance requires unusual wisdom, prudence, and most of all, common sense. Dr. Brademas, President of New York University, served as a Member of Congress (D-IN) for 22 years; and Mr. Garment, a senior partner in the Washington, D.C. law firm of Dickstein, Shapiro and Morin, as assistant to President Richard Nixon handled, among other duties, coordination with the Arts and Humanities Endowments. 2 In a 94-page report, the Commission declared that "to assure that the NEA operate in a manner accountable to the President, Congress and the American people, the Endowment's procedures for scrutiny and evaluation of applications for grants must be reformed . " Among the reforms the Commission recommended: -Strengthening the authority of the Chairperson; -Making the 26-member advisory National Council more active; -Delineating the functions of grant advisory panels and broadening their membership to make them more representative ; and -Eliminating real or apparent conflicts of interest. "The Commission wants to make clear that the National Endowment for the Arts belongs not solely to those who receive its grants but to all the people of the United States," said the Co- Chairmen . The Commission also unanimously recommended "against legislative changes to impose specific restrictions on the content of works of art supported by the Endowment." Said the Commission, "Content restrictions may raise serious constitutional issues, would be inherently ambiguous and would almost certainly involve the Endowment and the Department of Justice in costly and unproductive lawsuits . " While the Commission affirmed that "Freedom of expression is essential to the arts, " it recognized that "obscenity is not protected speech and that the National Endowment for the Arts is prohibited from funding the production of works which are obscene or otherwise illegal." The Commission nonetheless asserted that the NEA "is an inappropriate tribunal for the legal determination of obscenity." Said the Commission, "The nature and structure of the Endowment are not such that it can make the necessary due process findings of fact and conclusions of law involved in these determinations .... [T] he appropriate forum for the formal determination of obscenity is the courts." The Commission also urged that the NEA "rescind its current requirement that grantees certify that the works of art they propose to produce will not be obscene." Said the Commission: "The constitutional and other legal issues involved in the certification requirement will be decided by the courts" but "as a matter of public policy, the requirement should be rescinded." Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2015 https://archive.org/details/bipartisanindepeOOinde 3 The Independent Commission has called for "basic structural and procedural reforms at every level of the Endowment," said Dr. Brademas and Mr. Garment. "We are confident that this comprehensive approach is preferable to imposing content restrictions . " Declared the Commission: "Maintaining the principle of an open society requires all of us, at times, to put up with much we do not like but the bargain has proved in the long run a good one." Congress in 1989 called for the creation of the Independent Commission to review the NEA' s grant making procedures as well as standards for Endowment grants. President Bush appointed the 12- member body, four of whom were recommended by Speaker of the House of Representatives Thomas S. Foley (D-WA) in consultation with House Minority Leader Robert H. Michel (R-IL) , and four recommended by the Senate President pro tempore Robert C. Byrd (D-WV) in consultation with Senate Minority Leader Robert Dole (R-KS) . President Bush named the other four. Members of the Commission, which expires on September 30, 1990, were sworn in on June 6, 1990. In pressing for reforms in the operation of the Endowment, the Commission said that the sole authority of the NEA Chairperson to decide on grants should be made explicit in legislation and that to carry out his responsibilities, the Chairperson should be given more authority and more choices. To assure greater accountability to the President who appoints him, the Chairperson's term should be coterminous with the President's, declared the Commission. Concerned that the panels that make recommendations for grants had come to dominate NEA grant making, the Commission said that "Committees" of National Council members should be reinstated to provide another opportunity for review between grant advisory panels, the full Council and the Chairperson. The Commission said that to bolster accountability, recommendations of specific amounts of grant awards should be made by Endowment staff, after consultation with panelists. The Chairperson should also insist that panels and the National Council recommend more grants than funds available for them, thereby giving him a genuine choice in awarding grants. The Commission made several recommendations to avoid conflicts of interest on panels, including forming two or more panels in a given field where there is now only one. Panelists would not be permitted to serve on a panel considering applications from organizations with which they are affiliated. In addition, the pool of advisers sitting on grant advisory panels should be 4 expanded to include persons knowledgeable about the arts but not earning their living in them. The Commission also praised the partnerships between the NEA, on the one hand, and on the other, state and local governments and the private sector. The bipartisan group recommended maintaining the present formula of allocating 20% of NEA funds to state arts agencies, and urged the NEA to step up its collaboration with state and local arts agencies and other sectors of society to advance arts education. Dr. Brademas and Mr. Garment said that to communicate a sense of the Commission's recommendations, the group proposed that Congress add to the "Declaration of Purpose" or preamble of the legislation authorizing the NEA a provision making clear that "The arts and the humanities belong to all the people of the United States." The preamble should also note "the high place accorded by the American people to the nation's rich cultural heritage and to the fostering of mutual respect for the diverse beliefs and values of all persons and groups." Finally, the Commission recommended that the preamble say that federal arts programs should "be sensitive to the nature of public sponsorship." In addition to the Co-Chairmen, the members of the Independent Commission are: Dr. John Thomas Agresto, President of St. John's College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and former Deputy Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities; Theresa Elmore Behrendt of Tuxedo Park, New York, who served as the White House Liaison to the Arts and Humanities from 1982 to 1983; David E. Connor, a banker and financial consultant, who is President of David E. Connor and Associates of Peoria, Illinois, and a former Chairman of the Illinois State Arts Council; Marcia Laing Golden, who has held a number of civic and cultural positions in Kansas and is immediate past president of the Association of Community Arts Agencies in Kansas; and Kay Huffman Goodwin, an independent arts consultant and former Chairman of the West Virginia Arts and Humanities Commission. Other members of the Commission are: Joan White Harris, former Commissioner of the Department of Cultural Affairs in Chicago; Kitty Carlisle Hart, Chairman of the New York State Council on the Arts; Peter Kyros, Jr., a partner of Potomac Investment Associates in Westlake Village, California, and a former Deputy Chairman of the Federal Council on the Arts and Humanities; Charles Kinsley McWhorter, a New York attorney and former National Council on the Arts member and board member of numerous dance organizations, including the American Ballet Theatre Foundation; and Rosalind Wiener Wyman, President of Rosalind Wyman consultants in Los Angeles and a member of the Los Angeles County Music and Performing Arts Commission. 5 Dr. Brademas and Mr. Garment said the Commission held six days of public hearings at which 45 witnesses, representing a variety of views, testified. Included in the Independent Commission report is a "Consensus Statement" prepared by a Legal Task Force convened by the Commission, a panel of six leading constitutional lawyers, also of diverse perspectives, concerning legal and constitutional issues considered by the Commission. Single copies of the report are currently available from the Independent Commission (441 F Street, N.W., Room 305, Washington, D.C., 20001) . The report is a public document and may be reproduced . The news conference was held in the hearing room of the House Committee on Education and Labor, Room 2175, of the Rayburn House Office Building.