The Arts: Trevor Young, Edward Hopper, and the Federal Arts Budget
A Washington Post article tips me off to artist Trevor Young’s interesting-looking “Non-Places” exhibit at Flashpoint, a gallery in Washington, D.C. This piece (right, courtesy of Flashpoint’s website), as the article notes, evokes Edward Hopper, whose works I also enjoy. Apparently, unlike other artists working during the Great Depression, Hopper fared well during that period. Let’s hope Young and his peers make it through today’s “Great Recession,” if that’s what we’re calling it.
What individual artists won’t be eligible for, however, is any direct support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the federal arts agency. President Barack Obama’s FY 2010 budget request for the NEA — released May 7th — pleased agency supporters for requesting a roughly 4 percent increase — to $161.3 million for the fiscal year that beings Oct. 1, 2009 — or $6.3 million more than the current budget of $155 million. That’s still less than some Clinton- and Reagan-era appropriations and doesn’t remove a nearly universal ban on funding for individual artists, a policy established as a result of the decency wars of the 1990s. Still, for those in favor of federal funding of the arts, it’s better than a modern low of less than $97.6 million, allocated in fiscal 2000.