Jane Alexander
What we do is look for high standards of excellence in the arts.
Well, in the 1990 reauthorization legislation, there was a phrase that said we do not fund obscenity as defined by a court of law.
We have only two criteria, really - artistic merit and excellence - keeping in mind, now, the diversity of the American people.
There's a lot of people in any given community - rural, inner-city, or whatever - who have simply no access to the arts.
The endowment has never funded anything completely by itself, except in a few cases.
Senator Helms might very well do that. I would point out to him that we in the art world are not necessarily in the business of making controversial art.
Now, I cannot approve anything the council has rejected, but I can reject anything the council has approved.
No one's conception of art is going to be acceptable to everybody.
Nazi Germany produced some posters that would certainly rank as artistically meritorious; their political content was anathema to most people.
Most of our funding goes to organizations and is then used to leverage the private sector.
It would be difficult, in this day and age, to fund art that made racial slurs.
If a panel feels that a grant is worthy and they know the content of the work of art in question, we at the endowment will be prepared to defend it.
I've seen society change so much since the '60s and early '70s, and still we have the endowment and still we have art.
I knew as well as anybody what the endowment does for artists because I had been someone it had supported through not-for-profit theater.
I guess what the president is saying with regard to the private sector is that we want to see more consistent private giving.
I don't know where art is going to go in the future, so I can't hypothesize about whether I would still want to be at the NEA if it got into any issue of morality.
I don't know how one actually would define obscenity. I'm sure the definition is different according to the age one is living in.
I began to think, The endowment has had a bad reputation in the last few years, and that's unfair.
But art is not necessarily without controversy.
All I want to do is make sure that art is available to all Americans in a participatory way, whether you engage in the art process yourself or you're an audience member.