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President Obama's Arts & Humanities team is now complete, as Iowa Republican Jim Leach joins the previously announced Rocco Landesman; Leach will run the NEH and Landesman the NEA. Of the two, the NEA is the one that's had the bigger bullseye on its back, a lingering aftershock of the culture wars of the early 90s, when the NEA funded a series of controversial art projects (the Robert Mapplethorpe photos, for example) that had conservatives in Congress threatening to kill the agency entirely.

Dana Gioia, the poet who's been charged with rebuilding the NEA for the last 8 years, did a fine job; it may not have been the job some artists wanted him to do, but he did the first thing first: he saved the NEA and made it actually something that Congress now likes to fund. He did that by turning it away from funding artists and towards funding arts programs, presenters, and producers. This smells faintly of trickle-down economics (and Dana is after all a Republican), but arts supporters from both sides of the aisle breathed a sigh of relief when the NEA stopped funding things like Andres Serrano's beautiful but intensely controversial photo "Piss Christ" and instead focused on things like bringing Shakespeare to schools. And there are some compelling arguments for the NEA to fund regional arts organizations who might actually have their fingers on the pulse of their local communities instead of having bureaucrats in DC make those decisions. But you could also say that this sort of NEA is safe and only interested in funding the mainstream and the status quo.

I would love to see the NEA funding avant-garde or experimental artists. At least, I think I'd love to see it. But by its very nature, avant-garde art, of whatever kind, is made around the edges of what's accepted and expected. There's a certain against-the-flow quality to this work that just seems incompatible somehow with taking money from the government. And on a purely practical level, how many workers would the NEA need to be able to keep track of all the worthy, adventurous artists working on the edges of all the different scenes in different cities? I bet it's way more workers than the NEA would ever have the budget for.

Speaking of bets, I have to say I like the choice of Rocco Landesman to run the NEA. Any man who spends his Augusts at the racetrack in Saratoga is a man after my own heart, and despite what you may think of the shady Damon Runyanesque characters who inhabit the racetracks, I think there's something trustworthy about a guy who's been around the track a while and is still in the game: you have to know how to balance risk and reward; how to manage money - especially when things aren't going so well; how to deal with adversity - often lots of it; and how to judge a series of candidates for a single prize by looking over their past performances, or resumes. All of which sounds like it could come in pretty handy at the NEA.

Tell us: Should the NEA and NEH change the course of what they've been doing recently? Why or why not?
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