It is hard to tell which meaning the conference organizers who chose this title intended, and whether they were thinking of Francis Ford Coppola, Jerry Falwell or St. John. Clearly, they were suggesting that a little devastation and doom now and then is not a bad thing and may be a necessary prelude to rebirth.

I thought they might have been inspired by W. B. Yeats, and there are certain verses of The Second Coming which justify such a reading:

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

But I suspected this reading was erroneous when I got to the final verse:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Surely, none of us would believe that "slouching toward Washington", or for that matter, "slouching toward London, Moscow, Paris" or any other government center would alleviate our doom. Government's role (or lack of it) in supporting the arts is under attack in many different countries.

America no longer has an effective National Endowment for the Arts. The agency is brain dead, and the sign on the hospice door says "do not resuscitate."

With many in ISPA coming from outside the United States, it may seem inappropriate to focus a substantial portion of my remarks on the American apocalypse, but the same issues are surfacing in other countries as well.

In the United States, there is no longer national support for public funding of the arts. It is a non-issue. Indeed the subject was never even mentioned in the last presidential campaign.

America no longer has an effective National Endowment for the Arts. The agency is brain dead, and the sign on the hospice door says "do not resuscitate".

The Endowment Chair, Jane Alexander, has unwittingly become the Jack Kervorkian of the Arts. Unfortunately, Jack's patients die quickly, painlessly, and of their own volition; Jane's do not.

This is not an "ad feminam" attack upon Jane Alexander; I admire her energy and respect her intent. I recognize that probably no one could be successful in this environment.

Who then is responsible for what has happened to the Endowment? I would love to lay all the blame on the religious right, but honesty compels me to admit that we, the professionals in the arts community, also bear responsibility.

Robert Hughes stated in The Culture of Complaint that "...the American 'culture war' officially started on May 18, 1989, on the floor of the U.S. Senate in Washington, when Senator Alfonse D'Amato (Republican, NY.) tore up a reproduction of a photograph and threw the pieces on the floor. He had been sent it by...a religious activist whose pressure group, the American Family Association, had been formed to combat the spread of pornography, indecency and irreligious sentiment in America..."

The image, of course, was Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ", and as Hughes points out, "If Serrano had called his large and technically splendid Cibachrome print something else--La Catedral Abogada, perhaps, or more prosaically Immersion Study (I)--there would have been no way of knowing that it was pee."

But he didn't, and the rest is history. The fact that the NEA had no role in choosing to fund Serrano--it came from a regional group which had received an NEA grant--was lost in the smoke of the battlefield. Then came the Mapplethorpe show at the Corcoran in Washington, and the issues of censorship and freedom of artistic expression became the only subject addressed by the arts community.

We found ourselves incapable of enlarging or contributing creatively to the national debate. We could not find convincing language nor properly define terms. We dismissed the anger about Serrano and Mapplethorpe. We never successfully articulated why the work should be seen, nor, in our hubris, did we ever acknowledge that some people might legitimately be offended.

We were unable to facilitate a discussion about the nature of art and its role in society. Desiring the advantages of public funding, we failed to acknowledge the risks.

Instead of joining in intelligent debate, we succumbed to a plea for unity to save the endowment. We hid behind arts education and outreach, and what Hughes calls "the culture of therapeutics": we began to talk about the arts as if they were a spiritual vitamin C, intended to help the nation's children avoid moral rickets and gum disease and the aged remain active.

An article in the New York Times on December 10, 1996 describes the NEA Chair's travels around the country drawing Congress's attention away from controversial, avant-garde projects by focusing attention on small dance troupes and traditional and folk arts:

"each time, she returned to Washington with some valuable knowledge about a Congressional district as well as a renewed sense of purpose: the teen-ager in Oklahoma City whose dancing gave her chills; the wizened old people making lace with hand shuttles in North Dakota.
'What an eye-opener,' she said. 'They were all so passionate. There was no way I was going to immolate on one issue.'"

This may be good politics, but it is bad policy. The National Endowment should not be about wizened old people making lace with hand shuttles in North Dakota. Nor should it be about "Hmong needlework, coastal sea-grass basketry and woodcraft, Pacific Island canoe building, and Appalachian banjo-playing" as one of the NEA brochures so treasured by Bob Hughes noted. The NEA should be about encouraging artists and art-making and presenting institutions to reach out, take risks, explore and preserve our culture by expanding it.

The Chairman of the House of Representatives wants the Federal Government out of the business of supporting the arts because they are troublesome; they challenge the status-quo and accepted ways of seeing; they often irritate and provoke. Newt Gingrich is right; they do and they should, and that is precisely why they should be supported, for it is out of this tension that we renew and strengthen our cultural identity.

Many in the arts community are afraid of this debate, and have been going to Congress and the country saying the arts should be supported because they make us feel good. Maybe. But most of us who make and present art would be more inclined to agree with Robert LePage, who said, "Going to the theater is not about feeling good. It is about feeling."

Art is about discovery, not the re-affirmation of the already known; it is about being comfortable with being uncomfortable--learning to enjoy different ways of seeing, hearing, feeling, and being. We will never preserve federal funding of the arts by lying about their character, nor will we justify their support solely with economic arguments.

It is time to say, "Enough, we will no more!" The endowment is now at $99.5 million, a 40% cut from the previous year. The Times states: "Through lobbying, lunches and persistent overtures to the harshest critics, [the Chair of the NEA] was able to keep the agency alive, but just barely..." Perhaps it is time to let it die.

Several hundred years ago when a conservative Pope threatened the Jesuits with suppression unless they became less egregious, the Jesuit General said "Sit ut sunt aut non sint" "Let them be as they are or let them cease to exist".

If the Endowment as we once knew it--as a catalyst for artistic growth and experimentation through its individual grants, as an amazingly effective strengthener of institutions through its challenge grants, and as a developer of new audiences through its education and outreach grants--if this kind of endowment can no longer garner public support in Congress, then it should die, now, not later, and I offer the great lawn of Columbia for a public burial.

This is the open letter that I believe we as arts professionals should be sending to the President and the new Congress:

"What once worked does no more. The Endowment has made so many compromises that it has lost its sense of purpose. We recommend that the Endowment cease operation and disband its staff. We recommend that present funding be put in escrow and that a bi-partisan committee be established and encouraged to reach a consensus on a limited list of cultural and intellectual objectives that merit national funding and mechanisms for disbursing such funding.

"Given fiscal pressures and the need to balance the budget as well as the political problems that can occur when tax dollars are used to support controversial projects, we urge that serious attention be given to non-tax-based funding, such as a national lottery or a percentage of funds generated by an extension of copyright."

Having just returned from eight years of living in France, where 1% of the national budget--under both the Socialists and the RPR--was devoted to culture, (the equivalent of $32 per taxpayer as opposed to less than $0.50 in the U.S.), it is depressing to find the parsimony and poisoned debate that exists about the arts in this country. I am also mindful, however, that as problematic as public funding may be, we, unlike many other countries, have other sources of support.

Let me comment briefly on those sources:

Corporate philanthropy as we knew it a decade ago is changing. Corporate giving, which began as a CEO's gesture of good citizenship and whose only payback was community good will, is now increasingly determined by directors of marketing and sales. Cause-related marketing is the most recent perversion of philanthropy: I expect the next American Express ad to say: "Charge your Christmas shopping at Tiffany's and we will contribute a dime to a starving artist." America has moved from frequent flyer to feel-good points.

Even more important than what is happening to corporate philanthropy is what is happening to foundations. If anyone should be the venture capitalists for the arts, it is the foundation community. But foundations are investing less in ideas and are increasingly focused on social engineering and measuring "outcome". The real issue is one of leadership: there is no new leader proposing bold initiatives and ready to risk failure, and no new foundations have sprung into being to supply the innovative energy that once came from Ford, Mellon and Rockefeller.

This leaves only individuals, and our dependence on them has never been greater. The extraordinary generosity of private patrons--and the entrepreneurial savvy of artists -- is what is keeping us going today. But, to quote my friend Bob Hughes again, "for every Paul Mellon there is an Armand Hammer", for every disinterested giver, another who would seduce us down a road we should not go.

At the end of the day, the health of the arts will not be determined by funders, whether public or private--it will be determined by artists and those who present them.

Our role is to choose, to be the eye of the audience. We cannot ignore the box office, nor be driven solely by it. We cannot ignore our funders, but it is our responsibility, not theirs, to compose programs and choose artists. It is our opportunity to challenge the boundaries of high and low art, our opportunity to expand the canon of quality so that not just European but other forms are represented.

Through our selection of artists, the style of our invitation and the quality of our welcome, we are the ones who determine whether new audiences feel included and existing audiences challenged to remain faithful.

There is a certain irony in having invited two Jesuit-educated sailors from Shelter Island to open and close this conference. Bob's epiphany came at age 17 reading Appolinaire and discovering popular art; mine came at age 25 at my first seder, and hearing the youngest child ask the question "why is tonight different from all others?"

That question became the question to answer in everything I have ever done as a presenter. "How is this dance company, this theater group, this soloist different from all others?"

And on that note, I say "lahitrahot" ; "ha shanah habaah bei Yerushaleyem" --next year in Jerusalem!

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