Update: Thanks to Leonard Jacobs for commenting and prompting me to check out his tracking of the anti-NEA campaign at the Clyde Fitch Report. He also links to several other bloggers from the arts world working to unravel the NEA conference call reality. Check out Ian David Moss’ Shocking(ly tame) NEA audio and transcript released.
CultureGrrl has today’s statement from Rocco Landesman explaining the facts behind the recent conference call that resulted in the reassignment of Yosi Sergant within the NEA. If you read the transcript or listen to the conference call you’ll see that these facts are consistent with the content of the call.
Alas – I don’t expect those targeting the NEA will be satisfied with the reassignment of a political appointee or a list of facts aimed at distancing the agency from his comments.
They want to take down the entire agency.
These are the same people that targeted Van Jones and ACORN. (Their supporters are making the link: Shepard Fairy Studio Tagged with Anit-ACORN slogans) The NEA was in their sites before the notorious conference call. It just happened to provide them with much more political fuel than the 80s style “indecency” attack they started with. The editor of Big Hollywood, which “broke” the conference call story, published a call for elimination of the NEA in July. Check out all the anti-NEA articles published at this website the last 24 hours to keep the heat on: http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/?s=NEA
This is not going away. If arts supporters and champions of the NEA “move on” as CultureGrrl asks, no one will be looking for the next attack. This is not an isolated incident but the beginning of a sustained campaign.
If you’ve never told your Congressman what the NEA has done for your organization in your community, now is the time to start. Don’t wait for the next attack.
I admit I am quite puzzled by the lack of vocal public outrage around this issue from the arts community. Why haven’t more of us stood up for Yosi?
We are witnessing a concerted campaign of political intimidation aimed at artists and the entire arts community. It won’t stop with Mr. Sergant’s departure yesterday from the NEA. Their target is already widening to national arts service organizations and individual activists within the arts community. If the arts community doesn’t begin asserting its right to participate in public debate on policies of all sorts, not just funding for the NEA, in the face of this campaing then it will lose ground at the same time an obviously pro-arts administraiton is in the White House.
Sergant is the least of the issues right now. The right — as I have been saying, over and over and over at the Clyde Fitch Report — aims to take down the NEA and to wage a new and much more virulent and possibly violent culture war against American artists. Dalouge is aboslutely right to warn everyone to start stockpiling their rhetorical arms.