Breitbart Letdown

“I would encourage you to pick something whether it’s health care, education, the environment, you know, there’s four key areas that the corporation has identified as the areas of service.”

–Yosi Sergant

Well, Andrew Breitbart’s Big Hollywood website (home of the lunatic Victoria Jackson self-parody blog) has posted its second “big scoop” about supposed politicization of the National Endowment for the Arts, complete with full audio. If there’s any news here, it’s that Patrick Courrielche has backed away from saying there’s anything at all illegal here:

These may both be coincidences and I am not suggesting that the NEA or these groups definitively violated the law in these efforts. That’s for others to discuss and investigate. As I’ve stated in various television interviews, the organizers never discussed any specific policies. (Emphasis mine)

The thrust of his argument is that art groups take money from the NEA, which asked them to please, pretty please, think about ways they could possibly promote the reform agenda. Sergant again:

“And then my ask would be to apply artistic, you know, your artistic creative communities utilities and bring them to the table.”

Accusing the NEA of “tainting the creative process by encouraging the art community to address highly controversial political issues,” Courrielche describes the conference call as “government overreach:”

Many on the phone call may say and believe that this was a worthwhile effort. “What can be more inspiring then the NEA encouraging national service,” they may say. I would say that while it might sound like a noble cause, the big hand of government often enters the scene well manicured, but in times of desperation it all too often takes on the shape of a fist accessorized with brass knuckles. (Emphasis mine)

There you have it: asking artists to consider making art about controversial topics is the slippery-slope to Orwellian dystopia! Courrielche spends almost as many electrons on Glenn Beck doom-bunker nonsense as he does on his “scoop:”

Were there artists on the call that would create imagery extolling the benefits of offshore drilling? Were there any musicians who’d drop an electro dance anthem warning of the Road to Serfdom that awaits us if we let government create universal health care? Or how about artists that would wheat paste posters throughout urban areas, featuring a miner named Cole entirely sanitized, sitting in a clean room with the subtitle “Clean Coal.” If this was truly a bipartisan effort, why was I not invited to any conference calls held after the publication of my initial article?

Are there many artists who would create imagery extolling offshore drilling and the oxymoron known as “clean coal?” How many DJs are Glenn Beck fans? And why would anyone invite Courrielche to return for a conference call he obviously doesn’t agree should take place at all?

“This practice has never been the historical role of the NEA,” Courrielche says. Except it HAS BEEN the historical role of arts, and it appears the NEA did nothing more than arrange the call. Non-partisanship is not the same thing as non-advocacy.

Courrielche has another complaint: the NEA

forgot its role to the arts, a community currently in dire straits. If this arts group should be rallying around anything, it should be to directly help the arts community.

Right…which is why the NEA has received a 50% funding boost as part of the stimulus bill. Yet in Courrielche’s capable batshit-factory of a mind, that stimulus funding is now leverage to force artists into voluntary contest submissions. The horror! The NEA thought that art groups operating on government stimulus money might, y’know, want to make art about government stimulus. Courrielche again:

Setting up a propaganda machine is a dangerous precedent. The creation of a machine to address any issues, even ones with noble intentions, can be wielded by the state to create a climate amenable to the policies of those in power. Does anyone believe that once these artists are in place and we move to the election cycle, that the art they create will be bipartisan? (Emphasis mine)

I have no doubt most American artists weren’t going to be bipartisan anyway; there are plenty of good reasons why most artists aren’t Republican. A conference call asking the most progressive demographic in America to “apply artistic, you know, your artistic creative communities utilities and bring them to the table” hardly qualifies as the Yezhov terror.

What’s missing from Corrielche’s much-ballyhooed post about this horrible, awful no-good Stalinist slippery-slope conference call is a reason why anyone but him should care.