Off-and-On Funding for Disputed Art Show

Concerning Allan Parachini’s “Arts Groups Say NEA Future at Risk,” Nov. 10:

With the rush to freedom of thousands of East Germans and others being celebrated in the media as the death knell of repressive communism, it is painfully ironic that the Bush Administration chooses this time to eviscerate the National Endowment for the Arts by appointing as chairman an apparatchik who is terrorized by the right wing.

Chairman John E. Frohnmayer’s justification for pulling funding from a New York art show--that “the show had become so politicized that it no longer met artistic criteria”--should be cause for his immediate removal from office.

If art is to be funded only when it is unpolitical or (worse) apolitical, then we shall soon be seeking political asylum on the other side of the Berlin Wall, because that’s where the freedom of expression will be if we keep this up!

LOUIS FANTASIA

Los Angeles

The NEA reversed its course Thursday and agreed to release $10,000 in grant money for the New York exhibition, “Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing.” Last week, Frohnmayer had ordered the money impounded because of what he called the “political orientation” of the AIDS-related exhibition and its catalogue, in particular.