Free Republic

It seems Rocco Landesman, the head of the National Endowment for the Arts, didn't get the memo, literally. On September 22, stung by controversy over the administration's effort to turn the arts community into proselytizers of its very special brand of hope and change, the White House issued a stern warning to all government agencies: Keep politics out of the arts. White House denied that was ever the intent. Many in the media, as is their wont, took the Obama administration at their word. But not the website Big Government (which broke the story) and the Washington Times. They demonstrated...

...Which brings me to President Obama, our Optimist in Chief. He is a writer, an artist but we’ll come to that later. His second book had a title that would resonate with Lionel Tiger: “The Audacity of Hope”. This is much more than a felicitous phrase that he found in a sermon: it is the manifesto of this presidency and will lay the groundwork for the most arts-supportive administration since Roosevelt. Again, optimism presumes positive outcomes, the exigencies of the real world notwithstanding. The Obama campaign, and now the Obama presidency, has always been about aspiration: the idea that our...

ABC News' Yunji de Nies reports: This evening, National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Rocco Landesman released a statement on the controversial August 10 conference call, led by then-NEA communications director Yossi Sergant. On that call Sergant seemed to encourage artists to help support President Obama's agenda, which has now prompted the White House to issue new guidelines to prevent such a call from ever happening again. At the time Sergant himself seemed to sense he was on shaky ground, telling the group, "This is the first telephone call of a brand new conversation. We are just now learning how...

Last month, National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Rocco Landesman said that, in American politics, ”the arts are a little bit of a target. The subtext is that it is elitist, left wing, maybe even a little gay.” Well, the NEA has certainly earned that reputation these past few weeks. Just like the LGBT community, the NEA – which purports to help struggling artists of all kinds - is following in lockstep with The One, regardless of whether it’s good for artistic expression, free speech, or real people. Last fall, I was amazed at how many folks in the gay...

National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Rocco Landesman responded to the August 10 NEA, White House, and United We Serve conference call in a statement sent to the Washington Times. : STATEMENT FROM NEA CHAIRMAN ROCCO LANDESMAN September 22, 2009 As chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, I would like to clarify the issues concerning an August conference call in which an NEA employee participated.