**NEA conference call full audio and transcript here**

Should the National Endowment for the Arts encourage artists to create art on issues being vehemently debated nationally?

That is the question that I set out to discuss a little over three weeks ago when I wrote an article on Big Hollywood entitled The National Endowment for the Art of Persuasion?”

The question still requires debate but the facts do not.

The NEA and the White House did encourage a handpicked, pro-Obama arts group to address politically controversial issues under contentious national debate. That fact is irrefutable.

President Obama with the NEA’s Yosi Sergant

But some have claimed that the invite and passages, pulled from the conference call that inspired the article, were taken out of context. Context is what I intend to establish here.

On August 10th, the National Endowment for the Arts, the White House Office of Public Engagement, and the Corporation for National and Community Service hosted a conference call with a handpicked arts group. This arts group played a key role in Obama’s arts effort during his election campaign, as declared by the organizers of the call, and many on the call played a role in the now famous Obama Hope poster.

Much of the talk on the conference call was a build up to what the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) was specifically asking of this group. In the following segment, Buffy Wicks, Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, clearly identifies this arts group as a pro-Obama collective and warns them of some “specific asks” that will be delivered later in the meeting.

Buffy Wicks

Play Buffy Wicks, Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement:

• “I just first of all want to thank everyone for being on the call and just a deep deep appreciation for all the work you all put into the campaign for the 2+ years we all worked together.”
• “We won.”
• “I’m actually in the White House and working towards furthering this agenda, this very aggressive agenda.”
• “We’re going to come at you with some specific asks here.”
• “I hope you guys are ready.”

Later in the call, “specific asks” were delivered by Yosi Sergant, then Communications Director of the National Endowment for the Arts. What were the “asks”? They were for this pro-Obama arts group to create art on several hotly debated political issues, including health care:

Yosi Sergant

Play Yosi Sergant, former Communications Director of the National Endowment for the Arts:

• “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.”
• “And then my ask would be to apply artistic, you know, your artistic creative communities utilities and bring them to the table.”
• “Again, I’m really, really honored to be working with you; the National Endowment for the Arts is really honored.”
• “You’re going to see a lot more of us in the next four and hopefully eight years.”

As someone that has been creating arts initiatives and marketing campaigns for over 14 years, I feel like I have a good sense as to how a pro-Obama arts group, when requested by the NEA to address politically contentious issues, could so easily turn very partisan.

Consider:

Three days after the conference call a coalition of arts groups, led by Americans for the Arts, a participant on the conference call per the meeting contact list and recipient of NEA grants, sent out a press release with the heading “Urgent Call to Congress for Healthcare Reform,” which called for the creation of “a health care reform bill that will create a public health insurance option.” Eleven days after the conference call, Rock the Vote, another participant on the call, announced a health care design contest. “We can’t stand by and listen to lies and deceit coming from those who are against reforming a broken system,” they stated in their announcement. “Enough is Enough. We need designs that tell the country YES WE CARE! Young people demand health care.”

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. However, as can be seen below in the exchange between Nell Abernathy of the Corporation for National and Community Service, a federal agency, and Michael Skolnik, the third party moderator, the meeting seemed designed to deflect any questionable conversations to the “third party”, while keeping the issue of health care top-of-mind with the precision of a well positioned product placement.

Play Nell Abernathy, Director of Outreach for Serve.Gov and Michael Skolnick, political director for hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons:

Debating the role of government is and has been the goal of bringing this conference call to light. The NEA tainted the creative process by encouraging the art community to address highly controversial political issues. ‘How?’ you may ask. The NEA is the largest single funder of the arts in the United States. This government agency has the power and ability to fund arts organizations and recently expressed a desire to return to funding individual artists, bringing more from the group into the pool of potential grantees.

The NEA did encourage a handpicked, pro-Obama arts group to address issues under contentious national debate. That fact is irrefutable.

This practice has never been the historical role of the NEA. The NEA’s role is to support excellence in the arts, to increase access to the arts, and to be a leader in arts education. Using the arts to address contentiously debated issues is political subversion. And the fact that the White House played a role in encouraging the arts to address contentious issues should also be considered a 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.

And it appears that desperation may have been the impetus to the birth of this specific arts effort. This possibility reveals itself when we take a step back and view the environment at the time the invitation was distributed.

It was the beginning of August 2009, Congress was heading for a much-anticipated month-long recess after weeks of heated debate over health care legislation. At issue was President Obama’s desire for “universal health care” for all Americans, and he was losing that debate. The Administration attempted to push health care legislation through before the August recess, but the so-called Blue Dogs resisted the proposed public option.

After several grueling months of discussion, where the opposition accused the administration of creating death panels, inching the country closer to socialism, and desiring a single-payer system, the Democrats left for the August recess without a bill on the floor and a bit battered from their effort. The Democrats were presented with a daunting task – to face a public at town hall meetings that had gone nuclear. Each night a new incident of public outrage against the government takeover of health care was broadcast widely on cable news – each network painting the protesters as either a legitimate revolt against government growth, or the angry, uneducated, lunatic fringe.

Regardless of how this group was labeled, their mere existence pointed to one fact – the administration was losing the debate on health care reform.

It was in this environment that I received the invite from the National Endowment for the Arts to attend the August 10th conference call. When seeing that the NEA and the White House were inviting a group from the arts world to tackle health care, as well as energy and environment, it appeared to me as an attempt to create an environment amenable to the President’s positions on these efforts. Only after learning that this was the arts group that played a key role in getting the independent arts community behind then candidate Obama, was I convinced that this effort was unusual.

Michael Skolnik, the person asked by the NEA and the White House to help bring together this arts collective, defined the group and its goal in his opening statement. I think it is made pretty clear how this pro-Obama group would react to losing the healthcare debate if prodded to speak to that very issue:

Michael Skolnick

Play Michael Skolnick, political director for hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons:

• “I’ve been asked by folks in the White House and folks in the NEA … we had the idea that I would help bring together the artist community…”
• “…the Hope poster obviously is a great example, but it’s clear as an independent art community as artists and thinkers and tastemakers and marketers and visionaries that are on this call, the role that we played during the campaign for the president…”
• “…the President has a clear arts agenda and has been very supportive of using art and supporting art in creative ways to talk about some issues that we face here in our country, but also to engage people. And I think all of us who are on this phone call, you know, were selected for a reason.”
• “And so I’m hoping that through this group, and the goal of all this, and the goal of this phone call, is through this group we can create a stronger community amongst ourselves to get involved in things we’re passionate about as we did during the campaign. But to continue to get involved in those things, to support some of the President’s initiatives, but also to do things that we are passionate about and to push the President and push his administration…“

I find it hard to believe that the very intelligent meeting organizers would think that this pro-Obama arts group would produce bipartisan art about health care at a time when the administration was losing a national debate on that very issue. As any parent can tell you, if you give your child a key to the candy drawer they’ll end up with a sugar high.

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?

In their zeal to recapture the enthusiasm of the campaign, it appears the NEA overstepped its mandate and 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. The NEA’s mere participation in a meeting of this nature has put them and those invited in murky waters.

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?

While much of the phone call was spent explaining the general concept of United We Serve – to be expected when explaining the infrastructure and rational for any national initiative – when the time came to get specific on what the National Endowment for the Arts wanted this arts group to do, it was simple and concise – create art focused on four main issues, and the two at the top of the list, and most mentioned throughout the exchange, were health care and energy & environment.

Yosi Sergant

Play Yosi Sergant, former Communications Director of the National Endowment for the Arts:

• “This is a community that knows how to make a stink.”
• “…this is just the beginning. This is the first telephone call of a brand new conversation.”
• “We are just now learning how to really bring this community together to speak with the government. What that looks like legally?”
• “So bear with us as we learn the language so that we can speak to each other safely…”
• “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.”
• “My ask would be to apply artistic, you know, your artistic creative community’s utilities and bring them to the table.”

The National Endowment for the Arts needs to issue a statement with a bit more detail than the one issued at the time of Sergant’s reassignment. Not only have they not explained why Sergant was reassigned, their current statement is full of obvious contradictions and has only prompted more questions.

The NEA’s unattributed statement reads:

“On August tenth, the National Endowment for the Arts participated in a call with arts organizations to inform them of the president’s call to national service. The White House Office of Public Engagement also participated in the call, which provided information on how the Corporation for National and Community Service can assist groups interested in sponsoring service projects or having their members volunteer on other projects. This call was not a means to promote any legislative agenda and any suggestions to that end are simply false. The NEA regularly does outreach to various organizations to inform of the work we are doing and the resources available to them.”

By their own words and actions the NEA has attempted to distance the agency from the initiation of this meeting and have been outright dishonest in their role.

If the NEA has done nothing wrong, why have they been dishonest?

From their own words this effort was not something that the NEA regularly performed; otherwise their Communications Director wouldn’t have called this a “brand new conversation.”

As to the statement that the conference call was not a means to promote any legislative agenda, I believe the handpicked pro-Obama participants on the call and the vehemently debated issues that the NEA encouraged the group to address show clear intent on the part of the NEA. And that intent was to create art that aligned with the administration’s partisan agenda.

On September 4th I called the chairman of the NEA, Rocco Landesman, requesting a response to these inconsistencies as well as to request a statement from the NEA regarding their brand new arts efforts. As of the publishing of this article I have not received a response.

With each passing day, the National Endowment for the Arts’ credibility is tragically deteriorating. The only action that can restore its credibility is a full disclosure and accounting of the events that led to the launch of this arts effort, the rationale behind this new NEA function, and a clear explanation of the obvious contradictions in their statements related to this conference call.

I hope the NEA addresses this soon so that they can get back to their mandated artistic, not political, work.

MORE…

Patterico: The NEA, The White House, The Lies and The Cover-Up

Ben Shapiro: Demand Congressional Investigation: NEA Conference Call Broke Laws

Dana Loesch: Conference Call Transcript Implicates Fed Art Agency In Govt. Co-Opt of Arts Community 

Nolte: Propaganda, Health Care and ACORN: Full Context of NEA Conference Call Reveals Disturbing Pattern

Nick Gillespie: How to Corrupt Artists in One Quick and Easy Telecon

Don Loos: Buffy Wicks Another Big Labor White House Opertive with ACORN Ties

From Cosby’s Facebook page:

I agree with President Carter that racism is playing a role in recent outbursts against President Obama. During President Obama’s speech on the status of health care reform, some members of congress engaged in a public display of disrespect. While one Representative hurled the now infamous “you lie” insult at the President, others made their lack of interest known by exhibiting rude behavior such as deliberately yawning and sending text messages ….

Various polls prior to the election indicated that between five and ten percent of Americans would never vote for an African American president. That number, of course, only includes those who actually admitted to their prejudice. How many others harbored such feelings but did not respond honestly when asked the question? And how many people oppose Obama’s plan because the President is African American?

In “Birth of a Nation,” D.W. Griffith used white actors in black face to portray black legislators as having low intelligence and acting like fools. Today, we have a band of real life congressional fools seemingly bent on blocking any meaningful reform of the health care system. But if we allow even one American to die simply because he or she cannot afford treatment, we are creating a shameful scenario that could aptly be called “Death of a Nation.”