Is Obama Trying To Use The NEA As His Own Personal Propaganda Machine?

One artist thinks so:

I was invited by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to take part in a conference call that invited a group of rising artist and art community luminaries “to help lay a new foundation for growth, focusing on core areas of the recovery agenda – health care, energy and environment, safety and security, education, community renewal.” …
Backed by the full weight of President Barack Obama’s call to service and the institutional weight of the NEA, the conference call was billed as an opportunity for those in the art community to inspire service in four key categories, and at the top of the list were “health care” and “energy and environment.” The service was to be attached to the President’s United We Serve campaign, a nationwide federal initiative to make service a way of life for all Americans.
It sounded, how should I phrase it…unusual, that the NEA would invite the art community to a meeting to discuss issues currently under vehement national debate. I decided to call in, and what I heard concerned me. …
We were encouraged to bring the same sense of enthusiasm to these “focus areas” as we had brought to Obama’s presidential campaign, and we were encouraged to create art and art initiatives that brought awareness to these issues. Throughout the conversation, we were reminded of our ability as artists and art professionals to “shape the lives” of those around us. The now famous Obama “Hope” poster, created by artist Shepard Fairey and promoted by many of those on the phone call, and will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” song and music video were presented as shining examples of our group’s clear role in the election.
Obama has a strong arts agenda, we were told, and has been very supportive of both using and supporting the arts in creative ways to talk about the issues facing the country. We were “selected for a reason,” they told us. We had played a key role in the election and now Obama was putting out the call of service to help create change. We knew “how to make a stink,” and were encouraged to do so. …
A machine that the NEA helped to create could potentially be wielded by the state to push policy. Through providing guidelines to the art community on what topics to discuss and providing them a step-by-step instruction to apply their art form to these issues, the “nation’s largest annual funder of the arts” is attempting to direct imagery, songs, films, and literature that could create the illusion of a national consensus….
And if you think that my fear regarding the arts becoming a tool of the state is still unfounded, I leave you with a few statements made by the NEA to the art community participants on the conference call. “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?…bare with us as we learn the language so that we can speak to each other safely… “
Is the hair on your arms standing up yet?

State-sponsored artists pushed into creating state-sponsored art that glorifies the state? And is specifically sympathetic to the ruling political leader and his policies?
This makes images like this one go through my head:

image

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  • http://sayanythingblog.com/readers/entry/homosexuality_is_wrong_-_a_compendium move_zig

    But today, by cynically working together the NAACP, NEA and Democratic Party have created for themselves a symbiotic iron triangle of wealth and power that would fall apart if any one of the three departed from their symbiotic, self-aggrandizing behavior. Their wealth and power are being paid for with the enslavement and wrecked futures of millions of black children and the betrayal of African-American parents.

    Almost from the NAACP’s birth, the color it advanced was not so much black as red. DuBois had been a Socialist Party member and hailed the 1917 Russian Revolution, traveling to the Soviet Union in 1926 and 1936 and praising “the racial attitudes of the Communists.”

    In 1922 the NAACP began receiving grants from the Communist-linked Garland Fund, whose officials included William Z. Foster, Benjamin Gitlow, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Scott Nearing and American Civil Liberties Union founder Roger Baldwin. In 1938 the NAACP was represented at the Soviet-controlled World Youth Congress, and during the 1940s it was affiliated with the Communist-involved World Federation of Democratic Youth. In 1946 the NAACP gave support to the establishment of the Communist-dominated Progressive Party, which ran former FDR Vice President Henry Wallace for President in the 1948 election.

    Continued…

  • Spartacus

    HEH, I thought you meant the other NEA, the teachers union. Although that’s probably next. Little tykes wearing shorts, knee highs and green shirts telling the party about their parents discussing fiscal irresponsibility, intrusions into the private sector, and the thousand yard stare when they mention the good old days that were only a few months ago. The Obama youth

  • http://SayAnythingBlog.com The_Whistler_ofnd

    I’m thinking more like this picture:

  • http://www.valleydeals.com/cgi-bin/board2/YaBB.pl Kevin

    What group is more dependent on government grants than the “arts community?”

  • bill-tb

    Why do ask the question? Of course he is.

  • Spartacus

    The National Endowment for the Arts, providing a living to those that posses no useful skills since 1965!

  • http://sayanythingblog.com/readers/entry/homosexuality_is_wrong_-_a_compendium move_zig

    The NEA began in 1850 as the National Teachers Association, adopting its present name in 1857. From the outset it was “ideological” and discriminatory. Devoted to promoting government-owned public schools and “modern” pedagogical ideas, it permitted no private school teachers to join.

    Government-owned-and-run schools are, almost by definition, socialist schools. And in today’s America the public schools have become our largest and most pervasive local bastions of socialism. (This is why Bill Clinton tried to turn local schools into one-stop centers for an ever-expanding range of government services, and to use their presence as loci for zones to rationalize the banning of everything from firearms to liquor billboards. In Clinton rhetoric, every expansion of government was proposed “for the children.”)

    These socialized schools, modeled on statist European education in Prussia, attracted socialist activist teachers who saw public schoolchildren as perfect subjects for re-engineering society. That remolding began with the anti-Catholic objectives of Horace Mann and expanded to the anti-religious humanism of John Dewey.

    In 1935 in a report presented at the 72nd annual NEA meeting, the organization’s future Executive Secretary Willard Givens wrote: “A dying laissez-faire must be completely destroyed and all of us…must be subjected to a large degree of social control…. The major function of the school is the social orientation of the individual. It must seek to give him understanding of the transition to a new social order.”

    In 1938 “the Institute for Social Research, founded by the Comintern, appeared on the Columbia University campus, taking over the Teachers College, the country’s most influential school of education,” wrote veteran journalist Ralph de Toledano in an investigation titled “NEA Hastens Death of American Education.”

    Better known as the Frankfurt School….[it] eschewed the economic aspects of Marxism and promulgated a substitute based on Marx’s 1843 preachments,” de Toledano continued. “Later labeled neo-Marxism, the program called for the destruction of religion, the family, education and all moral values, along with the capture of the intellectuals and the instruments of mass communication such as the press, radio and films. To this it appended a new Freudianism, which reduced human relationships to rampant sexuality and the grossest pleasure principles — a program its secret founder boasted ‘will make America stink.’

    “The Frankfurt School’s program, implemented by the NEA, made the goal of education not to educate the young but to give them an anarchic ‘self-esteem’ and deprive them of any sense of what’s wrong or right….,” wrote de Toledano, “And it preached the alienation of children from parental guidance.”

    In 1946 the NEA printed National Education in an International World, which declared that each member of the emerging United Nations and its U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) “has a duty to see to it that nothing in its curriculum….is contrary to UNESCO’s aims.”

    The NEA’s openly avowed goal today,” wrote de Toledano is “‘To tap the legal, political and economic powers of the U.S. Congress. We want…sufficient clout [to] roam the halls of Congress and collect votes to reorder the priorities of the United States of America.’”

    The NEA has not been modest about imposing on students its own left-eyed values agenda, which ironically promotes the teaching of Darwinian evolution in the classroom while discouraging competition and scorekeeping on the playground. NEA promotes the discounting of religion (except for Wiccan paganism and Islam); sex education and social equality for homosexuals; and science but also unscientific environmental extremism. NEA also promotes multiculturalism that praises every minority while teaching that white America has always been a racist, sexist, homophobic, imperialistic land unworthy of respect, much less patriotism.

  • Spartacus

    ^FEH, they’ll be rich after they die.

  • http://ndgoon.blogspot.com/ goon

    The National Extortion Agency.

  • http://sayanythingblog.com/readers/entry/homosexuality_is_wrong_-_a_compendium move_zig

    Additional Reading:

    Public Education Brainwashing and here

    In 1939, a comrade of Keynes and Strachey named Bertrand Russell came to America to push their obscenitarian socialism and was (he says in his Autobiography) legally charged as “lecherous, libidinous, lustful, venerous, erotomaniac, aphrodisiac, irreverent, narrow-minded, untruthful, and bereft of moral fiber.” His aborted object had been to permeate the College of the City of New York with the corruption of the British Fabians. Immediately, John Dewey and other American Fabians organized to cry that “Academic Freedom” was under attack. The National Education Association (NEA) and the whole Leftist educational complex began to percolate pervasive degeneracies as being “Liberal” and “progressive.”

  • studakota

    Walked into a room at an estate sale in San Mateo, Ca. There on the wall was a authentic German Swastika flag for sale. Couldn’t afford it,$350.00, or the many other articles on sale. Wish I could have, because it was certainly powerful art. I have never seen anything so striking. The damn thing almost shouted at you. Point is, others will use this type of artistic suasion and, naive as our young are, they’ll fall prey to these means to sway their opinions. These Commies are going to take over folks unless we get over our, “it can’t happen here” attitude. If you like how Venezuela is going you’ll really love the USA in a few years.

  • Matt

    I think we need to clarify WHICH NEA we are talking about here.

    This is about the National Endowment for the Arts. A lot of people might confuse the acronym with another often hated by the right organization, the National Education Association.

    Istria

  • http://www.bikebubba.blogspot.com/ Bike Bubba

    I’m seeing a pattern here. He’s using the DOJ to protect his political friends caught in bribery and other crimes, as well as to persecute CIA agents previously exonerated by the DOJ under Bush. He’s using his office to get a “get list” on his political enemies, and now he’s using the NEA to “get” his political opponents.

    On the light side, I’m not quite sure exactly how the “performance art” of a naked woman smearing herself with chocolate while spouting off radical feminist slogans is going to persuade people to let government bureaucrats control healthcare.

    (yes, that is a real NEA project….)

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