“The NEA has withered in a matter of decades from a self-styled instrument of world peace to a cautious dispenser of largesse whose one inflexible principle is that no grant must ever redound to the administration’s embarrassment. Whether it can regain its early ambition–or whether it should try to–is an open question. But nobody contemplating a reform of this institution should begin without a clear and unsentimental understanding of America’s peculiarly fitful relationship to the arts, particularly the visual arts.”