The White House is attempting to mimic Leni Riefenstahl by rounding up those in the arts and entertainment industry and using them as the vehicles through which President Obama can peddle his agenda.

The National Endowment for the Arts denies that it was working with White House officials to promote the president’s agenda through the arts via this taxpayer-funded organization:

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.”

Unfortunately, the transcript of the actual call does not corroborate the NEA’s statement. BigGovernment.com obtained the full transcript of the conference call on which White House official Buffy Wicks (of the Office of Public Engagement and head administration official for Serve.gov; Wicks previous worked with WakeUp Walmart and was a lobbyist for the United Food and Commercial Workers’ Union), and others – including lead organizers with Rock the Vote and Current TV – discussed ways to co-opt the art community for political purposes and manipulate those around them so as to push things like Obama’s health care legislation. It’s a call that call participant Patrick Courrichie says raised the hair on his arms.

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If you’ve ever wondered–and worried–about where government support of the arts leads, look no further than the full transcript of an August 10 telecon  between an official at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and a group of “independent artists from around the country.” The short version: It leads to the use of taxpayer-funded culture as a means of propagandizing for specific, partisan political aims. Which corrupts not just art but artists.

As Patrick Courrelieche, an L.A.-based arts organizer who participated in the call, reported at Big Hollywood, the people running the call, including the NEA’s director of communications Yosi Sergant  and members of the White House Office of Public Engagement and United We Serve, told the assembled crew of “thought leaders” that “we’re going to come at you with some specific asks here” (that’s a direct quote from Buffy Wicks of the Office of Public Engagement). 

Chief among the requests from Sergant (who was either “reassigned” from the agency or “reportedly resigned” after denying the full extent of his role in organizing the call) was “to pick something whether it’s health care, education, the environment, you know… [and] apply artistic, you know, your artistic creative communities’ utilities and bring them to the table.” Beyond the specific policy issues above, the call organizers stressed the ideologically loaded concept of “service” as the animating principle of the Obama administration and wanted the artists to do whatever they could to promote that. As Wicks put it, “We really view [our efforts] as an onramp to a lifetime of service. We really want service to be incorporated into people’s daily lives.”

Given that the NEA prides itself on being the single largest funding source for the arts in the country, such arm-twisting by agency officials, however masked in fulsome compliments to creators’ genius, is disturbing on its face. It clearly sets a political agenda for the very people who are likely to be applying for, well, NEA and other government grants. Does anyone think that the organizers were fishing around for projects that might complicate the public option for health care?

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