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NEA Captures Data on Artists with Day Jobs

Not long ago we wrote about a study that took up the question of who is an artist, examining some of the ways in which defining creative workers is difficult. On Monday the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) added to the conversation by releasing a new data set called “Keeping My Day Job: Identifying U.S. Workers Who Have Dual Careers as Artists.”

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House Committee Seeks to Gut the NEA

In April, President Obama proposed his 2014 fiscal year budget, which, happily for us culture lovers, includes increases of some $15 million each for the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities. But Obama’s proposal was just the first step in a long, winding budget process, and now the Republicans have spoken: they want to slash the NEA and NEH budgets in half.

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A Grand Unified Theory of Art?

Could there be a unified theory of art? As someone who is a casual follower of the sciences and once happily attended a lecture in Boston by Stephen Hawking in which he amusingly illuminated some of the challenges that face physicists who, as of yet, do not themselves have a unified theory in their field, it seems more comic than serious to suggest a “unified theory” of much of anything.

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Obama Differentiates Himself from Romney on NEA Funding, Wants Increase

Two weeks ago, we pointed out that Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney was proposing severe cuts in the budget of the federally funded National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). Now, this week the Obama Administration has released their 2013 budget request to Congress, which requests to raise funding to a number of the countries’s cultural agencies and programs, including the NEA.

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Artist Karen Finley Talks New York of Yesteryear, Women in the Arts, Lady Gaga and More

Has she no decency? At long last, has she no decency? The transgressive, titillating performance artist Karen Finley was denied a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1990 because the language and content in her work was deemed “indecent.” Along with three other artists she became part of the infamous Supreme Court case The National Endowment for the Arts v. Karen Finley, which culminated in the discontinuation of individual artist grants. In her interview with Hyperallergic, Finley reflects on the past of New York City, the state of women in the arts, Lady Gaga and more.