Last month, Patrick Courrielche, a Los Angeles-based arts consultant, was invited by the National Endowment for the Arts to join a 75-person conference call “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,’’ according to the invitation.
Pardon me? The taxpayer-funded NEA is trying to recruit sympathetic artists to push the Obama agenda? Yes, it sounds wacky, and it sounded wacky to Courrielche, too. “Artists shouldn’t be used as tools of the state to help create a climate amenable to their positions, which is what appears to be happening in this instance,’’ Courrielche wrote in an Internet post. Speaking on the phone, he explained in greater detail how the organizers - NEA communications director Yosi Sargent, a promoter of Shepard Fairey’s famous “Hope’’ poster; Buffy Wicks, a former Obama field organizer now with the White House Office of Public Engagement, and three others - “said we had the ability to shape the people around us.’’
“The NEA was not created to encourage artists to address issues,’’ he said, and he’s right. State-sponsored agitprop, or agitational propaganda, is a tool usually associated with totalitarian regimes. According to its website, the NEA sucks down about $150 million a year from Congress, to support “excellence in the arts, both new and established; bringing the arts to all Americans; and providing leadership in arts education.’’ This year, for instance, the endowment gave over $1 million to Massachusetts nonprofits “threatened by declines in philanthropic and other support during the current economic downturn,’’ among other local grants.
Courrielche, who admits to being a strong Hillary Clinton supporter, is clearly a troublemaker of the first water. Before ratting out the NEA’s exercise in Groupthink, he published an essay in Reason magazine headlined “The Artist Formerly Known as Dissident,’’ chiding the arts community for “not meeting its duty of always questioning those in power.’’
“It’s time for the art community to return to its historical role in political affairs, which means speaking to power, not on behalf of it,’’ he continued. “Most artists would not want to be referred to as tools of the state, but in the case of Obama’s administration, that’s exactly what they’ve been so far.’’
NEA spokesman Sargent declined to comment on Courrielche’s remarks. A White House spokeswoman said Courrielche misconstrued the purpose of the phone call. “The White House’s Office of Public Engagement conducts outreach for the White House and engages the public in what our government is doing, and as part of that role it conducts calls and meetings on the public service initiative United We Serve,’’ she said. “This call was a briefing on public service - not political, informing arts organizations about the call to national service.’’
File under: Your tax dollars at work.
Look who’s back in my Inbox: “Alex - Michelle and I were heartbroken to learn this morning of the death of our dear friend, Senator Ted Kennedy. For nearly five decades, virtually every major piece of legislation to advance the civil rights’’ - and so on for 400 words. Signed, “Sincerely, President Barack Obama.’’
The question of White House spamming was raised, and never answered, at a White House briefing earlier this month during a testy exchange between Fox News correspondent Major Garrett and Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs, concerning a widely distributed message on health care from David Axelrod.
Garrett: “You don’t have an explanation of how someone who never signed up for an e-mail from the White House might get an e-mail from the White House?’’
Gibbs: “I hesitate to give you an answer because you might impugn the motives of the answer.’’
Call me old-fashioned, but I think the president of the United States should save his signature for legislation and correspondence, and not debase it like a scam-peddling spammer.
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com 
