Obama's 2013 budget calls for 5% increase for arts and culture

President Obama’s proposed 2013 budget, released Monday, calls for a 5% increase in spending for three cultural grantmaking agencies and three Washington, D.C., arts institutions.

Obama aims to boost outlays from $1.501 billion to $1.576 billion, encompassing the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities (NEA and NEH), the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the Smithsonian Institution, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the National Gallery of Art.

The arts and humanities endowments each would get a 5.5% boost, to $154.255 million -- nearly restoring cuts announced in December. But if Congress approves the president’s proposal for the fiscal year that begins in October 2012, the NEA and NEH will still be well short of the $167.5 million each was set to receive before two separate rounds of cuts instigated by Congressional Republicans during 2011.

Obama is proposing $231.9 million for IMLS, a $439,000 reduction.

The Smithsonian Institution, by far the heavy hitter of federal cultural spending, would receive $856.8 million -- a 3.7% hike for its operating budget, which would rise to $660.3 million, and a 12.3% increase in capital expenditures, to $196.5 million. The biggest capital expense would be $85 million, to continue construction on the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

New budget plan cuts NEA and NEH 5.6% but boosts Smithsonian

The National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities each will see a 5.6% budget reduction in fiscal 2012 under a spending bill passed Friday in the House that's expected to prevent a feared government shutdown.

Under the bill, each agency would have $146.3 million to spend during the budget year that began in October, down from $155 million. It's the second cut this year for the two grant-making agencies, which began 2011 with budgets of $167.5 million. The combined cuts now total 12.7%.

Americans for the Arts, the national advocacy group that lobbies to maximize arts spending -– or at least to minimize arts-spending cuts -– said that $146.3 million is what President Obama had penciled in in his original budget proposal for the NEA and the NEH, representing a compromise between the $155 million suggested by the Senate and the $135 million proposed by the House during earlier subcommittee negotiations over the budget.

The Senate passed the spending bill Saturday morning, and it now moves to President Obama for his signature.

Gauguin painting's attacker isn't the only crazy one

The woman who attacked a Paul Gauguin painting with her fists at Washington's National Gallery of Art on Friday might be mentally ill. According to a published report, the woman told police that the painting of two bare-breasted Tahitian women is "very homosexual. I was trying to remove it. I think it should be burned ... I am from the American CIA and I have a radio in my head. I am going to kill you."

If she is deranged, one wonders: What is the excuse for the Washington City Paper, which Tuesday published a story with the headline "Three Works at the National Gallery We’d Have Defaced Before Gauguin"?

The alternative tabloid proceeded to "recommend" three works in the museum's collection more suitable for trashing than the Post-Impressionist picture, which is on loan from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art to a popular traveling exhibition. One of the three writers even explains, "Actually, I've been defacing a work of art very subtly since September last year," claiming to regularly add colored pencil marks to a Sol LeWitt wall drawing at the museum.

The story appears in the paper's ArtsDesk blog, not on a comedy page, where standards would probably be higher.

The authors do bend over backwards to say they "recoiled at the news" of the original attack, and in a lame attempt at wit repeat variations of "don't try this at [your] home [museum]." But I suspect the shiver that ran down the spines of every museum curator around the globe when the Gauguin story first appeared, fearing possible copycats, will get a new jolt from what amounts to water-cooler tomfoolery now posted by art critics on the Internet.

Initial examination of the Gauguin painting showed no damage, according to conservators at the National Gallery, although study continues. (The painting was behind Plexiglass.) That's a good thing.

So was the quick action of the museum guard who intervened in what can only be described as a sad event, both for the art and for the plainly troubled attacker. Washington City Paper is an alternative newspaper, but who knew that the alternative to sad was dumb?

ALSO:

Art review: 'David Smith: Cubes & Anarchy' at LACMA

Art review: 'Vija Celmins: Television and Disaster, 1964-1966' at LACMA

Art review: 'William Leavitt: Theater Objects' at MOCA

-- Christopher Knight

@twitter.com/KnightLAT

Photo: Paul Gauguin, "Two Tahitian Women," 1898. Credit: Associated Press / National Gallery of Art