Ben Donenberg

I found Christopher Knight's piece about the National Endowment for the Arts politically naive ["Can He Bring the NEA Out of Hiding?" May 14]. The NEA has its critics and most of them fail to appreciate that the Endowment currently enjoys its highest level of bipartisan support among elected officials in many years. This is precisely because the former chairman, Dana Gioia, understood that the Endowment is funded by taxpayer dollars and therefore has the responsibility to support art that speaks to as broad a patchwork of American people as is possible.