Up from Mapplethorpe: but far from a conservative darling: the arts endowment today.(Washington)

THE day after Janet Jackson's peep show at the Super Bowl, a joke made its way around the offices of the National Endowment for the Arts: Did we fund that?

It's a fair question for a federal agency that has underwritten exhibitions far more revealing than Jackson's striptease. Over the years, the NEA has bankrolled provocateurs such as the S&M photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and "performance artist" Annie Sprinkle. Had it financed Jackson's performance as well, that would be outrageous--but hardly surprising, given all that has come before.

The NEA, of course, had nothing to do with the CBS halftime show. But that same week, conservatives nevertheless received a shock in its behalf, when First Lady Laura Bush declared that the agency would receive an $18 million funding boost in the White House budget proposal for 2005--nearly 15 percent above current levels. "I'm proud that this is the largest annual increase in more than 20 years," she said.

That announcement undercuts the message of fiscal austerity the Bush administration has been trying to convey amid rising conservative complaints about the rapid growth of government, from the escalating cost of the new prescription-drug benefit to the forthcoming highway bill. To be sure, the arts endowment is small beans in an era of multi-trillion-dollar allocations. The proposal to spend $140 million next year represents a microscopic sliver of the federal pie; removing it completely would, for example, cover American expenses in Iraq for about half a day. Yet much of the Right's fiscal frustration has zeroed in on the arts endowment. Conservatives wonder why the agency wasn't zeroed out years ago, when it served as a stock villain in soapbox tales of federal excess.

The NEA is no stranger to budget battles; its first one started before it was even created. When the builders of LBJ's Great Society were pushing for an arts endowment in 1965, the penny-pinching Iowa congressman H. R. Gross--who once questioned whether taxes should pay for the gas fueling the eternal flame at JFK's gravesite--mocked the notion that federal dollars ought to finance paintings and ballets. He tried to derail the bill establishing the NEA by offering an amendment permitting government sponsorship of belly dancing, which he defined as "jactitations and/or rhythmic contractions and coordinated relaxations of the serrati, obliques, and abdominis recti group[s] of muscles--accompanied by rotary undulations, tiles, and turns." Gross didn't get his way, but perhaps he would have if Congress had known the NEA eventually would pay for Karen Finley to smear her naked body with chocolate sauce and pepper it with bean sprouts in an attempt to make some kind of point about sexism.

Although the first round of NEA grants was of generally defensible quality--recipients included the likes of sculptor Mark di Suvero--many in Washington understood that the spending wasn't really about aesthetics. Shortly after the Kennedy assassination, presidential aide Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. lobbied President Johnson on the political merits of cultural pork. Arts funding, he said, "can strengthen the connections between the administration and the intellectual and artistic community--something not to be dismissed when victory or defeat next fall will probably depend on who carries New York, Pennsylvania, California, Illinois, and Michigan." Years later Richard Nixon received similar advice from his own team, and the NEA budget increased eightfold on his watch.

As the number of NEA handouts grew, the debate shifted away from the root question of whether it is the federal government's job to subsidize art, and toward the specific matter of what grant recipients were actually producing. In 1970, the agency awarded $500 to support the composition of a one-word poem: "lighght." That was merely silly. Grants in the 1980s occasionally sustained flamboyant obscenity, such as when the NEA subsidized Andres Serrano, who then submerged a crucifix in his own urine, snapped a photo, and named it Piss Christ. That image became a powerful icon of the culture wars and helped make it possible for Republicans to slash NEA funding by 39 percent after they captured Congress in 1994. Conservatives were disappointed that they didn't ...