NEA chair hopes to restore agency's image

WASHINGTON -- The new chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia, has big plans for the agency: a national tour of Shakespeare's plays, a national poetry recitation contest, programs for rural and military communities.\nAbove all, he wants to change the NEA's image. A decade after conservatives objected to such federally funded projects as Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs, which featured sadomasochistic themes, Gioia acknowledges that even he often defines the NEA by its most difficult time.\n"I think my feelings toward the endowment are much like many Americans'. It's that this absolutely great institution got caught in the culture wars," he said Tuesday during an interview at his office, a bright, spacious room just down the road from the White House.\n"The reason I came here ... was a conviction we need to restore the endowment to its rightful place as one of the premier institutions in the United States."\nGioia, 52, has both an artistic and commercial background. He is a poet who won a 2002 American Book Award for his third book of verse, "Interrogations at Noon." He is also a former vice president for marketing at General Foods Corp.\nNominated by President Bush and confirmed unanimously by the Senate in January to a four-year term, Gioia succeeds Michael P. Hammond, who died last year after just a week in office.\nGioia presides over an organization founded during the peak of government activism, the 1960s, and still recovering from near-extinction in the 1990s. Funding for the current fiscal year is $115.7 million, much better than a few years ago, but far below what it received in the early 1980s, when the budget topped $150 million.\n"My role ... is to come in and try to build a consensus, a bipartisan consensus that we fund the arts," he said, noting he has met with Congressional leaders from both parties and dined at the White House with the president and first lady Laura Bush.\n"In our history, we have given 120,000 grants, of which 11 are controversial. What is the percentage? Would you put an automaker out of business because out of 120,000 cars there are problems with 11"