That's right. The agency essentially started in 1967. In 1969 the budget was $8.5 million. By 1974 it was more than $64 million.

I take it that the agency hasn't grown more efficient over time in its use of its money.

In 1967, they were giving away $16 in grant money for every administrative dollar they spent. By 1996, they were giving away $4 in grants for every administrative dollar. You plant a bureaucracy, you water it, it's well fed and it blooms. But it doesn't bloom in a way that serves your mission; it blooms in a way that serves itself.

How much favoritism is there at the NEA?

There is a lot of garden-variety favoritism. But the more pernicious form of favoritism is a stylistic bias. Philip Pearlstein, a figurative painter, tells a terrific story. He was on a panel, and he sat there watching slides with his fellow panelists. At lunch, he was thinking over what he'd seen, and he realized that he hadn't seen one representational work. In fact, he hadn't even seen one work that was a four-sided canvas with paint on it. He remarked on this to some NEA staffers, and they explained that the NEA had asked a few of the panelists to come in the previous day and cull out all of the applicants they felt were not competitive. So he spent some hours going through the works that had been culled out. And he found among the rejects far and away the best artists in the whole lot. Many were painters, and not all of them were representational.

Meaning that, despite all the progressive talk, the kind of art the endowment supports has become more and more restricted?

The NEA when it first started was funding work in every stylistic category one can imagine. And then, even as the budget was getting larger and the number of grants was mushrooming, the kind of art that was being funded became of a narrower and narrower variety. When I looked at what was funded in 1995, almost every single artist was making art that was primarily geared toward social critique. If you're a painter and you go about your task, and your work is about paint, or space, or process, or whatever, but it isn't also driven by a desire to critique society in some manner, don't bother applying to the NEA.

To what extent is the NEA guiding and dictating this? And to what extent is it simply responding to what artists are doing?

There are excellent artists out there who don't do this kind of work and who have not received any of these grants. Perceptual painting, for example, has persisted through the postmodern period, and none of those artists have received any NEA grants. And many of them have applied for many years.

Americans can get terribly worked up about arts funding even though many of them don't interact with the fine arts at all. How to explain this, especially when it's a matter of mere pennies and when there are so many other flagrant examples of government waste and stupidity?

I think in part it's the fact that the formula for being a successful artist today has come to include learning how to critique the American public itself. When you have a whole generation of artists who have cultivated careers bent on this task, on critiquing the public -- in making fun of religion or patriotism, or of the expectation that the arts will be beautiful -- shockingly, the public reacts. Well, if you poke an animal with a sharp stick long enough, it's going to turn around and bite your hand. The fact that censorship is always the first argument raised in the art wars strikes me as amazingly hypocritical. It's not only artists in this country who have free speech, it's everybody else too.

What's wrong with a little government welfare for the arts?

We have no proof, except for the very beginning of the endowment's existence, that the government has actually helped the arts. I think the best situation is where well-run private foundations give grants that do not discriminate on a stylistic basis but on the basis of quality.

England, France and Germany have enormous cultural programs.

The Netherlands does too. It has warehouses full of the work artists have produced that it can't do anything with.

Doesn't it seem a little barbaric that a major country shouldn't have a sizable cultural program?

I never assume the European example is a great one to follow.

Is there any reason to think that the NEA might one day be terminated?

Realistically, abolishing the NEA is a nonissue. If the Gingrich Congress couldn't do it, it's not going to be done. No one running for office is even talking about it.

What's likely to happen to it?

I think until someone can determine whether we can achieve a considerable shift in the way the NEA goes about its fundamental business, and until we've determined whether many of the corrupting influences that have undermined the NEA can be reversed, it's best to keep the NEA small, run it well and hope for the best.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"