House lawmakers defeated a proposal that would have eliminated congressional oversight of State Department spending on artwork for U.S. embassies worldwide. The measure’s author, Representative Gerry Connolly (D., Va.), said it was necessary to push back on a cultural moment akin to the Red Scare and that stripping Congress of its ability to review expensive purchases of art was critical to fostering peace and alliances.
Ultimately, although 170 Democratic lawmakers backed the proposal to end Congress’s right to receive notifications on expensive art purchases, enough Democrats teamed up with Republican members to kill the proposal yesterday.
State is prohibited by law from spending more than 5 percent of the cost of a new embassy or other diplomatic building on artwork. In the recent past, the State Department has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on sculptures and paintings for certain outposts, including, in recent years, $200,000 on a mural for the new U.S. embassy in Guatemala, $250,000 for a “multi-media, multi-dimensional installation” in the Mexico embassy, and $420,000 for a “custom marble sculpture” of a cloud at the embassy in Montenegro.
To minimize potentially wasteful purchases, Congress last year passed a measure requiring the State Department to notify Congress of any planned art purchases over $37,500.
Connolly’s measure, which was proposed as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act this week, would have effectively repealed the congressional notification requirement, allowing State to make large art purchases without oversight.
He explained the rationale for this on the House floor Wednesday night: “These requirements require Congress to review all art that’s purchased for the Art in Embassies Program beyond that limit. That places a tedious and gratuitous strain on our ability to run the program at all,” Connolly said. “These attacks on cultural exchange programs are not new. Sadly, in the 1940s, in sort of a Red Scare moment in the United States, members of Congress attempted to defund and delegitimize the works of modern American artists across the board.”
Connolly’s comments sparked a sharp rejoinder from Representative Tim Burchett (R., Tenn.), who called the Connolly proposal “ridiculous” and speculated that Democratic lawmakers were embarrassed to even debate it: “I feel like the opposing party is probably a little embarrassed that it’s even being brought up, the fact that we’re doing it so late, but it would repeal a provision that Democrats approved last year that simply requires the State Department to notify Congress before it spends thousands of dollars on art for United States embassies.”
“Most of this art will never be seen except by the employees of the embassies. Now these same Democrats want to repeal this provision because they know there is absolutely no way they can justify spending millions of taxpayer dollars on art when inflation is at 9.1 percent, gas is nearly $5 a gallon, and our country is on the brink of a recession.”
The debate continued, with Connolly accusing Burchett of “intolerance”; he waxed poetic about the significance of his recent trip to Madrid, where he served a term as president of NATO’s parliamentary assembly, during the alliance’s recent summit.
“I visited the Prado,” he said, referring to the famed Spanish museum, “and I looked at one of the most powerful pictures I’ve ever seen, by Goya, about Napoleonic occupation of his homeland, Spain. He witnessed that harm, and he depicted it, and it drove him almost into madness what he witnessed.” Connolly seemed to be referring to The Third of May 1808, a painting that depicts the execution of Spanish resistance fighters by French forces, housed at the Prado.
“Maybe my friend thinks that art ought to be zero,” Connolly continued, “but I believe millions of Americans would disagree.”
But Representative Michael McCaul (R., Texas), the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee — who introduced the art-spending cap — told NR that the spending cap does not actually ban art purchases.
He also offered a dig at Connolly’s comments about Spanish art. “I hate to break it to Representative Connolly, but weapons win wars — not $400,000 cloud sculptures. And if he doesn’t believe me, he can ask the Ukrainians on the front lines who are begging for more HIMARS and Stingers — not Picassos.”
In his own statement to NR, responding to McCaul, Connolly kept the war of words surrounding his since-defeated amendment going, sticking with McCaul’s pivot from Goya to Picasso.
“I hate to break it to Mr. McCaul but Picasso’s Guernica has educated more people on the horrors of war than any other human expression,” Connolly said. “It’s a false choice to frame the issue as an either or. Our embassies are a representation of the United States. This amendment would simply cut bureaucratic red tape to allow us to share American artwork around the world.”