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“I think the worst thing in the world would be going around with the message, ‘I’m going to shake things up.’ That would be a huge mistake,” he said yesterday in the NEA conference room, even as his office was being painted and spruced up for a new era, one that arts supporters have eagerly anticipated for years.
And while Landesman is treading lightly for the moment, he is an unabashed hawk on the issue of money; increased funding, he said, is one of the barriers the NEA needs to overcome if it intends to once more lead the country’s sprawling network of artists and arts organizations. He also wants to reinstate grants for individual artists, a program that ended when the NEA was almost hounded to extinction by conservative critics in the 1990s.