Lily Janiak January 13, 2021Updated: January 20, 2021, 2:47 pm
Former Vice President Joe Biden accepts the Democratic nomination for president in Wilmington, Del., in August. President-elect Biden has been an intermittent consumer of the arts, but cultural leaders credit him as a key source of government financial support. Photo: Erin Schaff, New York Times
A switch from a Republican to a Democrat in the Oval Office doesn’t necessarily mean more funding for the arts.
In the past four decades, the National Endowment for the Arts’ annual budget, which is set by Congress, took its biggest hits during Democratic administrations: when the culture wars over works by Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, Barbara DeGenevieve and the so-called “NEA Four” led Congress to reduce the endowment’s budget by more than 38% from 1995 to 1996, and then during the Obama administration, when the budget took a series of hits from a recent high of more than $167 million in 2010 to abou