As NEA money for the arts has dried up in America, should we be surprised that private financing interests have moved in and that charges of conflict of interest are being leveled at museums and theaters? Robert Brustein writes that: “the high arts have become an endangered species in this country, being picked off by a variety of sharpshooters, including commercial producers, populists, politicians, multi-culturalists, middlebrow critics and, not least of all, the foundations. At the event celebrating thirty-five years of the NEA, I imagined that I saw the heads of many of those extinct animals mounted on the walls, under a plaque designated ‘Art with a capital `A.” – New Republic