Dana Gioia is the new head man at the National Endowment for the Arts. It’s been a fairly thankless job for the last decade or so, ever since the agency came under congressional fire for funding a few controversial artists in the early 1990s. Gioia admits that his toughest task may be to somehow craft a new image for the NEA, while also working to reestablish it as the preeminent funding institution in the American arts world, something it hasn’t been in quite some time. This objective is further complicated by the strange nature of current events: state governments nationwide are slashing their arts budgets and artists are coming under public fire for their opposition to the war in Iraq.