The insurance valuation is a whopping $2.4 billion — not even our museum, the largest art museum in the nation,
could come close to paying the premium for such coverage without the federal indemnity the N. E.A.
The N. E.A.’s budget is comparatively minuscule — $148 million last year, or 0.004 percent of annual federal discretionary expenditures — while the arts sector it supports employs millions of Americans
and generates billions each year in revenue and tax dollars.
Supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, the exhibition, “Age of Empires,” will teach our visitors about the origins of China, the superpower
that is now playing a major role in the balance of world power and trade.
This week, curators and conservators from the Metropolitan Museum of Art are in Beijing working with Chinese colleagues to pack these
and other objects for transportation to New York, where they will be featured in an exhibition this spring.
Laid out on a folding table was an exquisite array of vases, ritual vessels and a set of heart-stoppingly beautiful silver gilt tigers and dragons
that fit in the palm of my hand, perhaps part of a long-forgotten regal board game.
E.A., founded in 1965, serves three critical functions: It promotes the arts; it distributes and stimulates funding; and it administers a program
that minimizes the costs of insuring arts exhibitions through indemnity agreements backed by the government.
Similar grants have helped the Met mount exhibitions on the art of Jerusalem, India, Korea, Islam, Africa and Afghanistan.
Four years ago, in a small warehouse in central China, a team of Chinese archaeologists
showed me objects that they had unearthed from a nearby ancient tomb.