The insurance valuation is a whopping $2.4 billion — not even our museum, the largest art museum in the nation,<br />could come close to paying the premium for such coverage without the federal indemnity the N. E.A.<br />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<br />and generates billions each year in revenue and tax dollars.<br />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<br />that is now playing a major role in the balance of world power and trade.<br />This week, curators and conservators from the Metropolitan Museum of Art are in Beijing working with Chinese colleagues to pack these<br />and other objects for transportation to New York, where they will be featured in an exhibition this spring.<br />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<br />that fit in the palm of my hand, perhaps part of a long-forgotten regal board game.<br />E.A., founded in 1965, serves three critical functions: It promotes the arts; it distributes and stimulates funding; and it administers a program<br />that minimizes the costs of insuring arts exhibitions through indemnity agreements backed by the government.<br />Similar grants have helped the Met mount exhibitions on the art of Jerusalem, India, Korea, Islam, Africa and Afghanistan.<br />Four years ago, in a small warehouse in central China, a team of Chinese archaeologists<br />showed me objects that they had unearthed from a nearby ancient tomb.
