This thesis is an art-historical inquiry into the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and its controversies in the 1990s. A socio-economic model of instrumentalization of the arts based on Pierre Bourdieu's and David Throsby's conceptualizations of cultural capital is first developed. The model is then used to explore the notion of "congressional aesthetics," or a particular brand of arts-instrumentalization adopted by the U.S. Congress for post-WWII federal projects involving art, and two cases of its implementation. The first case is the successful implementation of congressional aesthetics in the instrumentalization of the arts in Sino-American cultural diplomacy during the Cold War. The kind of American art in the 1950s enabled the successful implementation of congressional aesthetics. The opposite case is then investigated: the failed implementation of congressional aesthetics in the operation of the NEA in the 1980s. Specifically, the NEA controversies of the 1990s can be traced to the agency's failure to conform to congressional aesthetics. Failed congressional aesthetics also results largely from the type of American art being produced in the 1980s.