by Paul
Mattick, Jr.
[Paul Mattick, Jr.’s
essay “Arts and the State” ran in the “Books & The Arts” section of The Nation of 1 October
1990 (251.6). It was a seminal broadside
from the left in the Culture War precipitated by the right during the
presidential administration of George H. W. Bush (1989-93).
[I think Mattick’s
article is self-explanatory, but there are some period references that are now
over 30 years old and may no longer ring bells for some readers. So I’m going to include a list of notes at
the end of the post that I hope will ease any confusion. Words, phrases, and references that are
defined or explained below are marked with an asterisk.]
Visiting
the exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs at the Institute of
Contemporary Art in Boston a month ago, it was hard at first to see what all
the fuss was about. The controversy that
has dogged the show since its organization by the Institute of Contemporary Art
in Philadelphia* certainly made itself felt in the huge numbers of visitors
(tickets sold out well in advance) and in the aura of decorous excitement that
enveloped those who managed to get in.
Most of the pictures, however, were unexciting. With the exception of a handful of striking
images from the artist’s last years, we saw celebrity portraits shot in 1940s
fashion style, arty flowers, naked black men in a venerable art-nude
tradition. In a distinct area, however,
reached only by waiting in a patient line of cultured scopophiles*,
were the pictures which more than the others had called down upon the National
Endowment for the Arts, partial funder of the Philadelphia I.C.A., the wrath of
America’s self-appointed guardians of morality.
There were more flowers, more naked black men
and a set of s&m photos that was undeniably gripping. Here the subject matter overcame
Mapplethorpe’s tendency to artiness and commercial finish in a set of documents
with the power of the once dark and hidden brought to light. Here are some things some people like to do,
they say; this is part of our world; you can look or not, but now you know they
exist, whatever you think of them. In an
age saturated with sexual imagery of all kinds, these pictures were perhaps not
as disturbing as they might have been to more innocent eyes. At any rate, the visiting public was not so
horrified as to fail to crowd the museum store to purchase bookfuls of
Mapplethorpe’s pictures (along with black nude-emblazoned T-shirts, floral
porcelain plates and bumper stickers proclaiming support for freedom of the
arts). Nonetheless, these photographs,
in the company of a few other pictures and performances, have evoked a storm of
Congressional and popular indignation that now threatens to sweep away the
N.E.A. itself. This, in turn, has given
rise to attempts to defend the current mode of state patronage of the
arts.
It
is difficult to speak of real controversy in this area, as the two discourses
at work are to a great degree at cross-purposes. That of the naysaying politicians tends
toward expressions of traditional American anti-intellectualism, portraying
state arts funding as the use, basically for the gratification of a degenerate
Eastern elite, of money better spent on local pork barrels and military
projects. Art, in this view, has a
natural affinity with sex, subversion and fraudulence. On the other hand, the statements of
opposition to censorship and calls for arts funding by artists, dealers, other
art professionals and liberal politicians take as given the social value of the
arts, their consequent claim on the public purse and (with some disagreement)
the current mode of distribution of the goodies. Without being in favor of either censorship
or the diversion of yet more money to produce new bombers and missiles, one may
step back and attempt to rethink the question.
Lacking
a feudal heritage, a tradition of princely magnificence such as that which
stands behind state cultural policy in European countries, the United States
has no long history of governmental patronage of the arts. Under American law, corporations themselves
were forbidden to engage in philanthropy, including support of the arts, until 1935.
Washington was supposed, in this most
purely capitalist of all nations, to spend only the minimum needed to control
labor and defend business’s national interests.
Theater, including opera, functioned in the nineteenth century as a
commercial enterprise across the country, and the visual arts were for the most
part produced for private purchase. When
growing economic power stimulated the mercantile and industrial upper classes
of the later nineteenth century to call for the establishment of museums,
symphony orchestras and other cultural institutions, they had to put up the
money themselves. Thus, while the
revolutionary regime in France, for example, took over the King’s palace and
its contents to create the Musée du Louvre for the nation, the United States
did not have a National Gallery in Washington until Andrew Mellon gave his
personal collection to the country and started building a structure to house it
in 1938.
The
arts began to attract more public attention with the start of the twentieth
century, as can be seen in the national publicity gained by the Armory Show
which introduced European modernism to the United States in 1913. Whereas art and all those things called
“culture” in general had earlier been largely identified with the European
upper class, Regionalism, given national exposure by a Time cover story
in 1934, claimed to be a uniquely American style. At the time of the New Deal, a few farsighted
individuals conceived the idea of government aid to the arts as part of the
general federal effort to combat the Depression. Two programs for the employment of artists,
one run out of the Treasury Department and a much larger one as part of the
Works Progress Administration [W.P.A.], represented the national government’s
first entry into patronage (aside from the commissioning of official buildings,
statuary and paintings). In the view of
the organizers of these projects, their long-term rationale was support for the
arts as a fundamental part of American life; but they could be realized, in the
face of much opposition from Congress (and professional artists’ associations,
true to the principles of free enterprise), only as relief programs, employing
otherwise starving (and potentially subversive) artists and preserving their
productive skills during the emergency.
Both programs died, after a period of reduction, with America’s entry
into the war.
Institutional concern with the arts developed
markedly with the U.S. rise to world supremacy after the war. The war reversed the normal flow of American
artists to Europe, bringing refugee artists to New York and California and thus
stimulating artistic life, at least on the edges of North America. More important, its segue into the cold war
joined to the growing desire of the American upper class to play social roles
equal to its expanded global importance a new use for American modern art as a
symbol of the advantages of a free society.
New York abstraction, still unappreciated by any sizable public, was not
only promoted by the mass media that had once publicized Regionalism but was
shipped around the world, along with jazz music and industrial design, by
government bodies like the United States Information Agency and by the
Rockefeller-dominated Museum of Modern Art.
In modern art, it seemed, America was now number one; while still
incomprehensible (as critic Max Kozloff* once observed), art that celebrated
the autonomy of the creative individual no longer seemed so subversive. In the realm of classical music, Van
Cliburn’s victory in a piano competition in Moscow in 1958 was an event of
political as well as cultural importance.
More fundamentally, beyond issues of international
political prestige and the aristocratic pretensions of the very rich, the idea
was gaining ground among America’s elite—particularly in the Northeast but in a
city like Chicago as well—that art is a Good Thing, a glamorous thing, even
(more recently) a fun thing. This
attitude rapidly trickled down to the middle class, whose self-assertion as
leading citizens of an affluent and powerful nation was expressed in a new
attachment to culture. As interest in
art spread throughout the country, the 1950s saw galleries in department
stores, rising museum and concert attendance and the commercial distribution of
classical LPs and inexpensive reproductions of famous paintings. Studio training and art history departments
proliferated in the universities. A
handful of corporate executives, in alliance with cultural entrepreneurs like
Mortimer Adler and R. M. Hutchins*, discovered that culture, whether classic or
modern, could be both marketed and used as a marketing medium.
In
part this reflected the changing nature of the business class; while fewer than
50 percent of top executives had some college education in 1900, 76
percent did by 1950. The postwar rise of
the professional manager helped break down the traditional barrier between the
worlds of business and culture, affecting the self-image of American society as
a whole. To this was joined—with the
growth of academia, research institutions and all levels of government—the
emergence of the new professional-intellectual stratum, connected in spirit to
the power elite in a way unknown to the alienated intelligentsia of
yesteryear. In 1952 the editors of Partisan
Review introduced a symposium on “Our Country and Our Culture” with the
observation that just a decade earlier, “America was commonly thought to be
hostile to art and culture. Since then,
however, the tide has begun to turn. . . . Europe. . . no longer assures that rich
experience of culture which inspired and justified a criticism of American
life. . . . [N]ow America has become the protector of Western civilization?” [The editing is original with Mattick. ~Rick]
Thus
politics, business and culture joined hands. Art’s growing value as an area of
investment and domestic public relations could only be reinforced by its
emergence as a marker of international prestige. The Kennedys’ Camelot was a watershed, with
its transformation of the Europhilia typical of the American elite into the
representation of the White House as a world cultural center. Kennedy counselor Arthur Schlesinger Jr.* put
it this way, in arguing for a government arts policy: “We will win world
understanding of our policy and purposes not through the force of our arms or
the array of our wealth but through the splendor of our ideals?”
Such
efforts both led to and were enormously enhanced by the founding of the
National Endowment for the Arts in 1965 and its rapid development
thereafter. While it represented the
fulfillment of ideas bruited about various levels of government since the
Eisenhower days, the N.E.A. was realized as an accompaniment to Lyndon
Johnson’s Great Society; like that program as a whole (and like the W.P.A.), it
reflected the principle of a the state’s responsibility for those aspects of
the good life not automatically taken care of by market forces. It should not be thought that it was
established without opposition (as of course no Great Society program was); in
fact, the N.E.A. achieved legislative reality only as a unit of a National
Foundation for the Arts and Humanities, of which the National Endowment for the
Humanities was the more respectable half.
In addition, the arts were carefully defined to include the productions
of the culture industry—movies, radio, fashion and industrial design—along with
the traditional “high” arts. The
Endowment not only survived numerous challenges to legitimacy but saw its budget
rise between 1969 and 1977 from $8 million to more than $82 million, and by
1990 to $171 million. This, moreover, is
only a portion of total arts spending, which includes sums directed, for some
examples, to museum development, to the Smithsonian Institution and to projects
under the aegis of the National Park System.
In addition, the big push to culture given by Congress since the
mid-1960s included changes in tax laws—in recent years to a certain extent
undone—encouraging donations of art and money to museums and other
institutions.
One
must not exaggerate: The sums spent on its arts agency by the American
government have always been derisorily small, both relative to other government
programs and in comparison with the spending of other industrialized capitalist
nations. West Germany, the world leader,
spent about $73 per inhabitant on the arts last year; the Netherlands spent
$33, and even Margaret Thatcher’s Britain laid out $12; the United States
indulged its culture-mongers with a measly 71 cents per capita. This amounted to less than 0.1 percent of the
federal budget (the Smithsonian alone receives a larger appropriation than the
N.E.A., as does the Pentagon’s military band program, budgeted in 1989 at $193
million). Even this, however, has seemed
too much to many conservative politicians, and the current effort to eliminate
or restrict the N.E.A. must be seen as one more protest by conservative forces
against a relatively novel effort with which they have never been happy.
Opposition
has typically focused, throughout the short history of government arts funding,
on moral and political issues as well as on the sacred character of the
taxpayer’s dollar. W.P.A. artists were
attacked for painting nudes, and a photographic registry of artists’ models was
held up in Congress as an example of the sort of filth that visual artists go
in for (along with political imagery of the Popular Front variety). In 1940 Senator Robert Reynolds from North
Carolina (which thirty years later would send forth the scourge of the N.E.A.,
Jesse Helms) urged Congress to refuse to fund the federal theater project, with
its “unsavory collection of communistic, un-American doctrines, its assortment
of insidious and vicious ideologies” and “putrid plays.”
The
N.E.A. was carefully designed to avoid many of the controversies that had
swirled around the W.P.A. The
nongovernmental panel system of peer review in awarding grants both tied the
endowment to arts institutions and shielded it from direct responsibility for
funding decisions. The fact that the
N.E.A. provides only partial funding for any institutional project and operates
largely in concert with state arts councils established a nationwide base of
support and further diluted its accountability.
In addition, the bulk of its funds have gone to support politically and
aesthetically conservative institutions like major art museums, orchestras and
opera and ballet companies.
Nonetheless,
the history of the N.E.A. is replete with an astonishing level of conflict for
such a tiny agency: struggles over financing “artistic excellence” versus
emphasis on “broadening access to culture”; over the support of less-than-high
art and over subsidization of experimental work often unrecognized as art by
the localities to which it has been offered.
In addition, the club of “family values,” that basic element of American
political rhetoric since the Civil War, was wielded by the endowment’s
opponents throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
Stress was laid on the effeminacy of ballet dancers, and much was made
of the fact that Erica Jong thanked the endowment for aid during the writing of
Fear of Flying*.
Meanwhile,
what we might call the Congressional Yahoo faction came to be joined, in a
curious alliance, by highbrow cultural conservatives like Hilton Kramer*, who
as art critic for The New York Times criticized N.E.A. grant-making
policy during the 1970s and continued his attacks as editor of The New
Criterion, founded in 1982 with money from a number of right-wing sources,
including the John M. Olin Foundation* [see Jon Wiener*, “Dollars for Neocon
Scholars,” January 1 (insertion Mattick’s ~Rick)].
Kramer directed his polemic both at such easy targets as the logrolling
habits of the N.E.A.’s grant-giving panels and at the endowment’s support for
what he called “a dedicated alliance of artists, academics, and so-called
activists” attempting “to politicize the life of art in this country.” Such people were typically “opposed to just
about every policy of the United States government except the one that put
money in their own pockets”; giving them that money was “supplying the rope to
those who are eager to see us hanged.”
The Heritage Foundation’s 1981 volume of policy recommendations for “a
Conservative Administration,” Mandate for Leadership*, contained
a paper on the N.E.H. and N.E.A. by Olin executive director Michael Joyce*. After suggesting that “as a true friend of
democracy, the NEH can teach the nation the limits of equalitarian [sic]
impulse,” Joyce indicated the need for the N.E.A. to turn from “politically
calculated goals of social policy (like the promotion of regional folk arts or
attempts to reach minority audience to a renewed stress on “excellence” and the
“cultivation of audiences with a true desire for high-quality artistic
experience.
The
Heritage Foundation’s recommendations suited the tenor of the times in this as
in other areas of federal policy. Opposition to arts spending gained strength
with the general turn against state expenditures (other than military ones)
during the 1980s. The Reagan government
attempted to cut the endowment’s funding by half as part of David Stockman’s*
implementation of what George Bush once called “voodoo economics.” As a member of Stockman’s team explained to
Livingston Biddle*, then chair of the endowment, the N.E.A. “was supporting art
that the people did not want or understand, art of no real value.” The political strength built up by the arts
during the preceding fifteen years was visible, however, in the success with
which this challenge was beaten back by pro-culture legislators.
The
twenty-odd senators who joined Jesse Helms* last year in protesting Andres
Serrano’s Piss Christ* as “shocking, abhorrent and completely
undeserving any recognition whatsoever”—especially that of the N.E.A.—were thus
following the example of earlier art-bashers.
One novelty of the situation was the involvement of a number of
conservative direct-mail operations, like the Rev.
Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association*, whose newsletter is sent to
around 400,000 addresses, including more than 170,000 churches. This sort, of outfit has generally occupied
itself on the cultural front with various forms of “popular production, from
politically liberal and risqué TV shows to rock-and-roll lyrics to neighborhood
porn shops to movies—such as Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ*,
which Wildmon picketed in 1988. The
extension of this malevolent interest to the high arts reflects the national
media exposure won by forms of elite culture during the last decade—due in part
to the efforts of the N.E.A. The vast
letter-writing campaigns that organizations like Wildmon’s are able to
instigate do not seem to reflect the trend of general public opinion
(according to some recent polls, at any rate), but they do represent a mass of
voters willing to be mobilized, and politicians, especially those not fond of
“atheistic, anti-American” imagery themselves, are ready to respond to them as
they have to the anti-choicers on abortion.
When Jesse Helms, originally alerted by a Wildmon mailing to the peril
to Christian values posed by the N.E.A., followed Alfonse D’Amato* in bringing
it to the attention of the Senate, he met with virtually no serious resistance,
and his now-famous anti-obscenity amendment*, tacked on to last year’s
appropriations bill, passed with ease (its later modification left its bite
intact).
However,
what the future will bring the N.E.A. is far from clear. Arts institutions and professionals have
begun to rally around the endowment, and they seem to have succeeded in
mustering support from the art-consuming public. A few restrictive decisions of
the N.E.A. have recently been called into question or reversed. The issue will in the short run be dealt with
politically, under the constraints of re-election campaigns and Congressional
wheeling and dealing. It is possible
that the arts have by now risen to such a position of ideological importance,
with modernism itself a staple of the status quo, that their claims will override
those of more antiquated “family values”—this is certainly true for the social
system as a whole, whatever happens in Washington under the pressure of local
and national politics.
Defenders
of the N.E.A. and of freedom of state-funded expression tend, like their
antagonists, to invoke “American values,” celebrating the arts as a natural
feature of a “free society.” A recent
advertisement placed in The New York Times by the Art Dealers
Association of America [“No Censorship Of Art,” under “Spring Art Showcase,” 13 May
1990, sec. 2 (“Arts & Leisure”): 34.
~Rick] is typical in
citing the Constitution and “the right of free expression which is one of the
core values of a democratic society.”
This ideological unity explains how one and the same organization—Philip
Morris Inc.—can support both sides of the controversy, funding the arts
lavishly and distributing copies of the Bill of Rights as a promotional
gimmick, while supporting the re-election campaign of Jesse Helms, a great
friend of the tobacco industry.
The
basic liberal argument was concisely stated by Richard Oldenburg*, director of
the Museum of Modern Art in New York, writing recently in MoMA’s Members
Quarterly. He identified the two
fundamental issues at stake as the continuance of government arts funding and
freedom of expression. The first is
important because “support for the arts is support for creativity, a national
resource essential to our future and a source of our pride and identity as a
nation.” And “creativity requires
freedom of expression,” including the liberty “to explore new paths which may occasionally
test our tolerance.” Oldenburg echoes
pro-art politicians and N.E.A. chair John Frohnmayer in pointing out how few
grants have been controversial out of the 85,000 made since 1965. Like any investment, investment in creativity
can be expected to miss the mark occasionally, but, according to Oldenburg,
“this is a small and necessary price to pay for nourishing imagination, for
respecting diversity, and for protecting our rights as individuals.” From this point of view, the only important
issue is control of the grant-giving process, which should clearly be in the
hands of art professionals—“experts,” as they are regularly called—rather than
in the clutches of politicians, whatever their stripe. As Anthony Lewis* put it in a summertime
column in The New York Times, “When politicians get into the business of
deciding what is legitimate art, the game is up.”
The other side has two basic responses to these
claims. According to Congressman Philip
Crane*, “Funding art, whether that art is considered outstanding or obscene, is
not a legitimate, nor is it a needed, function of the federal government.” But in any case, he continues, if art is to
receive state support, “Congress has a responsibility to its constituents to
determine what type of art taxpayers’ dollars will support.” This does not constitute censorship, such
arguments go: No one is preventing artists from doing whatever kind of work they
wish; but the taxpayers are under no obligation to pay for work they find
senseless or offensive.
Artist
friends who listen to talk radio all day in their studios tell me that this
sentiment seems to be widely shared, even by many opposed to censorship of
expression in the arts (this is also the implication of a recent Newsweek poll). In part, this is no doubt a reflection of the
enduring American uneasiness with sexuality, visible, for example, in the
ambivalence many feel regarding the availability of pornography. But it also seems to express resentment of
artists, apparently thought of by many Americans as a species of welfare
frauds, living high on the hog on government grants, free to devote themselves
to their peculiar pleasures and childish occupations.
Such
attitudes have deep historical roots.
For one thing, since their elaboration as a distinct domain of activity
in the centuries between the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution, the fine
arts have drawn their meaning in part from the contrast between free, creative
activity and labor directed toward the earning of money. The noncommercial soul of this department of
luxury-goods production, visible particularly in the bohemian flavor of the
avant-garde, is essential to art’s social role as sanctifier of a commercial
society: The love of art marks the bourgeoisie as the legitimate inheritor of
the civilization of the past, and heir to its ruling elites. At the same time, it makes the artist at once
an impractical, childish figure and a standing reproach to the devotees of the
bottom line. These remain important
features of the modern idea of art, though that concept has been changing
rapidly in recent decades, as a few artists have achieved wealth and celebrity
status, while bourgeois society has become more confident about its own value
system, and so more at ease with the commodity character of works of art.
Since
one important social function of art in the modern world has been as an
indicator of class position, it is not surprising that it is seen by many in
low-income brackets as a possession of the elite. In fact it is. Members of the corporate elite dominate the
boards of trustees that govern art institutions. And what little statistical survey work has
been done indicates that, despite the enormous enlargement of the art-consuming
public since the mid-1960s, that public is still overwhelmingly drawn from
upper-class and professional groups, with (for instance) blue-collar workers
contributing a negligible percentage.
This lends a certain plausibility to the efforts made so kindly on their
behalf by servants of social power like Jesse Helms “to stop the liberals from
spending taxpayers’ money on perverted, deviant art,” as Helms put it in a
fundraising letter. But to begin with,
it must be remembered that the public allegedly represented by the politicians
who speak for it has very little to do with what goes on at the heights of
power. As artist Richard Bolton* pointed
out in a recent article in New Art Examiner, “The recent outrage over
art was not fueled by popular rebellion, but by extremists with narrow and
self-serving agendas, by politicians who like to be in the news, and by a news
media driven by sensationalism.” At any
rate, those who, like Times columnist William Safire*, urge an end to
“forced arts-patronizing,” fail to extend the principle they invoke to other government
expenditures: the millions sent to the Nicaraguan contras*,
for example, or the billions expended on Star Wars and the Hubble space
telescope*. It is true, of course, that
the government’s money is at base a deduction from the social product, taken
from and spent without much say on the part of the producers. To question this arrangement, however, is
tantamount to demanding the abolition of the state, something hardly intended
by Safire, Helms or the Heritage Foundation.
What
they really have in mind, of course, is that the state should fund only art
already certified as “great”—that preserved in museums and concert halls, or
approved by conservative critics, the aesthetic component of the canon of
cultural literacy promoted by such as Allan Bloom* (another Olin Foundation
beneficiary, incidentally). In a Times
Op-Ed piece (“Say No to Trash”) commending the Corcoran Gallery in
Washington for its last-minute refusal of the Mapplethorpe show, New
Criterion publisher Samuel Lipman*, a Reagan appointee to the N.E.A.
supervisory National Council of the Arts, urged public art support to “more
fully concentrate on what it does so well: the championing of the great art of
the past, its regeneration in the present and its transmission to the
future.” It should refuse to promote art
whose raison d’être is its ability to outrage the public by dealing with extremities
of the human condition. More, of course,
than sadomasochistic or supposedly blasphemous imagery is at stake here. What is to go, opponents of the N.E.A.
generally agree, is, above all, artists and institutions on the social
fringe—gay and lesbian performance artists, feminist video makers, Latino
photographers and theater groups, black poets and painters.
We
are not speaking here of an avant-garde in the traditional sense. These artists
are not working outside the system, but for the most part are struggling to
improve their places inside it; however politically motivated or oppositional
in form or content their work may be, they are on the margins of official art or even—like Mapplethorpe—well ensconced within it. And indeed, while the Congressional
philistines tend to disparage the claims of such as Serrano that they produce
art at all, for a more sophisticated critic like Kramer, the issue is not,
strictly speaking, an aesthetic one.
While he sadly knew of no way to exclude Mapplethorpe’s work “from the
realm of art itself,” he wrote in the Times [“Is Art Above the Laws of
Decency?” New York Times 2 July 1989, sec. 2 (“Arts &
Leisure”): 1,7 ~Rick], the problem is that
“not all forms of art are socially benign in either their intentions or their effects.” Despite Kramer’s frequent fulminations
against the intrusion of political values into the realm of art, he here
demanded that a “social or moral standard” be consulted in determining what
sort of art the government should support.
For Kramer, like Lipman, the misdeeds of the
N.E.A. reflect the decline of decency throughout the culture, in high and
popular art alike, and so the erosion of the power of those who think like
him. “Unfortunately,” Kramer wrote,
“professional opinion in the art world can no longer be depended upon to make
wise decisions in these matters.” For
Helms and Co. the arts represent an issue far easier to campaign on than the
savings and loan scandal* or the coming depression. For art institutions, too, the struggle over
the N.E.A. provides a comfortable spot to take a stand. One museum curator remarked to me how handily
protesting the threat of N.E.A. censorship obviated paying attention to the
everyday censorship that goes on in the bulwarks of culture. Every choice of an exhibition to mount or a
program to perform, of course, implies a decision not to show or play something
else. Such choices are powerfully
subject to forces emanating from donors and potential donors, corporate
sponsors and the tastes of the sought-after audience. The most visible case is the deadly
limitation of orchestral and opera repertories to a small number of works that
can be depended on not to disturb listeners; it is well known that the playing
of too much twentieth-century music, for instance, leads directly to a decline
in ticket sales and diminished support.
A more blatantly political example was the Boston Pops Orchestra’s
refusal to honor its contract for a performance by Vanessa Redgrave* after her
statements in favor of Palestinian claims to nationhood; a famous case from the
land of modern art was the Guggenheim’s cancellation of Hans Haacke’s* planned
solo show in 1971 when the artist refused to withdraw three works judged
“inappropriate” by the director of the museum.
The
N.E.A. has indeed provided space at the margins which made life easier for many
artists and provided an expansion of cultural production beyond that which
would have been fostered by the market or private philanthropy alone. To take the case of theater, for example, while
there were just fifty-six nonprofit theaters in the United States in 1965,
there are more than 400 at present—and every Pulitzer Prize-winning play since
1976 has had its initial production at a nonprofit. Given the endowment’s important role in direct
arts financing and in stimulating private patronage (on average, N.E.A. funding
brings with it three times as much in private and state moneys) in the
mainstream as well as at the margins, the Helms amendment and its ilk have a
chilling effect on artists and institutions.
I am not qualified to judge whether restrictions such as those proposed
by Helms are, as some lawyers claim, unconstitutional. But that is certainly political—it is the use
of the state to foster some tastes at the expense of others—and it is certainly
censorship. Lipman makes the issue
clear: “In a free society, it is neither possible nor desirable to go very far [!]
in prohibiting the private activities that inspire this outré art,” he wrote
apropos of Mapplethorpe. But, he continues,
to believe that “because we are not compelled to witness what we as individuals
find morally unacceptable, we cannot refuse to make it available for others”
ignores the dreadful effects of “this decadence” on us and our children and
“our responsibility for others.” The
president of the Massachusetts branch of Morality in Media* put it more
pithily: “People looking at these kind of pictures become addicts and spread
AIDS.”
This
faith in the power of images for good or evil appears to involve a deep suspicion
that seemingly decent Americans will be overwhelmed by dark forces within them
that such images might unleash. It is no
accident that the assault on the N.E.A. gathered steam during the regime that
produced the Meese Report on obscenity*.
The current denunciations of “filth” continue key aspects of the
traditional discourse on pornography: When Helms displayed the offending
Mapplethorpes to his colleagues in the Senate, he first asked that the room be
cleared of women and children. Sexual
imagery, however distasteful, is permissible as the private possession of
(exclusive groups of) males. What has made
pictures like Mapplethorpe’s an issue is, in Kramer’s words, “the demand that
is now being made to accord these hitherto forbidden images the status of
perfectly respectable works of art,” thus eligible for exhibition in public
institutions. Kramer, like other
antipornographers, is no doubt fighting a losing battle; the principle of the
free-enterprise system so loved by all the advocates of decency—we may note
here the double celebrity of Charles Keating*, once chief enemy of sin in
Cincinnati and now defending his haul from the Lincoln savings and loan—that
the customer is always right, leads ineluctably to the free flow of all categories
of images throughout society. And art,
having for centuries been a home of the erotic and (especially since the
invention of photography) the documentary, is hardly likely to cease supplying
images of powerful and fascinating sorts to publics seeking titillation,
exaltation or even the shock of the horrific.
The
argument that the state ought not to fund work repugnant to “community standards”
is not a good one, since it rests on the idea of a homogeneous community, with
clearly demarcated standards, which does not in fact exist. (This is of course a basic problem with the
going legal definition of obscenity, even apart from that definition’s
dependence on such undefined concepts as an appeal to “prurient interest” and
lack of serious “artistic value.”) On
the other hand, the argument that art should be allowed to develop freely
typically rests (as in Oldenburg’s formulation quoted above) on the assumption
that the development of the arts represents an interest of “society”—a unified
interest that also does not exist.
Present-day society is made up not only of classes with antagonistic
interests but of a multitude of groups whose differences are expressed in
aesthetic as well as other terms. For
this reason, the idea that there exists an aesthetic sphere untouched by social
and political meaning is an ideological fiction, one recognized even in the
muddled thinking of a would-be censor like Kramer. The problem is not that art has been
politicized; the existence of state funding shows that the generally hidden political
side of the arts has existed all along.
The struggle over the N.E.A. is a struggle for control of this political
side.
If
the N.E.A. is eliminated or seriously restricted, the loss of funds will be a
tragedy for many artists and art institutions, though a smaller one than the
loss of school lunches or federally funded abortions taken away from other
sectors of society as part of the same political effort. Despite the stimulus of this threat (and its
so-far-piecemeal realization), it is not to be expected that many artists or
the art business and its hangers-on will come out in clear opposition to the
social order to which they must look for support. We can expect the next year to bring large
helpings of explicitly political art, in many cases reflecting no great
understanding of the nature of contemporary society but riding what is already
visible as a new wave of “official”—shown, funded and collected—art. We may also see intelligent and effective
political art, such as the exemplary work done (without benefit of government
grants) by graphic artists associated with ACT UP*. Other artists will continue to utilize and
transform the resources of their mediums to explore and shape their experience
in ways not explicitly political. For
all concerned with the arts, however, the current struggle over funding
constitutes a call to grapple with the political issues inherent in artworks
and institutions.
Defending
art and artists against both the know-nothings and the champions of Kramer’s
version of “the high purposes and moral grandeur” of art should lead us not to
blind support of the N.E.A. but, for instance, to pondering its function as a
facilitator of the aesthetic rituals of upper-class life. We might consider the use of cultural events
as meeting places for politicians and businesspeople. We might take on the politics of the art
world itself; as an editorial in New Art Examiner* asked, “While
it is necessary to rally the field against censorship by the right, why is it
not necessary to rally the field against censorship by insiders? Why shouldn’t we deal with the abuses of a
closed panel system? Why shouldn’t we
examine the cronyism of organizations, artist’s spaces, and publications, who
year after year receive NEA funding, and who supply the NEA with peer review
panel members and site visitors?” Short
of radical social transformation, of course, few changes are to be expected in
the workings of the institution of art.
But the discussion opened up by Senator Helms and his friends can lead us
to ponder the nature of the institution, and of the different roles that the
arts could play for artists and publics seeking to redefine them and their
place in social life.
For
those of us who take a critical stance toward the existing social system, the
Wildmons and Lipmans must be resisted—not, however, in the name of the myths of
American democracy or the transcendent value of art but simply in opposition to
reaction. What is objectionable about
the attacks on the Mapplethorpe exhibition, Piss Christ, Karen Finley*
et al. is not the injection of politics into the sacred precincts of art by a
bunch of barbarians. It is the
right-wing agenda itself—the call for austerity and the distrust of creativity
in all spheres of life other than those of corporate profitability. Opposing this means the effort to explore, in
analysis and, where possible, in practice, the complex relations of art to
present-day society and to the possibility of changing it.
Institute of
Contemporary Art in Philadelphia – inaugurated Robert Mapplethorpe: The
Perfect Moment on 9 December 1988-29 January 1989; NEA gave $30,000 to Philadelphia I.C.A.
for the exhibit; show moved to Boston, 1 August-4 October 1990. Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-89)
was an American photographer known for his black-and-white photographs. His work featured celebrity portraits, male
and female nudes, self-portraits, and still-life images. His most controversial works documented the
gay male BDSM subculture of New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
scopophile – one who derives sexual
pleasure by openly observing genitalia and sexual acts, as opposed to a voyeur,
who watches in secret.
Max Kozloff – (b. 1933);
American art historian, art critic of modern art, and photographer. He’s been art editor at The Nation, and
executive editor of Artforum. His
essay “American Painting During the Cold War” (Artforum 1973) is of
particular importance to the criticism of American Abstract Expressionism.
Mortimer
Jerome Adler – (1902-2001); philosopher, educator, encyclopedist, and popular
author. Robert Maynard Hutchins –
(1899-1977); educational philosopher. Together,
Adler and Hutchins founded the Great Books of the Western World program and the
Great Books Foundation.
Arthur Schlesinger,
Jr. – (1917-2007); historian, social critic, and public intellectual. He was a specialist in American history
and much of his work explored the history of 20th-century American liberalism. Schlesinger served as special assistant and “court
historian” to President Kennedy from 1961 to 1963.
Fear of
Flying – 1973 novel by Erica Jong (b. 1942). It became controversial for its portrayal
of female sexuality, and figured in the development of second-wave
feminism.
Hilton
Kramer – (1928-2012); art critic for New York Times, 1965-82;
founder of New Criterion, 1982 to his death (see my post “Culture War,” 6 February
2014).
John M. Olin Foundation – New York-based foundation established1953,
which grew out of a family manufacturing business (chemical and munitions),
funds right-wing think tanks; closed 2005.
Jon Wiener, “Dollars for
Neocon Scholars”
– The Nation 250.1 (1 Jan. 1990): 12-14.
Mandate
for Leadership – Mandate for Leadership:
Policy Management in a Conservative Administration, ed Charles L. Heatherly (Washington: Heritage Foundation, 1981); also Mandate for
Leadership III: Policy Strategies for the 1990s, ed. Charles L.
Heatherly and Burton Yale Pines (Washington: Heritage
Foundation, 1989); other volumes. (The “Conservative
Administration” of the first essay’s title was certainly President Ronald Reagan’s,
1981-89, followed by President George H. W. Bush’s administration, 1989-93.) The Heritage Foundation is a highly
influential conservative think tank in Washington, D.C.
Michael Joyce – (1942-2006); executive director of Olin Foundation.
David Stockman – (b. 1946); President
Ronald Reagan’s director, Office of Management and Budget,
1981-85.
Livingston Biddle – Livingston Ludlow
Biddle, Jr. (1918-2002); chairman, NEA, 1977-81; liaison director,
NEA, 1974-75.
Jesse
Helms – Jesse Alexander Helms Jr. (1921-2008); Senator
from North Carolina, 1973-2003. The most
stridently conservative politician of the post-1960s era, Helms opposed the NEA
and government arts funding in general.
Andres Serrano’s Piss
Christ
– Serrano (b. 1950) is an American photographer and artist; his Immersion
(Piss Christ) is a 1987 photograph of a small plastic crucifix submerged
in a small glass tank of the artist's urine which won the Southeastern
Center for Contemporary Art’s “Awards in the Visual Arts” competition in Winston-Salem,
North Carolina, sponsored in part by the NEA. The work and the
sponsorship of the competition generated controversy because it was called blasphemous
by Christians, conservatives, and NEA opponents.
Rev. Donald Wildmon’s
American Family Association – Wildmon (b. 1938) is an ordained United Methodist
minister, author, and former radio host; he’s founder and chairman emeritus of
the American Family Association and American Family Radio. The AFA is a fundamentalist Christian organization
founded in 1977; it opposes LGBT rights and expression, pornography, and abortion. The AFA has repeatedly lobbied Congress to
eliminate funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.
The Last Temptation of
Christ
– 1988, Universal Pics. & Cineplex-Odeon Films; directed by Martin Scorsese.
Alfonse D’Amato – (b. 1937); Republican
Senator from New York, 1980-1998.
anti-obscenity amendment – also known as the Helms
amendment; a provision added to the 1989 Interior Appropriations bill that forbade
federal funding of “obscene” art.
Richard Oldenburg – (b. 1933); Director
of MOMA, 1972-94.
Anthony Lewis . . .
column in The New York Times – “Abroad at Home: Fight the Philistines,” 8
June 1990, sec. A: 31.
Congressman Philip Crane – Philip M. Crane (1930-2014);
Republican from Illinois, 1969-2005.
Richard
Bolton . . . in
New Art Examiner – possibly
“The Cultural Contradictions of Conservatism," New Art Examiner 17.2
(June 1990): 24-29, 72.
Times columnist William Safire – “Essay: Stop
Subsidizing The Arts,” New York Times 18 May 1990, sec. A:31.
Nicaraguan contras –
various U.S.-backed right-wing rebel groups active from 1979 to the early 1990s
in opposition to the Marxist Sandinista Junta of National Reconstruction
Government in Nicaragua which came to power in 1979 following the Nicaraguan
Revolution.
Star Wars and the Hubble
space telescope
– the Hubble telescope is certainly still well known; Star Wars was the derisive
nickname for the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a missile defense system
intended to protect the United States from attack, proposed in 1983 by
President Reagan. Its mission was
changed and it was renamed in 1993 under President Bill Clinton.
Allan Bloom – (1930-92);
philosopher, classicist, and academician.
He became famous for his criticism of contemporary American higher
education, expressed in his 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind. The media labeled him a conservative, but Bloom
denied he was one.
“Say No to
Trash,” Samuel Lipman – “Dialogue:
Art and the Taxpayer’s Money Corcoran: Courage or Cowardice?; Say No To Trash,”
New York Times 23 June
1989, sec. A: 29. Samuel Lipman –
(1934-94); National Council on the Arts, 1982-88; cofounder of New Criterion,
1982.
savings and
loan scandal – dubbed the “S&L crisis,” this was the failure of 1,043 out
of the 3,234 savings and loan associations (S&L’s) in the United States from
1986 to 1995.
Boston Pops Orchestra .
. . Vanessa Redgrave
– cancellation (Boston Symphony Orchestra), April 1982.
Guggenheim’s
cancellation of Hans Haacke’s . . . show – Confronting Bodies, 30 April 1971;
canceled on 1 April because his show dealt with “specific social
situations” not considered art; one work, Shapolsky
et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, A Real Time Social System, as of May 1,
1971 exposed the questionable transactions of Harry Shapolsky’s real-estate
business between 1951 and 1971. Haacke
(b.1936) is a German-born artist who lives and works in New York City.
Morality in Media – now reorganized and
renamed as the National Center on Sexual Exploitation; non-profit, largely
Catholic organization known for its anti-pornography stance and anti-sex
trafficking advocacy; versions of the group campaigned against obscenity, sex
shops and sex toys, decriminalization of sex work, comprehensive sex education,
and various works of literature or visual arts the organization has deemed obscene,
profane or indecent.
Meese Report on
obscenity
– final report of the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography
(sometimes called The Meese Report for U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese [b.
1933], 1981-85), published in 1986; the result of a comprehensive investigation
into pornography ordered by President Reagan.
Charles Keating – Charles H. Keating
III (1923-2014); felon convicted of fraud in the savings and loan scandal
of 1989; prior to his arrest, he was a lawyer, a banker, and he was noted as a
vehement anti-pornography campaigner; in September 1990, criminally charged
with duping Lincoln Savings and Loan Association’s (Irvine, CA) customers into
buying worthless junk bonds of American Continental Corporation; convicted in
state court in 1992 of fraud, racketeering, and conspiracy and received a 10
year prison sentence; in January 1993, a federal conviction followed, with a 12
and a half year sentence; spent 4½ years in prison, but both sentences were
eventually overturned.
ACT UP – AIDS Coalition to
Unleash Power; an international, grassroots political group working to improve
the lives of people with AIDS through direct action, medical research,
treatment, and advocacy, and working to change legislation and public policies;
formed in March 1987 from the inspiration of Larry Kramer (1935-2020), playwright
and AIDS activist.
editorial
in New Art Examiner – probably “Editorials: Washington, D.C.,” 18.9 (Oct.
1990): 9; other possubilities: 17.1 (Sum. ’90): 7; 17.2 (June ’90): 7; “Artists
Challenge Anti-Obscenity Pledge,” 17.2 (June ’90): 15.
Karen
Finley –
(b. 1956); performance artist, musician, poet, and activist; her work frequently
uses nudity and profanity. In 1990, Finley
was one of the “NEA Four”—four performance artists (the others were Tim Miller [b.
1958], John Fleck [b. 1951], and Holly Hughes [b.1955]) whose grants from the
National Endowment for the Arts were vetoed by John Frohnmayer (b. 1942), chairman
of the NEA (1989-92), appointed by President George H. W. Bush, after the
process was condemned by Jesse Helms for “decency” issues.
[Paul Mattick, Jr. (b.
1944), is a Marxist theorist and philosopher, the son of German émigrés Paul
Mattick, Sr. (1904-1981), and Ilse Mattick (née Hamm, 1919-2009). He obtained his Ph.D. in philosophy
from Harvard in 1981, and taught philosophy at the New England
Conservatory of Music, Bennington College, and Adelphi University, where he was
chairman of the department.
[He was involved in the
council communist group Root and Branch, which sporadically published a
magazine/pamphlet series of the same name, starting in 1969. (Council communists are anti-Leninist-Stalinists
who oppose state socialism and advocate workers’ councils and council
democracy.)
[Paul Mattick, Jr., was
the editor of the International Journal of Political Economy, and is the
author of Social Knowledge: An Essay on the Nature and Limits of
Social Science (1986; reissued, 2020), Art in Its Time:
Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics (2003), Business
as Usual: The Economic Crisis and the Failure of Capitalism (2011),
and Theory as Critique: Essays on Capital (2018). He’s been the “Field Notes” (politics) editor
of the Brooklyn Rail since 2014.
[Arts
funding is a subject of great interest and concern to me, as ROTters will doubtless
know. There are numerous posts on Rick
On Theater that cover the funding of the arts and the cultures wars. These include “Degrading the Arts,” 13 August
2009; “The First Amendment & The Arts,” 8 May 2010; "‘The Arts Are
Under Attack (Again!)’" by Paul Molloy, 22 May 2011; “The Return of HIDE/SEEK,”
4 January 2012; “Culture War,” 6 February 2014; “The First Amendment & The
Arts, Redux,” 13 February 2015; “‘Observations: A New Deal for the Arts’” by
Paul Goodman, 18 September 2019.]
