"Arts and the State"

 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.]