America's Commitment To Culture

Government And The Arts

Kevin V Mulcahy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780429718564
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano are now legendary, as much because of NEA support of their work as for the work itself. This is one example of what can happen when politics meets culture, and it provides an appropriate snapshot of the issues explored in this book. As in other policy areas, cultural policies develop within a particular political context, evolve as a consequence of government action or inattention, and affect a variety of publics and interests. In this volume, the contributors explore the inescapable politics accompanying public culture. Surveying the philosophical, economic, legal, and political underpinnings of cultural assistance, they articulate not only governments role in the support of the arts, but also basic questions for future cultural policy. Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano are now legendary, as much because of NEA support of their work as for the work itself. This is one example of what can happen when politics meets culture, and it provides an appropriate snapshot of the issues explored in this book. As in other policy areas, cultural policies develop within a particular political context, evolve as a consequence of government action or inattention, and affect a variety of publics and interests.Americas Commitment to Culture discusses government support of culture as a public policy area. The book focuses on the rationales underlying public support for the arts and examines the development and practice of government as an arts patron. The contributors explore the inescapable politics accompanying public culture. Surveying the philosophical, economic, legal, and political underpinnings of cultural assistance, they articulate not only governments role in the support of the arts, but also basic questions for future cultural policy.

1
From Accord to Discord: Arts Policy During and After the Culture Wars

Margaret Jane Wyszomirski

Indirect, sporadic, narrow and tentative. Historically, this has characterized the commitment to culture and the arts of the United States government. Only in 1965, amidst lofty sentiments, worthy intentions and some trepidation, did the federal government begin a very modest program of ongoing support for arts and humanities activities with the establishment of the National Endowments for the Arts and for the Humanities. During the subsequent three decades, over three billion dollars were appropriated to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to foster the nonprofit arts in America and to expand arts participation opportunities for citizens across the nation. In turn, these federal funds have been a catalyst and an example for increased state, corporate, and foundation support for the arts.

For many years, the agency gained political support and artsworld applause while generating little controversy or criticism. Yet despite a largely positive record, the principle of federal support for the arts continues to be contested: sometimes by artists who fear the possible heavy hand of government control; other times by those who see it as an instance of government waste or overreach. In 1989, the NEA began to confront the most serious political challenge of its administrative life. The controversy revealed many inherent ambiguities of principle, purpose, and priority in federal arts policy. It also demonstrated how much the political dynamics and environment of arts policy had changed. By the late 1980's, the worid had become fundamentally different from what it had been in the mid-1960's.

The Controversy of 1989-1990

Each Spring, Congress considers an annual appropriations bill to that will fund the National Endowment for the Arts. Generally, this process is focussed in the Interior Appropriations subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives where Congressman Sidney Yates (D-IL) conducts a friendly inquiry into the recent activities and pending requests of the NEA. Typically, NEA program directors provide illustrations of how far the agency's money has stretched in support of worthy arts activities. Only in the earliest years of the Reagan Administration was the budget of the NEA threatened with significant cuts as part of an overall critique of "Big Government." In response, both the arts community and congressional supporters effectively mobilized to protect the agency's funds from serious and exceptional reduction. More commonly, the testimony of both agency and public witnesses presented a contrapunctual litany: one part stressing the benefits additional funds could engender, while another part bemoans the inadequacy of current funds and the lack of real growth since the late 1970's. Congressional supporters would sympathize with the funding complaints, perhaps add a little to the proposed budget, and compliment the agency for its good work.

This congenial pattern of action changed abruptly in 1989, as a storm of criticism and controversy began to gather around the NEA. At first, it focussed on Andres Serrano's photograph of a crucifix immersed in urine and entitled "Piss Christ." The NEA had awarded a grant of $75,000 to the Southeast Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) to support a program called "Awards in the Visual Arts" -- a program that had been winning NEA support since 1981. Serrano was one of ten artists selected by a SECCA panel of five jurors to receive a $15,000 fellowship. Part of the award also sponsored a travelling exhibit that included works by all the fellowship artists; that show included the photograph "Piss Christ." When an NEA Visual Arts panel had reviewed SECCA's application in March 1987, specific artists or artworks were not identified. The final stop of the travelling exhibit was Richmond, Virginia, where it attracted the attention and provoked a letter-writing campaign by the Reverend Donald Wildmon's American Family Association. This criticism was soon taken up by televangelist Pat Robertson, who condemned the work and the exhibit on his Christian Broadcasting Network as "blasphemy paid for by the government." Senator Alphonse D'Amato (R-NY) denounced the Serrano photograph as a "...piece of filth..." which was "...a deplorable, despicable display of vulgarity."¹ Senator Helms (R-NC) was concerned that ...the National Endowment's procedures for selecting artists and works of art deserving of taxpayer support are badly, badly flawed if this is an example of the kind of programs they fund with taxpayers' money."² Reacting to the Serrano grant, a letter co-signed by twenty-five Senators was sent to acting NEA Chairman, Hugh Southern, asking the Endowment to review and reform its grant-making procedures.

During June 1989, art figured prominently in two other controversies. In one instance, another NEA grant attracted congressional protest as Representative Richard Armey (R-TX) and more than one hundred members of Congress wrote the NEA in protest of its funding for the museum exhibit, "Robert Mappiethorpe: The Perfect Moment" which included portraits, flower studies, nudes of children, and homoerotic works, including the now notorious photos of one man urinating into the mouth of another and the picture of the artist with a bullwhip sticking out of his rectum. The travelling exhibit, organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, had been recommended for its $30,000 NEA grant by a peer panel that, it was later learned, had been rife with conflicts of interest. Also that month, the United States Supreme Court ruled that desecration of the flag was protected speech. The decision invalidated anti-desecration iaws in forty-eight states, including those of Illinois that had been enacted the previous year in response to a student exhibit at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibit included Scott Tyler's work entitled, "What is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?" Tyler's work included an actual U.S. flag placed on the gallery floor, inviting viewer comments and responses to the question posed; in order to comment, viewers had to step on the flag to reach the ledger. Throughout the Summer, public funding for the arts and flag desecration became the twin peaks of a symbolic politics of values and standards.

In July, the Mapplethorpe exhibit was scheduled to appear at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. Aware that the show was attracting unusual public criticism and concerned that some of the nudes of children might run afoul of District of Columbia regulations concerning child pornography, the Corcoran canceled the show. In doing so, the museum stated that it felt its action to be "prudent" because, in the circumstances, the show might "be so inflammatory and provocative as to invite consequences" negative to the museum and to the NEA.³ Members of the artistic community decried the Corcoran action as "capitulation" to political pressure that could cost the institution its professional credibility.⁴ Jock Reynolds, Director of the Washington Project for the Arts called the Corcoran cancellation "an insult to [the] public's intelligence" that exhibited "bad faith toward the public [and] toward the artist."⁵ Eventually, to protest the museum's action, more than a dozen artists withdrew from two exhibits designed to survey trends in contemporary art at the Corcoran.⁶ By the end of the year, Corcoran director, Christina Orr-Cahall resigned as director of the museum. Thus, the clamor from the right was joined by outrage from the left in a battle over community standards vs. professional standards, of obscenity and blasphemy vs. artistic freedom.

On one side, conservatives and religious groups contended that both the NEA and its artistic constituency seemed to regard expressions of the aesthetic taste (or distaste) of taxpayers as unwarranted interference and potential censorship while treating the tastes and opinions of arts professionals and peer panelists as incontrovertible.⁷ On the other side, artists and their civil libertarian allies asserted that "those who receive public funds deserve the freedom to create...regardless of its possible interpretation by some as disagreeable or offensive."⁸ Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) argued that "the answer is getting the government out of the arts," while Representative Charles Stenholm (D-TX) suggested a cut in the NEA's budget as "a shot across the bow...sending the appropriate message" of Congressional concern.⁹ Even the NEA's staunchest supporters, such as Senator Claiborne Pell (D-RI) offered that "...serious errors in judgment were made when such works were recommended for funding by their respective peer panels" and Senator Ted Kennedy called the controversial grants "aberrations."¹⁰ The NEA's appropriations subcommittee chairman Representative Sidney Yates (D-IL) proposed changes in the agency's subgranting procedures that would make the Endowment more responsive and accountable for the work it supported.

Meanwhile, the NEA, headed by an acting chairman and awaiting the appointment of a new chairman by the Bush Administration, was alternatively thunderstruck by the intensity of the uproar and naively hopeful that the controversy would blow over. Instead, the agency's annual budget review stretched through the summer and into the autumn of 1989, expanding beyond the normal confines of the Interior Appropriations subcommittee onto floor debate in both Houses as it attracted extensive media coverage. While Congress considered an array of amendments to the NEA's appropriation bill, it rejected the more drastic proposals. Although Congress approved a ban on Endowment funds for works that might be "considered obscene, and that do not have serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value,"¹¹ it rejected a more farreaching and restrictive amendment sponsored by Senator Jesse Helms. The Helms Amendment would have prohibited the use of federal funds for promoting, disseminating, or producing:

1. obscene or indecent materials, including but not limited to, depictions of sadomasochism, homoeroticism, the exploitation of children, or individuals engaged in sex acts; or
2. material which denigrates the objects or beliefs of the adherents of a particular religion or non-religion; or
3. material which denigrates, debases, or reviles a person, group or class of citizens on the basis of race, creed, sex, handicap, age, or national origin.¹²

Similarly, following a July House vote of 361 to 65,¹³ Congress reduced the NEA's appropriation by $45,000 -- a sum equal to the amount of the two grants awarded to Serrano by SECCA and to the Institute for Contemporary Art for the Mapplethorpe exhibit. In doing so, Congress rejected three other proposals -- to eliminate the NEA, to cut it by 10 percent, or to cut it by 5 percent.

These were not easy, routine, or unnoticed legislative decisions. For example, the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) targeted 21 House Democrats who voted against cutting any of the NEA's fund. The NRCC sent press releases to these members' districts accusing them of supporting "sexually explicit and anti-religious works of art that are offensive to millions of Americans."¹⁴ Thus, as the first round of the NEA controversy ended, the political stakes of this policy issue had escalated. In an effort to channel the partisan, ideological and political debate away from the legislative forum, the FY 1990 appropriations bill also established a bipartisan Independent Commission to examine the NEA's grant-making procedures and standards and report its findings and recommendations to the Congress within the year.

Seeking to comply with the anti-obscenity prohibition in the FY 1990 appropriation, the newiy confirmed NEA chairman, John Frohnmayer, instituted a requirement that all grantees sign a pledge of compliance that they would not use federal monies for projects that were obscene. Artists objected and some, rather than sign the pledge, turned down grants which they had been awarded. Others initiated legal suits against the agency for infringing on their constitutional right of freedom of expression. Meanwhile, the politically untested NEA Chairman withdrew a grant to Artists Space in New York City for a show, "Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing", about AIDS that included images of homosexuality and whose catalog criticized public figures such as Senator Jesse Helms, John Cardinal O'Connor and Representative William Dannemeyer. Chairman Frohnmayer's explanation was that the show's political purpose detracted from its artistic merits, and that "political discourse ought to be in the political arena and not in a show sponsored by the Endowment."¹⁵

This was broadly regarded as an overreaction. Congressman Pat Williams (D-MT) called Chairman Frohnmayer's decision "a further bruising of freedom of artistic expression," while constitutional lawyer Floyd Abrams called it "an appalling surrender of First Amendment principle."¹⁶ Leonard Bernstein refused to accept the National Medal of Arts in protest of the NEA action, while another Medal recipient, painter Robert Motherwell, accepted the award but offered to give his prize of $10,000 to Artists Space to replace the canceled grant.¹⁷ Although Frohnmayer quickly reinstated the grant, his decisional fumble left agency critics, supporters, and arts constituents equally unsure of his principles and dissatisfied with his judgment.

In March of 1990, the NEA's periodic reauthorization review provided an occasion to renew the controversy over standards and content restrictions. Conservative groups like the Eagle Forum and the Traditional Values Coalition announced their opposition to reauthorization for the NEA unless restrictions were enacted. Simultaneously, under fire from many of the same groups, commercial recording companies agreed to institute a system of uniform warning labels concerning sexually explicit lyrics. Congressmen E. Thomas Coleman (R-MO) and Paul B. Henry (R-MI), the ranking Republican members of the NEA's House authorizing subcommittee, warned "...that resistance to any restriction on funding could threaten the NEA's existence."¹⁸ Concurrently, the liberal advocacy group, People for the American Way, issued a report stating that "Far Right" demagogues had launched "...a coordinated campaign of distortion" and that "...for the sake of the First Amendment, the Far Right's effort to defund the NEA must be defeated."¹⁹

The Bush Administration sent up a stra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• About the Editors and Contributors
• 1 From Accord to Discord: Arts Policy During and After the Culture Wars
• 2 The Politics of Arts Policy: Subgovernment to Issue Network
• 3 Federal Arts Patronage in the New Deal
• 4 To Change a Nation's Cultural Policy: The Kennedy Administration and the Arts in the United States, 1961-1963
• 5 The Organization of Public Support for the Arts
• 6 Leadership and the NEA: The Roles of the Chairperson and the National Council on the Arts
• 7 The NEA and the Reauthorization Process: Congress and Arts Policy Issues
• 8 The Process of Commissioning Public Sculpture: "Due" or "Duel,"
• 9 The Public Interest and Arts Policy
• Index
• About the Book