TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/060490/0604109.000

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                U+l                                                          NATION, Page 46

Whose Art Is It, Anyway?


Desperate for an enemy, the radical right accuses Washington of
subsidizing obscene, elitist art. The facts paint a different
picture

By ROBERT HUGHES -- With reporting by Hays Gorey/Washington and
Janice C. Simpson/New York


    Jesse Helms knows as well as anyone in Washington how strong
the know-nothing streak in America is and how to focus its
rancor -- which is, in essence, what he has done with the
National Endowment for the Arts. Only this can explain why
thousands of people who don't utter a peep when the President
pulls billions from their wallets to bail out crooks and
incompetents in the savings and loan industry start baying for
the abolition of an agency that indirectly gave $30,000 to a
now dead photographer. When Robert Mapplethorpe, that much
overrated lensman, posed with a bullwhip stuck like a tail in
his anus, he was parodying the image of the devil. He could
not have foreseen how literally it would be taken by folk who
have never clapped eyes on the photo itself.

    The Donnybrook over the continued existence of the NEA began
last year with the funding of an exhibition of Mapplethorpe's
photographs, has ramified immensely since then, and is now
coming to a head. Helms' pressure has already forced the NEA
to make arts-grant recipients pledge that they will do nothing
obscene or indecent on Government money. Sometime in June the
NEA's reauthorization and funding bills go to the House floor,
where a vocal ultra-conservative rump, led by California
Republican Dana Rohrabacher, will attempt to abolish the
agency. Since the House will probably not go along -- George
Bush has declared that he would not support such a bill -- the
issue will come down to a fight over the further restriction
of "obscene" content in NEA-funded work.

    Leading the NEA's defense is Democratic Congressman Pat
Williams of Montana, who wants to reauthorize the NEA for
another five years and leave questions of obscenity to the
courts. "As long as the Federal Government can support the arts
without interfering with their content . . ." says Williams,
"government can indeed play a meaningful part in trying to
encourage the arts . . . We know pornography when we see it,
but the freedom to create is invisible."

    There has been plenty of method in the anti-NEA demagoguery.
At its root lies a sense of lost momentum, a leakage of power,
in the far American right. The cold war thawed out after 40
years and left its paladins standing with wet socks in the
puddle. "And now what shall become of us, without any
barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution." The words
of the poet Constantine Cavafy -- shh! a Greek homosexual! --
apply quite well to the right's dilemma in 1990.

    But if there is no longer a clear-cut Enemy at the Gates,
a useful if more diffuse one can still be found at the bottom
of the garden: a fairy. Such is the insight on which Jesse
Helms is banking his political fortune in this Senate election
year of 1990.

    Helms is on the losing side of most issues, and little
legislation of his own gets passed, but no one could accuse him
of a lack of raw populist acumen. His National Congressional
Club remains one of the richest political-action committees in
Washington, a direct-mail operation that pulled in $1.4 million
in 1989. The strength of its mailing list, combined with those
of right-wing religious groups like Donald Wildmon's American
Family Association and Pat Robertson's 700 Club, has kept the
bombardment of the NEA going strong.

    It is a nice diversion: a punitive hullabaloo, casting the
NEA as the patron, if not of Commies, then of blasphemers,
elitists and sickos. The arts grant becomes today's version of
the Welfare Queen's Cadillac. And if the NEA is trashed or even
dismantled in the process, so much the better: it only shows
that the post-Reagan right still has teeth.

    A few facts are in order.

    Last year the U.S. Government gave the NEA $171.3 million
to support theater, ballet, music, photography, painting and
sculpture throughout America. Compared with the arts
expenditures of other countries and with the general scale of
federal outlays, this is a paltry sum. In 1989 France, with
less than a fourth the population of the U.S., spent $560
million on music, theater and dance alone.

    Williams speaks of "the right of the taxpayers to determine
through this body [Congress] how their money shall be spent."
Fair enough, but there is a degree of micromanagement to which
democracy will not stretch; one cannot expect a national
plebiscite every time a Kansas repertory group asks for
$10,000. The fact is hardly any other  major Western government
spends less on the arts than the U.S. For every dollar that
came to the arts from the Federal Government in 1987, about $3
came from corporate subsidies.

    But, say abolitionists like Rohrabacher, isn't that the
point? "If the NEA disappears, art would still prosper. If
funds for the NEA are cut, the private sector will surely fill
any holes and gaps that remain."

    Actually the reverse is likely. Corporate arts underwriting
oscillates with the laws on tax deductions, and the NEA
controversy could reduce it. In any case, corporations prefer
"safe" institutional culture: Ford puts Jasper Johns in the
National Gallery, Mobil puts Masterpiece Theatre on PBS.

    But the NEA was not created to subsidize such big-ticket
events and famous names. Its brief is diversity; it is not a
ministry of culture with control over museums, theaters or
operas. All it can do on $170 million a year is give seed-money
grants to a wide variety of cultural projects, many of them
small, marginal, obscure and quite outside the field of
prestige corporate underwriting. About 85,000 of these grants,
nearly 90% of them for less than $50,000 each, have been
distributed since 1965. But, though seldom large, the NEA grant
is a powerful magnet for corporate dollars.

    Take the Harlem School for the Arts, a 25-year-old
institution that provides arts education to about 1,300
students a year, most of them black, Hispanic and Asian. It
holds a $50,000 NEA grant to fund a special masters voice class
for budding opera singers. This grant is just a fraction of its
$1.7 million annual budget, but Joyce Perry,  development
director, feels "very disturbed" about the assault on the
endowment: "Community institutions like ours depend on the NEA.
We're established now and can get other funds, but there are
other grass-roots organizations just starting out that can't
make it without the stamp of approval of the NEA."

    In the same way, Jomandi Productions in Atlanta, a
nationally recognized theater company that is one of the few
places in America where aspiring black playwrights can get
their work performed, depends on its $60,000 NEA grant to pull
in much of the rest of its $1 million budget. BAM, the Brooklyn
Academy of Music, whose annual Next Wave festival has turned
into an essential conduit between experimental and mainstream
theater and dance, gets about 6% of its $10.3 million budget
from the NEA; but that 6%, according to its director Harvey
Lichtenstein, is crucial. Far from being opposites, private and
public money work together. On this level, the NEA has served
the public very well for 25 years, and on the stingiest of
budgets.

    This reality contradicts the vaporings of antifunders like
Douglas Bandow of the Cato Institute -- "There's no
justification for taxing lower-income Americans to support
glitzy art shows and theater productions frequented primarily
by the wealthy."

    Quite apart from the fact that the NEA gets about 69 cents
a U.S. citizen a year, less than the cost of one New York City
subway token, its abolition would do very little to alter the
patterns of American "elite" culture (the John F. Kennedy
Center for the Performing Arts, the Museum of Modern Art or the
Chicago Symphony Orchestra) but would fall heavily both on
minorities and upon the cultural opportunities of the young,
the poor and the "provincial." The idea of an American public
culture wholly dependent on the corporate promotion budgets of
white CEOs, reflecting the concerted interests of one class, one
race, one mentality, is unthinkable -- if you think about it.
But that is all the abolition of the NEA offers.

    The NEA's record is long and honorable. It has fostered
innumerable works, shows and performances that would never have
had a chance without its modest underwriting but were of real
value. And some of its money is wasted. Some NEA grants help
produce lousy or ephemeral art because lots of art is ephemeral
or lousy, subsidized or not. If Congress cannot be sure whether
a new bomber or missile will work before committing billions
to it, how can some arts panel be sure that Anna Anybody,
recipient of $15,000 for a photographic project, will go on to
become the next Diane Arbus or Imogen Cunningham? And how can
it know in advance what she will produce? It can't, that's how.
No one's taste is infallible; some seeds germinate, others do
not. And grants are not state commissions. A degree of waste
is built into patronage, period. The notion of "cost-effective"
culture is a Reaganite fantasy.

    There is, as is always the case when money is being handed
out anywhere, a certain amount of logrolling and favoritism
among the peer groups that review applications, and a peevish
sense of entitlement among many applicants on the basis of
class or race or gender. But the NEA's peer-group system has
at least the merit of being a tad more democratic and informed
than the fiats of a minister.

    NEA advocates who claim that conservative assaults
constitute censorship of free speech are both wrong and right.
They are wrong because Government refusal to pay for a work of
art is not censorship but a withdrawal of favor: the artist is
still free to do whatever he/she wants, only not on public
money.

    But in a wider sense, the advocates are right. Helms' record
of opposition to free expression is shameful. The direct-mail
attacks, plus the restrictive anti-obscenity pledge, coming
just as the NEA charter is up for renewal, have caused immense
nervousness in the endowment. Its new director, John
Frohnmayer, has wavered under right-wing pressure; one cannot
imagine the formidable Nancy Hanks, who ran the NEA from 1969
to 1977, quailing before the likes of Helms and Rohrabacher.
The chill makes the NEA much more circumspect about awards,
especially to performance artists. And the NEA has limply
allowed the opposition to frame the terms of the debate. The
grants to Mapplethorpe and artist Andres Serrano, creator of
the notorious Piss Christ, were two controversies in 25 years
that caused a big public outcry. Two out of 85,000 is
statistically insignificant.

    Support for the NEA is stronger in the Senate than in the
House, probably because the whole House is up for re-election
this year, whereas only a third of the Senate is. Plenty of
folk on Capitol Hill have been sandbagged into acting as though
a vote for the NEA is a vote for blasphemy, pederasty and
buggery. They should think again. And so should those who
imagine support of the arts would be better served by putting
the NEA's budget in the hands of the states, an alternative
Republican proposal that would trivialize arts funding in a
melee of local politics.

    The artists too will need to resist; this means much more
organization, never their strong suit. NEA Chairman Frohnmayer
says he is dismayed by their slow reaction to the attacks: "I'm
not sure there is an arts community out there because they've
been silent for such a long time." So far, only two artists
seeking grants have refused to sign a letter saying they will
abide by the anti-obscenity pledge. (But last week the New
School for Social Research filed a suit challenging the
restrictions.) The real "silent majority" on this issue is the
millions of Americans who believe in the value of the arts --
and it is time they spoke out.