TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/081489/08148900.000

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 6.4 KB | 124 lines

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l                                                          ESSAY, Page 82

A Loony Parody of Cultural Democracy


By Robert Hughes


    Senator Jesse Helms, that noted paleo-conservative, has
taken up the cudgels against the most distinguished and useful
vehicle of patronage in American cultural life, the National
Endowment for the Arts. Neoconservatives want to keep the NEA
because they would like to run it. Paleos like Helms don't
greatly care whether it exists or not; if attacking it can serve
a larger agenda, fine.

    Last year NEA money totaling $45,000 was used by the
Corcoran museum for an exhibition by the photographer Robert
Mapplethorpe and by an institution that gave an award to the
artist Andres Serrano. One of Serrano's pieces was a photo of
a plastic crucifix immersed in the artist's urine -- a fairly
conventional piece of postsurrealist blasphemy, which, though
likely to have less effect on established religion than a
horsefly on a tank, was bound to irk some people. Mapplethorpe's
show was to contain some icy, polished and (to most straights
and, one surmises, at least a few Republican gays) deeply
repulsive photos of S and M queens doing this and that to one
another.

    As soon as the dewlaps of Senator Helms' patriarchal wrath
started shaking at its door, the Corcoran caved in and canceled
Mapplethorpe's show. Unappeased, the ayatullah of North
Carolina proposed a measure that would forbid the NEA to give
money to "promote, disseminate or produce" anything "obscene or
indecent" or derogatory of "the objects or beliefs of the
adherents of a particular religion or non-religion" -- which,
taken literally, comprises any image or belief of any kind,
religious or secular.

    In effect, this would make the NEA hostage to every crank,
ideologue and God botherer in America. A grant for an
exhibition of Gothic ivories could be pulled on the grounds that
the material was offensive to Jews (much medieval art is
anti-Semitic), to Muslims (what about those scenes of false
prophets in hell with Muhammad?) or, for that matter, to
atheists offended by the intrusion of religious propaganda into
a museum. A radical feminist could plausibly argue that her
"nonreligious" beliefs were offended by the sexism of Rubens'
nudes or Picasso's Vollard Suite. Doubtless a fire worshiper
could claim that the presence of extinguishers in a theater was
repugnant to his god.

    In short, what the amendment proposes is a loony parody of
cultural democracy in which everyone becomes his or her own
Cato the Censor. Clearly, Jesse Helms has no doubt that the NEA
must be punished if it strays from what he fancies to be the
center line of American ethical belief. The truth is, of course,
that no such line exists -- not in a society as vast, various
and eclectic as the real America. Helms' amendment might have
played in Papua, where a Government spokesman defended the
banning of Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ on
the grounds that "our people traditionally set much store on
dreams and hallucinations." But in the U.S., no.

    The problem is compounded by the fact that the NEA is not
a ministry of culture. It does not commission large works to
reflect glory on the state, or set firm policy for other
institutions. Its $169 million budget is tiny -- less than
one-third the projected price of one Stealth bomber, or, to put
it another way, only ten times the recent cost of a single
painting by Jasper Johns. The French government spends three
times the NEA's budget each year on music, theater and dance
alone ($560 million in 1989). German government spending on
culture runs at around $4.5 billion, repeat, billion a year.

    The extreme conservative view is that support of the
contemporary arts is not the business of government. Never mind
that quite a few people who were not exactly radicals, from
Rameses II to Louis XIV and Pope Urban VIII, thought otherwise
and thus endowed the world with parts of the Egypt, the Paris
and the Rome we have today. New culture is optional -- slippery
stuff, ambiguous in its meanings, uncertain in its returns. Away
with it! Let the corporations underwrite it!

    The fetish of supply-side culture was one of the worst
legacies of the Reagan years. Though the Great Communicator was
frustrated in his attempt to abolish the Endowment in 1981, he
made sure that more Government money went to military bands than
to the entire budget of the NEA. Oom-pah-pah culture to fit a
time of oom-pah-pah politics. After all, who could say that the
arts needed support outside the marketplace at a time when star
orchestra conductors were treated like sacred elephants and the
art market was turning into a freakish potlatch for new money?

    Conversely, why bother to support what market Darwinism
seems to condemn to obscurity? "I have fundamental questions,"
Helms grated, "about why the Federal Government is supporting
artists the taxpayers have refused to support in the
marketplace." But this was exactly what the NEA was created, in
1965, to do -- and it was the wisest of decisions. Lots of
admirable art does badly at first; its rewards to the patron are
not immediate and may never come. Hence the need for the NEA.
It is there to help the self-realization of culture that is not
immediately successful.

    Corporate underwriting has produced some magnificent
results for American libraries, museums, ballets, theaters and
orchestras -- for institutional culture, across the board. But
today it is shrinking badly, and it requires a delicate balance
with Government funding to work well. Corporations' underwriting
money comes out of their promotion budgets and -- not
unreasonably, since their goal is to make money -- they want to
be associated with popular, prestigious events. It's no trick
to get Universal Widget to underwrite a Renoir show, or one of
those PBS nature series (six hours of granola TV, with bugs
copulating to Mozart). But try them with newer, more
controversial, or more demanding work and watch the faces in the
boardroom drop. Corporate is nervous money; it needs the NEA for
reassurance as a Good Housekeeping Seal of approval. Our
problem, despite conservative rant, is too little Government
support for the arts, not too much. Even if we had a ministry
of culture to parade the roosters, we would still need the NEA
to look after the eggs.