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charge of elitism was hurled not only against the wealthy consumers of
art, but also against their often penniless creators. You were elitist if you
created works of art, and you were elitist if you bought them, thus con–
fusing patronage with talent, economic status with artistic vision. These
charges, possibly because they implied callousness towards the under–
privileged and indifference to black and ethnic cultural experience,
caused a major retreat, the surrender of many of the standards and val–
ues that make a serious culture possible.
The attack on the arts from the morally correct right proved just as
paralyzing as that from the left-wing myrmidons of political correctness.
It
began in earnest with the emasculation of the National Endowment
for the Arts after controversial grants to such shock artists as Robert
Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano aroused the wrath of conservative
bullies like Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina and Senator Alfonse
D'Amato of New York. Mapplethorpe's X
Portfolio
and Serrano's
Piss
Christ,
works for which I have extremely qualified respect, obviously
were designed to
epater la bourgeoisie
in traditional avant-garde fash–
ion. And if so, they accomplished their ends in a manner that must have
surprised even these bohemian shock troopers. On the basis of a hand–
ful of such controversial grants, conservative politicians, along with
such watchdog agencies as the American Family Association, managed
to emasculate the National Endowment and to persuade Congress to
impose content restrictions on all grantees in the form of a new obscen–
ity clause that every applicant was obliged to sign . I agree with much of
what Ed Rothstein said yesterday, but this is where I disagree. I do think
this is a free speech issue, because if you take away the possibility of
institutional support for artists, you are really taking away the possibil–
ity for them to express themselves freely. I'm not talking about individ–
ual support for the artist, but institutional support.
A Supreme Court decision endorsing these content restrictions at the
NEA represented an even more serious blow to free expression. This
majority position by conservative judges was later reinforced by
then-New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani's decision to deny public funds
to the Brooklyn Museum on the basis of those two exhibits of elephant
and horse dung that he found to be indecent. They may have been in
bad taste-taste is always debatable-but to punish the institution was
to inhibit the possibility of further and later free expression.
Not all the omens were bad. In February
2001,
a Supreme Court
decision set some limits on the government's abi lity to attach strings to
public money, arousing hopes that the subsidized arts might one day be
free again from government interference, even government censorship.
