The NEA and censorship I - National Endowment for the Arts - column

National Review, July 9, 1990 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

The NEA and Censorship I The ongoing quarrel over the role of the National Endowment for the Arts suffers from a lack of focus. This is sometimes the doing of the ignorant, sometimes the doing of polemical opportunists. These latter would have us believe that those who have been a alarmed by a few recent excesses of the NEA are cryptofascists who favor a general censorship.

Anthony Lewis of the New York Times is not ignorant, and therefore must be set down as behaving opportunistically. The technique is hoary: One associates the opposing argument with unseemly people. As in, "The other side, which one might call the fascist side, favors . . ." Consider the matter of the photographs by Andress Serrano: the crucifix immersed in the artist's urine, photographed with the caption, "Piss Christ." Now I think it entirely candid to say that there is a commnumity f people in american, among whom Mr. Lewis is comfortable, who are quite simply unoffended by such a photograph. For one thing, they think of Christ, if ever they do, as distracting historical superstation responsible for all sorts of human misbehavior; and if some artist wants to express his feeling about Christ by urinating on a crucifix, who are we to object?

Mr. Lewis's column, "Fight the Philistines," begins: "A small band of religious zealots and right-wing political opportunists is trying to show the world that America is an intolerant Puritan country, contemptuous of artists."

How is that for target-bombing those who believe something is functionally wrong with an agency that begets Piss Christs, and circulates pictures by the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe which celebrate (the exact word) homoeroticism and sadomasochism?

The technique, then, is to denounce those who state their objections and to associate them with a great historical pageant of all things horrible. Thus the Protestant minister Donald Wildmon, who has objected to some of the work of the NEA, "would no doubt prefer to live in the Spain of Torquemada, the Massachusetts of Cotton Mather, or the Soviet Union of Stalin."

Sometimes it is painful to be made to think, but at the risk of inflicting cruel & unusual punishment on Mr. Lewis, one needs to lead him, calmly, through a child's garden of syllogisms.

--Censorship, of a generic kind, is exercised every day by myriad authorities. The New York Times exercises a benevolent censorship by, for instance, declining to publish the Mapplethorpe photos undre discussion. In declining to do this, it can be denounced for exercising narrow censorship; or it can be praised for exercising good judgment.

--If the word "censorship" is appropriately used to describe a refusal to back a particular exhibit, then it is also appropriately used to describe the very act of selection. For instance: last October the NEA first pulled back from, and then reinstated, its funding of something called Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing (an exhibition of AIDS-related paintings and photographs). When the agency decided to reverse itself and renew its backing, it did so with one qualification: It declined to pay for the catalogue that was designed to go with the AIDS exhibit. The catalogue was an explosion of anti-Christian odium (the Catholic Church is a "house of walking swastikas"). That catalogue was "censored" by the NEA, we are free then to say.

--But in that case, censorship goes on at a feverish pace, given the discrepancy between the number of applications for NEA money and the money available. For every dollar of the $170 million spent by the NEA, one assumes that an application for two or three dollars was turned down.

On what grounds? Maybe the committee didn't think that other photographer was as "good" as Mapplethorpe. Using what criteria? Well, er . . . the composition wasn't as good, nor the lighting, nor the . . . subject matter as interesting?

Writes Mr. Lewis: "The critics of the NEA, when they want to sound reasonable, say that after all it is only a question of making sure that Government money does not go for objectionable art. But that argument begs the real question: Who decides?"

The real question: Whoever does decide, and somebody must, is what issues from that decision something that critics can call censorship? Censorship, used in this way, goes on every day, in every way, in a free society: and should.