Mad about Mapplethorpe - controversy about exhibit of artist Robert Mapplethorpe's works

National Review, August 4, 1989 by Andrew Ferguson

WASHINGTON, D.C.-Bureaucrats in the arts, like their brethren elsewhere, are the Greta Garbos of democratic society: all they want is to be left alone. They Labor in a tiny vineyard, a hermetic subculture of thousands of artists and dozens of customers; here, a show of fingerpainted toilet seats hung on the walls of a county welfare office; there, a nude dance performed in the basement of a Presbyterian church. Their obscurity is their happiness-that, and the $150 million they annually dispense through the National Endowment for the Arts.

Every so often, however, there's a leak in security. Controversy-the bureaucrat's nightmare of nightmaresinevitably ensues. There was the flap this spring, for example, when Senator Alfonse D'Amato discovered that a photographer called Andres Serrano had used $15,000 of NEA money to finance Piss Christ, a photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine. And then Congressman Dick Armey of Texas heard about Robert Mapplethorpe.

Mapplethorpe died in March of AIDS, celebrated, as he had been for a dozen years or more, as a major artist. The Christian Science Monitor (even!) had early on tagged him "one of the most original of America's younger photographers." Mary Baker Eddy, phone your arts desk: Mapplethorpe's leitmotif was "homoerotic and sadomasochistic imagery"-one of his more celebrated pieces, for exam ple, showed a man urinating into a pal's mouth, while another featured the artist himself, doubled over and pantless, with a bullwhip dangling from his orifice of choice-as well as photos of "children in erotic poses," a form of personal expression more commonly known, when not federally funded, as child pornography. These pictures and more coagulated in a traveling show sponsored in part by the NEA, to the tune of $30,000. The exhibit-which also included, for aesthetic effect, scores of pictures of flowers-was scheduled to arrive at Washington, D.C.'s, Corcoran Gallery in July.

On June 8, Congressman Armey and 108 co-signers sent a letter to Hugh Southern, the acting chairman of NEA, asking, in effect, what the hell was going on. Noting "this is not the first time we have had concerns about the NEA funding inappropriate materials," the congressmen said they understood that "the interpretation of art is a subjective evaluation, but there is a very clear and unambiguous line that exists between what can be classified as art and what must be called morally reprehensible trash."

Had it not been backed up by the power of the purse, the letter would surely have been laughed off as the thundering of Neanderthal lunatics or the posturing of pols (which in some cases it doubtlessly was). Under the circumstances, however, the Corcoran decided not to show the Mapplethorpe exhibit after all, reasoning that the proximity of Mapplethorpe's subsidized shutterbuggery to irate congressmen might endanger NEA funding.

The Corcoran's decision sparked the predictable outrage from the Washington arts crowd: "appalled . . . rightwing . . . outright cave-in . . . censorship of the most vulgar kind . . . McCarthyism . . . muzzle freedom of expression"-the heavy breathing almost drowned out the cliches. A hardy amalgamation of artists and gays and Lesbians and aesthetes gathered outside the gallery, chorusing, "Shame! Shame!" Cocktail parties were held. There was talk of boycotts, although of what, precisely, no one seemed sure. The directors of the hapless Corcoran seemed at first surprised, and finally hurt: all they had tried to do, after all, was keep the money flowing to the very same people who now reviled them for their prudence.

In the wake of Mr. Armey's objections, Sidney Yates (D., Ill.), the art establishment's mouthpiece in Congress, has undertaken to ban indirect funding from the NEA, a practice which he blames for the Serrano and Mapplethorpe contretemps. Conservatives on the Hill have greeted the reforms, along with the Corcoran's self-censorship, as a small victory.

But do they understand how small it really is? There was something almost quaint about Mr. Armey's letter, with its talk of a "very clear and unambiguous line" separating art from rubbish. For it is one of the primary premises of the art world that this line doesn't really exist-tbat it is in fact a kind of cramp in the consciousness of the unenlightened (read: middle-class American) mind. "If art is to remain something other than a blue-chip commodity," hollered one of the speakers at the rally outside the Corcoran, "it will challenge and offend, especially those whose power rests in the status quo."

Given such a premise, questions of taste are by definition beside the point: those who are offended are supposed to be offended. The concerns of the people whom Mr. Armey is charged with representing and the values of the art establishment that wants to receive their subsidies are utterly incompatible. Arguments from taste and merit can never be won because they can never be joined.

In the end the only argument that will work is the libertarian one: artists can do whatever they wish in the privacy of their own galleries so long as the rest of us don't have to pay for it. Mr. Armey says that although he is "philosophically opposed" to federal funding of the arts, the position is politically unrealistic: "You can't get there from here," he says. But with a few more Mapplethorpes and Serranos -and there will be more-the case will become easier to make.