Leaving Town Alice: Confessions of an Arts Warrior. - book reviews

National Review, Sept 20, 1993 by Jacob Neusner

In the long history of how Washington calls to national service both wise men and fools, the accident of political circumstance leaving the Republic in the hands of sheer chance, rarely have we lost more at the toss of the political dice than in the spring of 1989, when, in the midst of a protracted crisis, John Frohnmayer took over as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. He was the wrong man, at the wrong time, in the wrong place. Over the next two and a half years many Americans came to question whether this country should spend tax money on the arts at all. And Mr. Frohnmayer was the reason.

Frohnmayer came to Washington in the midst of the crisis precipitated by the Endowment's funding of the infamous Piss Christ, a work of art consisting of a calculatedly offensive title, a bottle of urine, and a plastic statue of Jesus. And word had just gotten out that the NEA had a hand in the exhibit of Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs, including pictures no newspaper or magazine of general circulation was prepared to reprint.

In his first days as chairman, Frohnmayer turned a crisis into a catastrophe. What he did was simple. The National Council of the Arts, on which I served, had recommended we not fund a New York City project, "Artists Space," that did not strike us as a good use for public funds. The NEA chairman accepted our recommendation. Then the applicant persuaded him to make a trip to New York to see the exhibit.

He went. He saw. He thought it was pretty good. He didn't know much about art, but he knew what he liked. And so he reversed himself. And all hell broke loose.

No one can point to another case in which an Endowment chairman selected one rejected application among many, paid a personal call on the applicant, took a guided tour of the project, then reversed himself. When you run a federal agency that receives tens of thousands of applications annually - and of necessity has to reject most of them - you simply cannot play Lady Bountiful on a retail scale.

Some of us asked Frohnmayer whether he was prepared to re-examine all rejected applications and decide what he thought of each one. We wondered whether he realized the precedent he was setting - swooping down from on high, to show favor to one applicant among hundreds. Some asked about fairness and due process. And a few even then foresaw the coming disaster.

How did the Frohnmayer fiasco come about? Paying off a political debt, President Bush stood by his choice for nearly three dreadful years even at the cost of his own credibility. Frohnmayer was fired two and a half years into his botched assignment; in fact, he ought never to have been appointed. Pat Buchanan did a great public service by making himself a major threat to the Bush Presidency and turning Frohnmayer into a principal source of opprobrium.

But Buchanan gets only part of the credit. In this self-serving, mean-spirited account, Frohnmayer gives himself the lion's share. He shows in his own words exactly what went wrong. Bush appointed a liberal Democrat and got what he deserved.

Frohnmayer's defense in fact forms a scathing indictment of his year at the NEA, one far more devastating than any critic could have fabricated. Now that he tells us what he was thinking, he proves that when we on the Council distrusted our own suspicions, thinking they must be wildly exaggerated, we were wrong. Our suspicions were, if any thing, understated. For Frohnmayer not only ran the Endowment into the ground, he did so willfully and knowingly. He substituted self-righteousness for wisdom, and turned reprisal into public policy.

He writes his own epitaph: "I leave with the belief that this eclipse of the soul will soon pass and with it the lunacy that sees artists as enemies and ideas as demons." From these words, you would hardly imagine that this man's critics on the Arts Council included brilliant musicians of exquisite taste, such as Sam Lipman; essayists of elegance and wit, such as Joseph Epstein; long-time and generous patrons of the arts, such as Phyllis Birney - not to mention members of Congress, right, center, and left. Everybody wondered why this man insisted on labeling his opponents "enemies of the arts," when all they did was point out his bungling.

His critics indicted a bad administrator, an unreliable politician, and a self-glorifying partisan of a tiny fringe of the arts avant garde. We weren't lunatics, and he was no victim of any "eclipse of the soul." We cared about an Endowment that served a broad national consensus and so would endure for generations to come, and we respected the righteous indignation of people Frohnmayer held in contempt, for instance, "fundamentalist proponents of traditional values."

I doubt that many people will enjoy reading this book as much as Frohnmayer obviously enjoyed writing it. Stylistic infelicities make the reading something of a trial. The book is heavily padded and boring, and the prose hardly a tribute to the artistry of a man who wants to establish his arts credentials. Here is how he conceives artful prose: