Artistic freedom, public anger - argument against Jesse Helms' bill on National Endowment for the Arts appropriations

National Review, Oct 13, 1989 by Ruth Berenson

Artistic Freedom, Public Anger

AS AN ALUMNA, so to speak, of NATIONAL REVIEW, I have been sadly disappointed at the magazine's enthusiastic endorsement (for example, in the editorial "Shutter-buggery," Sept. 1) of Senator Helms's proposal to emasculate the National Endowment for the Arts. The House of Representatives has just rejected his amendment to the Endowment's appropriations bill, and conservatives should not hope for its resuscitation in Senate-House conference later this fall. If the Helms amendment became law, it would cripple the peer-panel process through which the Endowment's grants have always been made by forcing the panels to make their recommendations not on the quality of the art or the artist, but on whether or not a proposed project might be regarded by someone--anyone--as "obscene or indecent," or as denigrating "the objects or beliefs of the adherents of a particular religion or non-religion," or as debasing or reviling "a person, group, or class of citizens on the basis of race, creed, sex, handicap, age, or national origin." Further, the Endowment's chairman would have to assume the role of censor and bar any grants that seemed to him to be in violation of these proscriptions--a task for which few people (other, perhaps, than Senator Helms) would feel themselves qualified.

The current controversy raises a broader question than why or whether the agency should have supported the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition or, via a subgrant, the award by the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art to photographer Andres Serrano. The work--or lurid descriptions thereof--of both artists has clearly outraged large numbers of people. This is not the first time that Endowment grants have offended, nor, assuming that the state of the arts in this country continues on its present course and that the agency to survives the current onslaught, will it be the last. But the sound and fury that this particular episode has engendered seem indicative of a more generalized and profound anger than ever before.

This anger has been increasing steadily as the subversion of traditional American values has become more and more apparent. Ronald Reagan, whose election was due in no small part to belief in his promise to restore these values, was unable to do so; we don't yet know whether President Bush will be more successful. But it seems clear that Americans are profoundly frustrated at their inability, and that of their government, to retrieve a more moral, more innocent America. They pay taxes for programs aimed at the crime problem, the drug problem, the illiteracy problem, the teenage-pregnancy problem, the AIDS problem--with no discernible result. To them, the flag remains sacred, and their perception that the Supreme Court now says it isn't only confirms their conviction that the America they love is being torn apart by forces they are powerless to resist.

But wait! What's this about the National Endowment for the Arts using their tax money to support not just art and artists they don't understand (by now they've become used to that) but art and artists they understand only too well--art and artists who, they are told by NATIONAL REVIEW and others, glorify obscenity, desecrate religion and morality, and epitomize the decadent America that is so alien to them? This they can stop. They can say to Congress, "Not on our money! We can judge art as well as any so-called expert. If the government is going to spend our money on art, it had better spend it on art we approve of."

In the 24 years of its existence, only twenty of the Endowment's 85,000 grants have provoked congressional questioning--surely not a bad record. Much of the Endowment's money goes to institutions taking artistic risks, as the Actors Theater of Louisville did last season when it premiered, in its "new plays" series, a play by William F. Buckley Jr. If the Helms amendment had been in effect, it seems unlikely that the theater panel would have dared recommend support for this program: from Aeschylus, through Shakespeare and Moliere, to our own time, playwrights have challenged traditional customs and beliefs. The panel might well have feared that these "new playwrights" would follow in their footsteps.

Conservatives have always mistrusted the Arts Endowment. At the beginning we worried that public subsidies for the arts might erode the systems of private support for them which have served this country so well. This fear proved baseless: private arts funding has increased steadily, though at a slightly reduced rate since passage of the new tax laws in 1986. But we were even more concerned that the Endowment might become a kind of cultural czar and impose a particular viewpoint, aesthetic or ideological, on artists or arts institutions as a condition, real or implied, for receiving support. The peer-panel review system, authorized by Congress less than two weeks after the Endowment's first appropriation bill became law, was designed precisely to allay these fears. But if the Helms amendment should be revived, the fears might become reality.