Art, by George - George Bush's support for National Endowment for the Arts subsidies

National Review, April 16, 1990

AT TIMES President Bush has a loopy way of seeming to abandon principle and polities simultaneously, as when he suddenly announced his opposition to "censoring" art. That, apparently, was his justification for supporting NEA subsidies with no conditions (as to blasphemy or obscenity, for example). He thus failed to grasp the elementary distinction between suppressing something and refusing to finance it. On that logic the U.S. Government has suppressed the Communist Party, Radio City Music Hall, CBS News, Wheel of Fortune, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

It was, however, good news for the "artistic community," which has lately gone in a more urological direction than most Americans would willingly opt for: there was Andres Serrano's famous Piss Christ Robert Mapplethorpe's photo of one fellow peeing into another's mouth, and the like. Such art thrives in the bureaucratic economy, where it's exempted from the vulgar test of the market and judged by what is now a hopelessly philistine arts establishment incapable of discrimination. But it has now been confirmed in its role of state patron-thanks to Mr. Bush.

Why? When private collectors can spend up to $53.9 million for a single painting, the price Van Gogh's Irises fetched a few years ago, it would seem that there's enough money sloshing around to keep the art world afloat without federal intervention. The primary objection to state subsidies for immoral art is the same as the objection to subsidizing Beethoven: it isn't the state's role. The secondary objection is that generally it is bad art. There are exceptions, but the people making the choices on the taxpayers' behalf nowadays lack the taste to know the difference. And why override these objections when legitimate art does thrive on the free market.

Yet somehow the artsy Left managed to make subsidizing obscene art a matter of high principle, and ride it to political victory, with the aid of a more or less conservative President. Maybe Mr. Bush should consider whether he thinks what he said.