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Cincinnati censorship - obscenity case involving Mapplethorpe exhibit - column
National Review, May 14, 1990 by William F. Buckley, Jr.
NEW YORK, APRIL 16
As was absolutely predictable, the entire critical world is focusing on Cincinnati, where a new hero has been discovered, and a new villain. The hero is the director of the Contemporary Arts Center, which is featuring the Mapplethorpe photographs, and the villain is the sheriff who served a grand-jury indictment on him for violating the obscenity laws of the city of Cincinnati.
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The next thing you knew, the panzer divisions of the artistic community were on the march. Mr. Bennard Perlman, for instance, who contributes an op-ed piece to the New York Times under the headline "A Century of Cincinnati Aesthetics: From Fig Leaves to Fines." What has he got to say? Sample: "In the nineteenth century, when the sight of an ankle was shocking--ministers spoke out against women playing croquet; one simply did not say |piano legs'--well-meaning males censored art to protect fair maidens' sensibilities." Anyone with just a little imagination can write the rest of the column. Don't forget to include the ban on Ulysses and painting over breasts and genitalia in the Sistine Chapel. If you have any trouble, go to the local software house and order the program, "Artists, Immunity of. $19.95."
The controversy is almost a year old. It began last summer when the National Endowment for the Arts put up money for the Mapplethorpe collection and also for the Serrano collection. The former (which is now in Cincinnati) contains photographs of the kind of thing men do to each other while communicating AIDS (of which Mapplethorpe died). The second contained a crucifix in a jar of the artist's urine.
What we haven't heard from the artistic community is the correct reaction to two questions. The first is: Are we taking the position that any creation executed by an artist is "art"--and that it should be immune from criticism? And second, What kind of criticism is tolerable?
Let us suppose that an artist painted a synagogue in the shape of a swastika. Would we be obliged to withhold criticism of the painting, in deference to the liberties of the artist?
Ah, we are told, it isn't criticism we object to, it is the action of such as the sheriff of Cincinnati, who is prosecuting the Arts Center, and the action of such as Senator Helms, who is specifying that certain kinds of art do not qualify for national patronage.
One needs to say, in turn: Where is the criticism by the art community of the work of Serrano and Mapplethorpe? There is high sensitivity to the excesses of a legislature that exercises fiduciary powers in spending the people's money, and sensitivity to a sheriff who enforces a law passed by the people of Cincinnati, which law has been held to be constitutional (Miller v. California) by the Supreme Court. It is striking that no one is aroused by the damage done to artistic integrity by using in the first instance a camera, in the second, sculpture, in order to make a statement. Mapplethorpe and Serrano are only incidentally artists, to the extent that this work represents them. They are engaging in what years ago Herbert Agar identified as the "anarchic passion to smash." The depiction of sodomy is primarily a statement, rather than a work of art; and the use of the artist's urine to enshroud the crucifix is primarily an act of abuse. A healthy society needs to find means by which to say: We care. What are such means?
In the case of Hamilton County, Ohio, you are told that if you want to buy an issue of Hustler, go to another city to do it; and that applies to X-rated video cassettes and to the Playboy movie channel. The sheriff who acted against the Mapplethorpe exhibit is, according to the New York Times, "arguably the most popular politician in Hamilton County." Why are we mad at him? Shouldn't we be mad at the Supreme Court, which has ruled that that which is held to be obscene by "community standards" can be proscribed? And why angry at a Congress that pauses to ask the question: Are there no offenses which an artist can commit, such that it is right to forgo patronizing him with tax money?
The director of the arts center in Cincinnati knew where he was headed. "Mr. Barrie and the trustees say they tried to head off some criticism by restricting the exhibition to people 18 or older, segregating the most disputed pieces from the rest of the exhibit, placing warning signs at the door alerting visitors to the sexually explicit nature of some of the work, and raising the entrance fee from $2 to $5." If they did all that, then they have done all the intellectual homework necessary to send Mapplethorpe's pictures over to another city.
COPYRIGHT 1990 National Review, Inc.
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