Mapplethorpe and the new obscenity

Afterimage, March-April, 2003 by Dustin Kidd

At this point, Congress began discussion of new standards for selection of NEA funding awards. Essentially, they were looking for standards that would prevent the future funding of works like those of Mapplethorpe. As a result the art world realized that formalist principles would no longer be sufficient for protecting its practitioners, a point highlighted by an article written by the art critic Hilton Kramer:

Are these disputed pictures works of art? My own answer to this question, as far as the Mapplethorpe pictures are concerned, is: Alas, I suppose they are. But so, I believe, was Richard Serra's "Tilted Arc" a work of art. This is not to say that either "Tilted Arc" or the Mapplethorpe pictures belong to the highest levels of art--in my opinion, they do not--but I know of no way to exclude them from the realm of art itself. (12)

Kramer recognized that formalism had failed to distinguish art from obscenity, and could not serve that purpose in the future. To this, art critic Arthur Danto responded:

By the formalist standards of critical appraisal that prevailed in museum-and art-historical circles until the most recent times, Mapplethorpe's work ought by rights to qualify as art of the highest level."" But those standards had badly eroded by the 1990s, all at once exposing Mapplethorpe to criticism from an unanticipated direction. (13)

Danto, responding to the erosion of formalism, and in defense of the American art world, fused aesthetics with identity politics in order to create an art-critical framework by which Mapplethorpeis work, and similar works, can be judged. The result was a "perspective of gayness" that allowed Mapplethorpe's artistic merit to be determined on art world terms, while also justifying the art/obscenity overlap. Danto explains how he eventually went to a Mapplethorpe retrospective held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, after he had declined an earlier opportunity to go to the opening and had at first felt that Mapplethorpe's work was not worth seeing:

I finally went, at some point well into the show's run, largely in consequence of a conversation I had at a party attended by some people from the Whitney. One of them, asking whether I was going to review the show, said, when I expressed doubt, that he felt it was important to. He felt that there was a kind of gay sensibility in the work which it would be worth dealing with. That all at once gave me a reason to think about the show. There was, then as now, a great deal of talk about the art of this or that group--of women, or of African-Americans and the issue seemed important and in fact urgent enough to justify writing about Mapplethorpe's art from the perspective of gayness. (14)

Danto allows this perspective to guide "Playing with the Edge," an essay on Mapplethorpe's work that appeared first in The Nation, and was later reprinted in a book. Danto's development of a homosexual framework for interpreting Mapplethorpe's art was no historical coincidence. Danto had, since the mid-1980s, asserted the primacy of art criticism over aesthetics as the key mode of art interpretation for the postmodern period. Aesthetics, Danto believed, relied upon a division of the beautiful from the practical, and a division of form from content. Danto argues in After the End of Art that Duchamp's invention of readymade art--which appeared first in the form of Fountain, a purchased urinal that Duchamp signed and placed on exhibitohad revealed to the art world that art can be made from mundane, everyday items, and that judgment of this art must consider content alongside form. Speaking about art since the 1960s, which he labels as "art after the end of art," Danto says: