Whose Art Is It, Anyway?

By ROBERT HUGHES

Jesse Helms knows as well as anyone in Washington how strong the know-nothing streak in America is and how to focus its rancor -- which is, in essence, what he has done with the National Endowment for the Arts. Only this can explain why thousands of people who don't utter a peep when the President pulls billions from their wallets to bail out crooks and incompetents in the savings and loan industry start baying for the abolition of an agency that indirectly gave $30,000 to a now dead photographer. When Robert Mapplethorpe, that much overrated lensman, posed with a bullwhip stuck like a tail in his anus, he was parodying the image of the devil. He could not have foreseen how literally it would be taken by folk who have never clapped eyes on the photo itself.

The Donnybrook over the continued existence of the NEA began last year with the funding of an exhibition of Mapplethorpe's photographs, has ramified immensely since then, and is now coming to a head. Helms' pressure has already forced the NEA to make arts-grant recipients pledge that they will do nothing obscene or indecent on Government money. Sometime in June the NEA's reauthorization and funding bills go to the House floor, where a vocal ultra- conservative rump, led by California Republican Dana Rohrabacher, will attempt to abolish the agency. Since the House will probably not go along -- George Bush has declared that he would not support such a bill -- the issue will come down to a fight over the further restriction of "obscene" content in NEA-funded work.

Leading the NEA's defense is Democratic Congressman Pat Williams of Montana, who wants to reauthorize the NEA for another five years and leave questions of obscenity to the courts. "As long as the Federal Government can support the arts without interfering with their content . . ." says Williams, "government can indeed play a meaningful part in trying to encourage the arts . . . We know pornography when we see it, but the freedom to create is invisible."

There has been plenty of method in the anti-NEA demagoguery. At its root lies a sense of lost momentum, a leakage of power, in the far American right. The cold war thawed out after 40 years and left its paladins standing with wet socks in the puddle. "And now what shall become of us, without any barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution." The words of the poet Constantine Cavafy -- shh! a Greek homosexual! -- apply quite well to the right's dilemma in 1990.

But if there is no longer a clear-cut Enemy at the Gates, a useful if more diffuse one can still be found at the bottom of the garden: a fairy. Such is the insight on which Jesse Helms is banking his political fortune in this Senate election year of 1990.

Helms is on the losing side of most issues, and little legislation of his own gets passed, but no one could accuse him of a lack of raw populist acumen. His National Congressional Club remains one of the richest political-action committees in Washington, a direct-mail operation that pulled in $1.4 million in 1989. The strength of its mailing list, combined with those of right-wing religious groups like Donald Wildmon's American Family Association and Pat Robertson's 700 Club, has kept the bombardment of the NEA going strong.

It is a nice diversion: a punitive hullabaloo, casting the NEA as the patron, if not of Commies, then of blasphemers, elitists and sickos. The arts grant becomes today's version of the Welfare Queen's Cadillac. And if the NEA is trashed or even dismantled in the process, so much the better: it only shows that the post-Reagan right still has teeth.

A few facts are in order.

Last year the U.S. Government gave the NEA $171.3 million to support theater, ballet, music, photography, painting and sculpture throughout America. Compared with the arts expenditures of other countries and with the general scale of federal outlays, this is a paltry sum. In 1989 France, with less than a fourth the population of the U.S., spent $560 million on music, theater and dance alone.

Williams speaks of "the right of the taxpayers to determine through this body ((Congress)) how their money shall be spent." Fair enough, but there is a degree of micromanagement to which democracy will not stretch; one cannot expect a national plebiscite every time a Kansas repertory group asks for $10,000. The fact is hardly any other major Western government spends less on the arts than the U.S. For every dollar that came to the arts from the Federal Government in 1987, about $3 came from corporate subsidies.

But, say abolitionists like Rohrabacher, isn't that the point? "If the NEA disappears, art would still prosper. If funds for the NEA are cut, the private sector will surely fill any holes and gaps that remain."

Actually the reverse is likely. Corporate arts underwriting oscillates with the laws on tax deductions, and the NEA controversy could reduce it. In any case, corporations prefer "safe" institutional culture: Ford puts Jasper Johns in the National Gallery, Mobil puts Masterpiece Theatre on PBS.

But the NEA was not created to subsidize such big-ticket events and famous names. Its brief is diversity; it is not a ministry of culture with control over museums, theaters or operas. All it can do on $170 million a year is give seed-money grants to a wide variety of cultural projects, many of them small, marginal, obscure and quite outside the field of prestige corporate underwriting. About 85,000 of these grants, nearly 90% of them for less than $50,000 each, have been distributed since 1965. But, though seldom large, the NEA grant is a powerful magnet for corporate dollars.

Take the Harlem School for the Arts, a 25-year-old institution that provides arts education to about 1,300 students a year, most of them black, Hispanic and Asian. It holds a $50,000 NEA grant to fund a special masters voice class for budding opera singers. This grant is just a fraction of its $1.7 million annual budget, but Joyce Perry, development director, feels "very disturbed" about the assault on the endowment: "Community institutions like ours depend on the NEA. We're established now and can get other funds, but there are other grass-roots organizations just starting out that can't make it without the stamp of approval of the NEA."

In the same way, Jomandi Productions in Atlanta, a nationally recognized theater company that is one of the few places in America where aspiring black playwrights can get their work performed, depends on its $60,000 NEA grant to pull in much of the rest of its $1 million budget. BAM, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, whose annual Next Wave festival has turned into an essential conduit between experimental and mainstream theater and dance, gets about 6% of its $10.3 million budget from the NEA; but that 6%, according to its director Harvey Lichtenstein, is crucial. Far from being opposites, private and public money work together. On this level, the NEA has served the public very well for 25 years, and on the stingiest of budgets.

This reality contradicts the vaporings of antifunders like Douglas Bandow of the Cato Institute -- "There's no justification for taxing lower-income Americans to support glitzy art shows and theater productions frequented primarily by the wealthy."

Quite apart from the fact that the NEA gets about 69 cents a U.S. citizen a year, less than the cost of one New York City subway token, its abolition would do very little to alter the patterns of American "elite" culture (the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Museum of Modern Art or the Chicago Symphony Orchestra) but would fall heavily both on minorities and upon the cultural opportunities of the young, the poor and the "provincial." The idea of an American public culture wholly dependent on the corporate promotion budgets of white CEOs, reflecting the concerted interests of one class, one race, one mentality, is unthinkable -- if you think about it. But that is all the abolition of the NEA offers.

The NEA's record is long and honorable. It has fostered innumerable works, shows and performances that would never have had a chance without its modest underwriting but were of real value. And some of its money is wasted. Some NEA grants help produce lousy or ephemeral art because lots of art is ephemeral or lousy, subsidized or not. If Congress cannot be sure whether a new bomber or missile will work before committing billions to it, how can some arts panel be sure that Anna Anybody, recipient of $15,000 for a photographic project, will go on to become the next Diane Arbus or Imogen Cunningham? And how can it know in advance what she will produce? It can't, that's how. No one's taste is infallible; some seeds germinate, others do not. And grants are not state commissions. A degree of waste is built into patronage, period. The notion of "cost-effective" culture is a Reaganite fantasy.

There is, as is always the case when money is being handed out anywhere, a certain amount of logrolling and favoritism among the peer groups that review applications, and a peevish sense of entitlement among many applicants on the basis of class or race or gender. But the NEA's peer-group system has at least the merit of being a tad more democratic and informed than the fiats of a minister.

NEA advocates who claim that conservative assaults constitute censorship of free speech are both wrong and right. They are wrong because Government refusal to pay for a work of art is not censorship but a withdrawal of favor: the artist is still free to do whatever he/she wants, only not on public money.

But in a wider sense, the advocates are right. Helms' record of opposition to free expression is shameful. The direct-mail attacks, plus the restrictive anti-obscenity pledge, coming just as the NEA charter is up for renewal, have caused immense nervousness in the endowment. Its new director, John Frohnmayer, has wavered under right-wing pressure; one cannot imagine the formidable Nancy Hanks, who ran the NEA from 1969 to 1977, quailing before the likes of Helms and Rohrabacher. The chill makes the NEA much more circumspect about awards, especially to performance artists. And the NEA has limply allowed the opposition to frame the terms of the debate. The grants to Mapplethorpe and artist Andres Serrano, creator of the notorious Piss Christ, were two controversies in 25 years that caused a big public outcry. Two out of 85,000 is statistically insignificant.

Support for the NEA is stronger in the Senate than in the House, probably because the whole House is up for re-election this year, whereas only a third of the Senate is. Plenty of folk on Capitol Hill have been sandbagged into acting as though a vote for the NEA is a vote for blasphemy, pederasty and buggery. They should think again. And so should those who imagine support of the arts would be better served by putting the NEA's budget in the hands of the states, an alternative Republican proposal that would trivialize arts funding in a melee of local politics.

The artists too will need to resist; this means much more organization, never their strong suit. NEA Chairman Frohnmayer says he is dismayed by their slow reaction to the attacks: "I'm not sure there is an arts community out there because they've been silent for such a long time." So far, only two artists seeking grants have refused to sign a letter saying they will abide by the anti-obscenity pledge. (But last week the New School for Social Research filed a suit challenging the restrictions.) The real "silent majority" on this issue is the millions of Americans who believe in the value of the arts -- and it is time they spoke out.

With reporting by Hays Gorey/Washington and Janice C. Simpson/New York