The Nea: Trampled Again

By ROBERT HUGHES

It may be, as many members of the Republican Party seem to believe, that there are few disadvantages attached to being American. But there is at least one: What other democratic nation would make a bantam like J. Danforth Quayle its Vice President and send him forth to lecture on public morality and cultural health? Last month's sitcom episode in which the Vice President mistook Candice Bergen, a.k.a. Murphy Brown, for the Scarlet Woman of Babylon has already passed into history. A baby out of wedlock! The Veep blew his chance to link this fictional infant to the agenda of the antiabortion lobby -- MURPHY CHOOSES LIFE! -- and scolded the fictional mother for getting pregnant in the first place.

Now the Little Communicator is at it again. As Republican spin doctors and political handlers scurry about the landscape trying to use "family values" to shore up President Bush's eroding base among conservatives and divert attention from peskier concerns such as the deficit, the Vice President must beat the populist drum on cultural and moral matters. To a standing ovation from the annual Southern Baptist Convention in Indianapolis last week, Quayle declared that the hoots of nationwide amusement at his Murphy Brown efforts were a "badge of honor." A "cultural elite," cynical and relativistic, the same folk Spiro Agnew used to call the "nattering nabobs of negativism" 20 years back, was still undermining the good old American values, "the simple but hard virtues."

Americans like to accuse their opponents of forming an elite; it's one of the hoariest cliches of democracy. But Quayle was born not with a mere silver spoon but with a silver ladle in his mouth. He is the millionaire son of media millionaires, imbued with the deepest tribal mores of the Midwestern country club, raised to office by presidential patronage. For such a man to complain about elitism, and media elitism in particular, seems forced. There is something distinctly unbecoming about Quayle's efforts to present himself as a man of the people.

For those interested in the intersection of government policy and the arts, however, one prediction may be made. With the elephants nervously trumpeting about cultural values, the already much embattled National Endowment for the Arts will come in for some more ritual trampling.

The reason is threefold. First, a plethora of Washington conservatives hope for distraction issues -- anything that will take voters' minds off the domestic economy -- and see in the campaign for moral restrictions on the NEA a rich source of cheap shots against "liberal" culture.

Second, the NEA has a new acting director, Anne-Imelda Radice, 44, an arts administrator put in by Bush to replace John Frohnmayer, who was fired to appease Pat Buchanan's distorted and ranting attacks on the NEA during the early primaries. Radice told a House subcommittee on appropriations that "if we find a proposal that does not have the widest audience . . . we just can't afford to fund that." At a May conference at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art she declared that, despite the acrid controversy over NEA policy in the arts community, "blood is thicker than water, and we have to stick together to save the NEA." This seems bound to translate into more conservative, "mainstream" funding policy, although 97 out of 100 NEA grants go to projects that have nothing to do with what is vaguely called "the cutting edge" of culture.

The odds are that under Radice's stewardship, anything that speaks of sex or politics -- or, worst of all, both -- can go whistle. In fact, she has canceled two grants for projects at university art galleries that had already been approved by an 11-to-1 vote of the NEA's decidedly unradical advisory council. One, for $10,000, was for "Corporal Politics," a show proposed by the List Visual Arts Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, containing images of sexual organs. The cancellation, Radice claimed, was based solely on "artistic merit."

But the third element that seems bound to fuel further controversy over the NEA is a verdict just handed down by a federal court in Los Angeles. In 1990 Frohnmayer, hoping to mollify the Republican right, introduced a clause requiring "general standards of decency" as a basis for NEA grants. On that standard, four performance artists (Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, John Fleck and Tim Miller) saw their applications for grants rejected and sued the NEA. Last week Judge A. Wallace Tashima struck down the "decency" clause as vague and unconstitutional. The government, he said, does not have "free rein to impose ( whatever content restrictions it chooses" on federally funded art. "The right of artists to challenge conventional wisdom and values is a cornerstone of artistic and academic freedom." The NEA Four, as they have been dubbed, will now try to show that their grants were refused for political, not aesthetic reasons.

A Harris poll last February indicated that 60% of Americans support federal funding of the arts and that 80% feel "the arts need to operate freely with a minimum of government control." Tell that to the self-appointed political guardians of American virtue. Pincered between them and the extremists who think any denial of a grant to "experimental" art is cultural fascism, the NEA faces plenty of troubles ahead in this election year.