Word: corcoran
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Last year NEA money totaling $45,000 was used by the Corcoran museum for an exhibition by the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and by an institution that gave an award to the artist Andres Serrano. One of Serrano's pieces was a photo of a plastic crucifix immersed in the artist's urine -- a fairly conventional piece of postsurrealist blasphemy, which, though likely to have less effect on established religion than a horsefly on a tank, was bound to irk some people. Mapplethorpe's show was to contain some icy, polished and (to most straights and, one surmises, at least...
...soon as the dewlaps of Senator Helms' patriarchal wrath started shaking at its door, the Corcoran caved in and canceled Mapplethorpe's show. Unappeased, the ayatullah of North Carolina proposed a measure that would forbid the NEA to give money to "promote, disseminate or produce" anything "obscene or indecent" or derogatory of "the objects or beliefs of the adherents of a particular religion or non-religion" -- which, taken literally, comprises any image or belief of any kind, religious or secular...
...case in point is the Corcoran Gallery's sudden cancellation of an exhibit of Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs. The whole matter was needlessly confused when the director, Christina Owr-Chall, claimed she was canceling the show to protect it from censorship. She meant that there might be pressure to remove certain pictures -- the sadomasochistic ones or those verging on kiddie porn -- if the show had gone on. But she had in mind, as well, the hope of future grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, which is under criticism for the Mapplethorpe show and for another show that contained...
...congressional letters and the Corcoran withdrawal incited the ire of arts partisans who contend that withholding funds or threatening to do so amounts to Government censorship. Political whim, their argument goes, should not be the judge of art. What shocks one generation -- a Madonna set in a shabby tenement, for example -- is treasured by a later one. Moreover, art that flouts convention by dealing with the extremities of the human condition is the work most in need of support...
...Washington Project for the Arts is shopping around for a museum willing to present the Mapplethorpe exhibit, and a laser artist is making plans to project images of Mapplethorpe's photos on the Corcoran Gallery's facade. By canceling the Mapplethorpe show, the Corcoran's Orr-Cahall hoped to deflate the flap and engender serious reflection about what is art, what is not and what the Government should support. Those, she admits, are questions to which "no one has yet found answers...