Word: nea
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Senator Jesse Helms, that noted paleo-conservative, has taken up the cudgels against the most distinguished and useful vehicle of patronage in American cultural life, the National Endowment for the Arts. Neoconservatives want to keep the NEA because they would like to run it. Paleos like Helms don't greatly care whether it exists or not; if attacking it can serve a larger agenda, fine...
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...
...protest quickly spread across the political spectrum. On May 18, 36 Senators signed a letter asking for changes in the NEA's grant-making procedures so that "shocking, abhorrent and completely undeserving" art would not get money. At the prompting of Texas Congressman Dick Armey, 107 members of the House sent a similar letter to the endowment...
...howls of protest from the arts lobby are timely since the NEA this year must undergo its five-year budget review. Congressman Sidney Yates of Illinois, a stalwart supporter of the arts whose subcommittee oversees the NEA, has asked acting endowment chairman Hugh Southern to come up with a way to make the endowment more accountable for its grants without opening the door to congressional micromanagement. Southern says he hopes to produce "something that's agreeable to all parties that doesn't get into any kind of chilling of expression...
Agreeable to all parties, of course, is the rub. It will always be politically safer to fund an exhibit of old masters than an exhibit of unproven work. Two weeks ago at a meeting in his office, Yates confronted NEA critic Armey with a Picasso painting of the Crucifixion, which offended many people in the 1930s. Armey admitted that he was not offended by the Picasso, but did not concede anything about Mapplethorpe. Armey warned that if the Mapplethorpe catalog is plunked down on the table during the debate on NEA funding, its budget would be "blown...