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Government Funding of the Arts
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16552 |
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EDITORIAL
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| Issue
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11 / 1989 |
1,058 Words |
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Morton A. Kaplan
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The furor over the cancellation of the exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., and Sen. Jesse Helms' subsequent amendment is a monument to the ability of the arts establishment to brainwash the media. This issue has nothing to do with First Amendment freedoms or the rights of artists to experiment with new techniques or means of expression. These remain untrammeled no matter how odious the work or how depraved the artist. The only relevant issue is the right of the government to control the expenditure of tax dollars raised from the general public.
If the public becomes outraged over a new missile, it will not be built. If it becomes outraged over a catastrophic health insurance bill, it will be modified. When one dips into the pork barrel, one is obliged to play by the rules of democracy.
Government support for the arts is inherently problematic. It raises the question of official art, whether that art be the standard of the public, government officials, or a largely self-chosen art establishment. Choices always involve inclusion and exclusion. Private patronage on the whole is a far better protection for diversity and experimentation than any governmental program can be. The moment one has an endowment through committees that dominate large grants, the process of official encouragement of some lines of art and official discouragement of others will have begun to influence artistic directions. The lines of communication quickly become incestuous, and the institutions begin to operate in a vacuum.
There may be exceptions: Art forms of merit that would die out without public assistance. Perhaps the support of opera in Italy comes within that category. And WPA art programs in the depths of the Depression may have been salutary.
All public support programs, even those in the field of science, raise serious questions. Senator Proxmire's Golden Fleece awards sometimes were directed at clearly justifiable projects. At least, however, there are some objective standards in science, even though they have not prevented the funding of many bad projects nor stopped the inhibition of meritorious projects. And the major foundations at times have been guilty of causing serious distortions in the academic areas in which they made grants.
Only an arrogant arts establishment, whose lines of communication constituted a closed circle, would have had the temerity to use public funds for the Mapplethorpe exhibit. Let me grant that Mapplethorpe is an artist with the lens. I think that Eric Gibson's reflection in this issue that he was an inferior portraitist is only partly correct. Although Gibson has seen many more pictures of Andy Warhol than I have, I have never seen a more revealing portrait of him. And if many of his studies are "masks," then these masks reveal a portion of reality that other studies occlude. This is not true of the photographs to which I shall come.
Even, however, if Mapplethorpe's studies of homosexual sadism were genuinely artistic, it would have been a mistake to use public funds for the exhibit.
The use of public funds constitutes a form of legitimation, and that is inappropriate when this issue at the very least in still unresolved insofar as
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