The current attack by Sen. Jesse Helms and his allies in Congress on the National Endowment for the Arts raises in the most dangerous way a fundamental question about American freedom of expression: How is it to be limited?
The attack on the arts endowment and on free speech is a reaction against two grants made recently by the arts endowment -- one to the Institute for Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania to support a traveling retrospective exhibition of the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe, and the other to the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, which used a portion of its award for a fellowship to the artist Andres Serrano. Senator Helms and his allies charge that part of Mr. Mapplethorpe’s work is “obscene” and “pornographic” and that Mr. Serrano’s is “sacrilegious.”
The attack takes the form of an amendment to an appropriation bill that would prohibit the use of federal funds for the dissemination, promotion, and production of “obscene or indecent materials, including but not limited to depictions of sadomasochism, homoeroticism, the exploitation of children, or individuals engaged in sex acts,” or “material which denirates the objects or beliefs of the adherents of a particular religion or non-religion,” or “material which denigrates, debases or reviles a person, group, or class of citizens on the basis of race, creed, sex, handicap, age, or national origin.”
Given the impossibly vague and broad language of this proscription, anyone can easily imagine works that unquestionably should be available to the public that would be denied federal support. Leo Steinberg’s scholarly study of the sexuality of Christ in Renaissance painting would be banned, along with anything dealing with Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. I would be on dangerous ground in my course on the history of the 1960’s when discussing the Ku Klux Klan or Malcolm X, not to mention Andy Warhol’s movie, Ciao, Manhattan. Would English departments have to refight the battles over D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and James Joyces’s Ulysses? Social and political satire would be off limits, of course, and forget the idea of showing the work of contemporary British artist Francis Bacon in Des Moines and Kansas City, or discussing it in a course on 20th-century art. Gauguin is clearly out, and to be entirely safe the National Gallery should probably take down Albert Pinkham Ryder’s Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens. If my suggestions of aesthetic McCarthyism appear to be taking a well-intentioned proposal to absurd extremes, one need only review the history of authoritarian regimes to discover how efforts to regulate human thought and creativity always become crudely irrational.
The bill with the Helms amendment has passed the Senate. The House has passed an appropriation bill containing a different and more tolerable rebuke to the arts endowment -- a budget cut of $45,000, the exact amount spent to support the work of Mr. Mapplethorpe and Mr. Serrano. The matter will soon be resolved by a House-Senate conference committee.
Much is at stake. The issue is not whether Mr. Mapplethorpe’s images are pornographic or Mr. Serrano’s sacrilegious, or about whether their work is art or whether they are artists. The question is whether our government, having decided to support the arts, should be involved in attempting to suppress certain forms of expression in an attempt to cleanse public discourse of offensive material. It is perfectly fair for Senator Helms and his think-alikes to denounce Mr. Mapplethorpe and all he stands for, and it is within bounds for them to criticize the Institute for Contemporary Art and the arts endowment. That is part of the American way. They should not, however, use the power of the public purse to limit the public’s intellectual and cultural life. It is ironic that at the same time we were applauding the pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square with its demands for expanding the scope of public discourse in China, a little group of willful men was busy in Washington attempting to limit expression in the Land of Liberty.
The proponents of the Helms amendment tacitly acknowledge that they are undercutting a cherished American commitment to free speech, because they insist that they are not proposing censorship. Artists, they argue, may create and exhibit anything they wish; they simply cannot enjoy a federal subsidy if their work is judged by someone to be offensive or obscene within the meaning of the Helms amendment. This logic is tortured because the amendment, in effect, would create a blacklist, and people whose names were on it would be less equal than others in the eyes of the law. If not censorship, it is most surely government discrimination against certain ideas.
If there is a program of governmental subsidies, and there certainly needs to be, the competition for support should be open to all artists on the basis of their merit as artists, as judged by qualified people in the field. When the arts endowment was originally established, Congress wisely took great care to keep politics and elected officials out of the process of awarding grants. Indeed, the enabling legislation scrupulously prohibits the arts endowment from considering the content of a work of art in reaching decisions about awards. It would be a terrible mistake for Congress to undermine the careful and serious evaluation process that the arts endowment currently uses. The result, if not an Orwellian nightmare, inevitably would be a morass of erratic judgments, sanitized programs, and mediocrity.
Let panels of qualified judges decide who is to be encouraged with federal funds, and let them have the widest possible latitude in deciding how to stimulate a vitality in the arts that will enrich the quality of life for the public. Clearly, the panels should not be subsidizing Hustler and Deep Throat, but the argument about them should focus on their artistic merit, or lack thereof, and not upon whether they are obscene or indecent. There is a critical difference.
Such an approach is not risk free. Mistakes will be made. Some people or groups will be offended from time to time. But we must remember that our Founding Fathers decided long ago that the rewards of freedom were well worth the risks. In the current controversy, the tradeoff is clear -- the price of excellence and the price of a vibrant artistic scene is the risk of occasional offense to someone’s sense of what is appropriate to display or say in public.
Before heading all the innocents into the nearest shelter for protection, one should realize that the current controversy is not about billboards on major thoroughfares or television beamed into homes where unsupervised children watch indiscriminately, nor even about magazines sold in plain brown wrappers at newsstands. It is about what may be shown in museums visited by adults who voluntarily enter knowing what they will see. The Mapplethorpe exhibit, for instance, displayed appropriate notices about the capacity of some of the images in the show to offend.
Most importantly, if art is doing its job, it is causing the audience or viewer to see things afresh, to think about things in a new way. It is inherently unsettling because it reorders the world for us, perhaps challenging our assumptions and beliefs or reaffirming our perceptions for new reasons. Our nation is committed in a wonderful, revolutionary way to the notion that the healthiest response to threatening ideas is a full and free examination of them. The best defense against falsity is not repression but exposure.
The unwarranted principle that the Helms amendment would establish does not endanger the arts alone. Universities, in particular, have a great deal at stake, and not simply because we receive funds from the arts endowment occasionally. Our duty to society, in exchange for the special privileges we enjoy, is to provide an unfettered forum in which knowledge can be exchanged and ideas explored. We have a positive obligation to protect free expression against threats from whatever quarter and in whatever form.
In addition, as part of our educational mission, we promote those forms of scholarship and creative activity that would be undernourished if they were left to the gentle mercies of the commercial marketplace. The arts endowment, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and numerous other quasi-governmental agencies have the same purpose.
The Helms Amendment and the thinking behind it pose a serious threat to any activity that cannot survive without some form of government support.As educators are well aware, that support is now a fundamental fact of university life. Does it stretch the imagination too much to contemplate a bill that would say that universities may admit whomever they wish, but federal financial-aid funds cannot be used to support students who engage in “indecent or obscene” activity? Faculty members may do research on anything they wish, but federal funds cannot be used to support any expression that “denigrates” some groups. In fact, why should federal funds be used to support an institution that tolerates the dissemination, promotion, or production of obscene or indecent materials or materials that denigrate some group?
I fear the effects on higher education of a well-intentioned but ill-advised Congressional effort to enforce such standards. My scenarios may distort the current intentions of proponents of the Helms amendment, but they do not greatly stretch the logic of their argument. It is significant that the Helms amendment would bar the Institute for Contemporary Art and the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art from receiving funds from the arts endowment for five years. That shot across the bow has meaning for the entire fleet, and it may already have caused the timid to batten down the hatches.
The amount of money involved in this case is small in comparison to the budget of a complex research university such as Penn, but the program funds involved are the life blood of the Institute for Contemporary Art, which operates on a very stringent budget. It would be crippled without them. Though the university supports the institute enthusiastically and would try to help financially, it would be difficult to divert funds from other research and teaching activities. Moreover, the threat that censorship might in the future expand into other arenas is even more important than the funds or the institutions immediately affected.
We will be much better off in the long run if we recognize that some people, often curiously enough those who believe themselves to be the strongest proponents of democracy, find some art and some ideas dangerous. Yet the best protection we have found for democracy is an unregulated market in expression. Such a fundamental commitment to intellectual freedom has served us for over 200 years and is our best hope for the next 200 as well.
Sheldon Hackney is president of the University of Pennsylvania.