Washington, D.C. -- Advocates for the arts and humanities said last week that they were somewhat relieved, but not entirely satisfied, by a Congressional compromise on the kinds of work the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts may support.
The hotly debated compromise trimmed, but did not eliminate entirely, the broad restrictions that Sen. Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina, had proposed for the two endowments.
While some artists and scholars said the agreement was probably the best that could have been hoped for after more than four months of often heated controversy, others warned that it might open the door to further restraints on the endowments’ activities.
The compromise, worked out by a joint House of Representatives-Senate committee, maintained a prohibition on support of “obscene” art, but removed restrictions on support of work that “denigrates” people on the basis of religious beliefs, gender, race, age, handicap, or national origin.
The agreement also said that the endowments, before denying support for a project under the prohibition’s terms, must determine that the work, “when taken as a whole, [does] not have serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” The language of the approved restriction closely follows that of the U.S. Supreme Court’s definition of obscenity in a ruling in a 1973 case, Miller v. California.
Under the provisions of the Congressional agreement, the endowments would be responsible for enforcing the prohibition.
The provisions were included in an amendment to a spending bill for the Interior Department and several cultural programs, including the two endowments. The House approved the compromise last week, and the Senate was expected to do so soon.
The original restriction was proposed by Senator Helms in response to two controversial exhibitions supported with arts endowment funds -- a show of photographs by the late Robert Mapplethorpe that included sadomasochistic and homoerotic images, and an exhibition that included a photograph by Andres Serrano of a crucifix submerged in a container of urine.
Mr. Helms’s restrictions were accepted by the Senate on a voice vote in late July, but a similar provision was not included in the House version of the bill. The agreement to pare down the restrictions came despite several last-ditch efforts by the Senator to muster support for preserving the full amendment. At one point late last month, Mr. Helms rose on the Senate floor and held up several of the photographs from the Mapplethorpe exhibit, saying: “Any Senator who thinks that I am attacking aesthetic art needs to come over here and look at the photos.”
In addition to approving the prohibition on grants supporting obscene works, the committee agreed to provide $250,000 for a 12-member commission to study the way the arts endowment reviews grant proposals and to suggest possible standards for the endowment to adopt.
The commission will have four members appointed by President Bush, four by House Speaker Thomas S. Foley, and four by Senator Robert C. Byrd, President pro tem of the Senate.
John Hammer, director of the National Humanities Alliance, said that some kind of restriction on the endowments “was almost inevitable” because of the intensity of the controversy. He said, however, that the part of Senator Helms’s amendment dealing with obscenity was considered by scholars to be “the least damaging -- certainly in the humanities, where provocation doesn’t usually run along those lines.”
Officials of other humanities groups were more pessimistic.
Said Stanley N. Katz, president of the American Council of Learned Societies: “I think it’s an outrage that as much of the Helms language is in it as is there.”
Mr. Katz said that basing the restriction on the Supreme Court obscenity ruling, which states that the definition of obscenity must be based at least partly on local community standards, raised the possibility of future actions against the humanities endowment.
“I don’t think you have to be more than 5 years old to understand that if community standards are what we’re being asked to apply, then as soon as a scholar comes along with a non-majoritarian view on politics or gender or race -- you name it -- we’re going to be in trouble,” he said.
Several members of Congress promised further scrutiny of the endowments when they come up for reauthorization next year.
Rep. Dana T. Rohrabacher, a California Republican who led the House supporters of the Helms amendment, said in an interview that the compromise agreement set “anemic standards” for the agencies.
The House and Senate members who worked out the compromise approved a House measure to cut $45,000 out of the arts endowment’s budget -- equal to the amount of endowment money that went to the Mapplethorpe and Serrano exhibitions.
The agreement also kept a recommendation that the endowments change the way they supervise “re-granting,” a practice by which the agencies make large block grants to arts or humanities organizations that in turn make smaller grants to individual artists or scholars.
Under the agreement, Congress recommends that the two endowments exercise power of final approval over all awards made by re-granting organizations.
It was unclear how the recommendation might be put into effect by the humanities endowment, and a spokesman for the endowment said that agency officials would not comment on the compromise.
In addition, the compromise agreement lifted a Senate-proposed five-year ban on arts-endowment grants to two organizations -- the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute of Contemporary Art, which used $30,000 in endowment money to organize the Mapplethorpe exhibit, and the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, N.C., which used $15,000 to support the work of Mr. Serrano.
The compromise included a mandate that the arts endowment inform Congress if it intends to make a grant to either of the two institutions. The agreement didn’t specify what action, if any, Congress would then take.
Sheldon Hackney, the university’s president, said in a written statement: “We are gratified that Congress has dropped the Senate language along with the blacklist. The original amendment and blacklist were punitive and would have inhibited free expression.”
Judith Tannenbaum, acting director of the institute, said that the compromise agreement was “probably as good as could have been anticipated,” adding: “I would hope that things can go back to normal here.”
She said that the wording of the agreement would still leave the endowment with considerable latitude in making decisions about what projects to support.
In fact, she said, under the agreement, the exhibit that caused so much trouble for the institute might still receive federal support. Even critics of the endowment have conceded that only about 10 of the nearly 150 photographs in the Mapplethorpe show could be classified as offensive.
“As I understand it, it’s very possible that the Mapplethorpe show could still be funded, could be defended, because the work must be taken as a whole, so the exhibit would be taken as a whole,” she said.
Many members of Congress disagreed, however, saying they thought the amendment would effectively curtail some of the endowment’s activities. Rep. Fred Grandy, an Iowa Republican who opposed Mr. Helms’s amendment, said during the final House debate on the compromise that he thought the critics of the arts endowment had accomplished their “mission.”
“I think that the possibility of homoerotic art or crucifixes or Stars of David in tubs of urine being funded is limited,” he said.