It is a given that most people over the age of 18 months know how to walk, and most of them can wave their arms, jump, talk and complete a great variety of basic physical and mental activities on a fairly automatic basis.
It's when someone tells us how we fall short in our walking or talking or jumping that we begin to entertain uncertainties. Saying to a normal person, "No, no! All wrong! Touch the heel of your left foot to the ground, roll forward through the toe, at the same time bending your knee as your body surges forward: NOW touch the heel of your right foot to the ground, roll forward through the toe, at the same time bending your knee, etc., etc." tells that person a whole lot more than he needs to know about the automatic skill of walking.If kept up long enough, it could make an angry, uncertain cripple of a perfectly normal person, especially if the instructor is flawed in his perceptions and is not primarily interested in helping the walker. And such analysis will take a lot of the instructor's time, which might better be employed on real problems, while the walker skips merrily down the street on his own. The truth is that most people perform best when least inhibited or analyzed.
This analogy comes to mind when one considers the thorny issue of censorship in the arts, which has reared its head recently and seems likely to throw a cloud over reauthorization of the National Endowment for the Arts on its 25th anniversary.
The flap over the Mapplethorpe and Serrano photography exhibits has focused the nation's adverse attention on one of the most blameless agencies in government - generally altruistic and leanly run, accustomed to getting $5 million mileage out of every $1 million it gets its hands on. Seed money from the NEA has been sown across the country, raising a bumper crop of local matching funds that have enabled fine accomplishments in the arts nationwide.
Now a few members of Congress and the religious right have focused attention on a few NEA grants for works they consider obscene, even pornographic, causing great havoc and putting the NEA's future in doubt.
The fact is that they had to reach far and comb deep to find such causes for concern. Of more than 80,000 grants made by the NEA last year, only about 20 became involved in any controversy.
Can the Defense Department say the same about its expenditures? Can the Department of Housing and Urban Development? Is the NEA a target because it is small and manageable, hence easy to pick on, and pictures make such good graphics for politicians seeking to make a little easy hay? (One should note that all 11 questionable NEA activities cited by Sen. Jesse Helms in his communication to the Congress were either art exhibits or non-traditional events outside the scope of the usual music, dance, drama and writing venues.)
Returning to my original analogy: Most artists perform best when left to themselves. When problems arise, they are best dealt with by those who know their fields. The NEA's system of review by peer panels to determine an individual's or group's worthiness for a grant has worked outstandingly well. Awardees are thus identified at minuscule expense by dedicated people. The system is well loaded with checks and balances, with small chance for blatant bias.
In a variation of the instructions on how to walk, the Congress put through a rider on this year's authorization of the NEA's $171 million. It requires artists receiving grants to sign a statement that their works were not or would not be "obscene," which was defined as "including but not limited to depictions of sadomasochism, homoeroticism, the sexual exploitation of children, or individuals engaged in sex acts."
No one defends any of the behaviors specifically mentioned, but who shall decide the status of works of recognized artistic merit that fall into the gray area? Would a thousand Renaissance paintings have survived this sort of test? Berg's opera "Lulu"? On the other hand, how much has Soviet censorship, with its frequent reviews and demands for apologies, inhibited such geniuses as Prokofiev and Shostakovich?
Will artists be afraid to take money they are offered, for fear they may do something culpable under the new guidelines? What if an artist's creation, which has unquestioned artistic merit, should lead him into forbidden paths? Will awards be withdrawn midway in a work's creation? Will lawsuits result? Will works that artists have done in the past be held against them in the future?
A major problem is that people who know little about the NEA are getting their first information about it through this adverse publicity, and seeing it as a danger to society. It's disquieting to have generally well-informed friends approach me with questions about the NEA and comments on what they suppose to be its unworthiness. The Right's witch hunt is apparently making some progress.
The Bush administration, which has increased the NEA's appropriation by $3 million for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, strongly favors reauthorizing the agency with no congressionally mandated restrictions.
Perhaps that's because over the centuries it has become increasingly apparent that censorship is usually narrow-minded and biased, regressive, nit-picking, expensive and, in the final analysis, ineffective in curbing an artistic idea whose time has come.