The decision by Anne-Imelda Radice, the chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Arts, to reject grants for two projects containing sexually explicit works is bound to revive concern in some quarters that free artistic expression in America is in danger of being suppressed by government.
Radice's decision to veto the two proposals for NEA support in the Museum Special Exhibition Category strikes me as evidence that the system for approving federal support for the arts was working reasonably well.The recommendations in point involved $10,000 grants for an art exhibition at the List Visual Arts Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and for an exhibit of video and photography at the Anderson Gallery of Virginia Commonwealth University. The former included a painting called "Genital Wallpaper" and was described by the NEA's advisory panel as containing examples of "violence, castration, sexual fetishism and ultimate loss." The latter included a work comprising more than 100 tiny photographs of faces, lips, hair and a sexual organ.
I should make clear now that I am unfamiliar with either exhibit as well as with the artists and photographers represented in them. For the descriptions of these works and the accounts of Radice's decision and the NEA process that led up to it, I am relying on what appears to be a straightforward article by William H. Honan in the New York Times.
The decision to withhold support for exhibiting art and the actual suppression of art are two very different matters. In the case of both rejected exhibits, the works already were completed and were in the domain where they will be judged on their artistic merit. That is precisely the same arena of judgment in which every piece of art finds itself, from antiquity to the present moment. If the works have value, they will endure, no matter what the government does. And no amount of support, public or private, will give immortality to bad art.
The advisory panel to the NEA, the National Council on the Arts, recommended 169 exhibits to Radice. Of these, she approved 167, or 99 percent. That percentage alone would suggest that the government is regulating its support of the arts with a very light hand.
With regard to the two rejected exhibitions, the one containing the painting "Genital Wallpaper" sailed by the advisory panel by a vote of 11-1 with one abstention. The photography and video exhibit for Virginia Commonwealth was recommended unanimously without even discussion. On a lesser scale of importance, the absence of discussion in one case and what apparently was only minimal debate in the other indicate a shockingly cavalier attitude.
Of greater importance, the advisers evidently have chosen deliberately to ignore the rising level of political controversy about public support for sexually explicit artistic images or works.
To strongly defend the arts against government suppression or the efforts by legislatures to define what is good or acceptable art is one thing. To assert, as the NEA panel in effect did, that public oversight is offensive to publicly supported art is quite another. Radice may have sent several signals to the artistic community with her vetoes, but clearly one of them was a warning that if the advisory panel wishes consent, it must first advise in a meaningful way.