Duping the NEA

ONCE AGAIN, disgruntled artists are crying "Censorship!" in order to discredit the concept of moral standards in art. Four artists whose grant applications to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) were recently rejected have filed a lawsuit against the organization's "decency code," which forbids the funding of works of art and literature that depict homosexuality or the erotic. They claim that the code was the reason for their rejection and that it sets an unconstitutional limit on freedom of expression.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which is handling their case, supports this view, and demands that grants be awarded on the basis of artistic merit, not ideology.

This dichotomy between art and ideology is a curious one. Certainly, the technical merit of a work of art is morally neutral and should be judged separately from the content. But to demand that only the former quality be the basis for judging a work's value is to deny art's role in human life and its purpose of conveying and influencing human thoughts and experiences. The value of a work to the viewer and society--which is what the NEA judges are judging when they allocate our society's money--depends on both style and content.

THE ROLE OF CONTENT in the worth of the work of art can be best illustrated by a less controversial example. Few would find fault if a prize were awarded to Richard Wright's Black Boy rather than to Mein Kampf. In these cases, judges must consider the total value the work presents to the viewer or reader and whether they feel morally justified in promoting the work and the beliefs that are inextricably bound up in it.

The artists' evident hypocrisy lies in their creating overtly political or ideological work in which the content is intended to be the work's major value, and then quickly proclaiming the "freedom" of art from ideological standards as soon as their intended funders reject the work's ideology. Like immature adolescents, they want the thrill of offending the establishment without any curtailment of the benefits of that establishment's patronage.

It is especially interesting that the works that have sparked this controversy have often been photographs or performance pieces (e.g. Mapplethorpe's and Serrano's photos and Annie Sprinkle's strip-shows). Here, the work not only depicts the idea of an event but is dependent on the actual occurrence of that event. The judge is not only deciding to promote the idea of urinating on a crucifix, but also to fund someone who actually did it. The artist and his or her work are morally implicated in the subject matter itself, further illustrating the impossibility of separating art from values.

The artists who are suing the NEA have a right to their own ideology. So do those who fund them. If these disagree, no business will be transacted, but no one is attempting to suppress the other. There is a world of difference between refusing to buy a book and burning it. The sooner the artists realize this, the sooner they will drop these unjustifiable censorship lawsuits that make a mockery of all sincere struggles for artistic and moral freedom.

Art should be judged for its content as well as for its form.