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                                                                                CULTURE, Page 43

The NEA: Trampled Again


When Dan Quayle and the religious right talk about moral values,
it can only be bad news for the arts agency, long a scapegoat
for "liberal" culture

By ROBERT HUGHES


    It may be, as many members of the Republican Party seem
to believe, that there are few disadvantages attached to being
American. But there is at least one: What other democratic
nation would make a bantam like J. Danforth Quayle its Vice
President and send him forth to lecture on public morality and
cultural health? Last month's sitcom episode in which the Vice
President mistook Candice Bergen, a.k.a. Murphy Brown, for the
Scarlet Woman of Babylon has already passed into history. A baby
out of wedlock! The Veep blew his chance to link this fictional
infant to the agenda of the antiabortion lobby -- MURPHY
CHOOSES LIFE! -- and scolded the fictional mother for getting
pregnant in the first place.

    Now the Little Communicator is at it again. As Republican
spin doctors and political handlers scurry about the landscape
trying to use "family values" to shore up President Bush's
eroding base among conservatives and divert attention from
peskier concerns such as the deficit, the Vice President must
beat the populist drum on cultural and moral matters. To a
standing ovation from the annual Southern Baptist Convention in
Indianapolis last week, Quayle declared that the hoots of
nationwide amusement at his Murphy Brown efforts were a "badge
of honor." A "cultural elite," cynical and relativistic, the
same folk Spiro Agnew used to call the "nattering nabobs of
negativism" 20 years back, was still undermining the good old
American values, "the simple but hard virtues."

    Americans like to accuse their opponents of forming an
elite; it's one of the hoariest cliches of democracy. But Quayle
was born not with a mere silver spoon but with a silver ladle
in his mouth. He is the millionaire son of media millionaires,
imbued with the deepest tribal mores of the Midwestern country
club, raised to office by presidential patronage. For such a man
to complain about elitism, and media elitism in particular,
seems forced. There is something distinctly unbecoming about
Quayle's efforts to present himself as a man of the people.

    For those interested in the intersection of government
policy and the arts, however, one prediction may be made. With
the elephants nervously trumpeting about cultural values, the
already much embattled National Endowment for the Arts will come
in for some more ritual trampling.

    The reason is threefold. First, a plethora of Washington
conservatives hope for distraction issues -- anything that will
take voters' minds off the domestic economy -- and see in the
campaign for moral restrictions on the NEA a rich source of
cheap shots against "liberal" culture.

    Second, the NEA has a new acting director, Anne-Imelda
Radice, 44, an arts administrator put in by Bush to replace John
Frohnmayer, who was fired to appease Pat Buchanan's distorted
and ranting attacks on the NEA during the early primaries.
Radice told a House subcommittee on appropriations that "if we
find a proposal that does not have the widest audience . . . we
just can't afford to fund that." At a May conference at New York
City's Metropolitan Museum of Art she declared that, despite the
acrid controversy over NEA policy in the arts community, "blood
is thicker than water, and we have to stick together to save the
NEA." This seems bound to translate into more conservative,
"mainstream" funding policy, although 97 out of 100 NEA grants
go to projects that have nothing to do with what is vaguely
called "the cutting edge" of culture.

    The odds are that under Radice's stewardship, anything
that speaks of sex or politics -- or, worst of all, both -- can
go whistle. In fact, she has canceled two grants for proj ects
at university art galleries that had already been approved by an
11-to-1 vote of the NEA's decidedly unradical advisory council.
One, for $10,000, was for "Corporal Politics," a show proposed
by the List Visual Arts Center at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, containing images of sexual organs. The
cancellation, Radice claimed, was based solely on "artistic
merit."

    But the third element that seems bound to fuel further
controversy over the NEA is a verdict just handed down by a
federal court in Los Angeles. In 1990 Frohnmayer, hoping to
mollify the Republican right, introduced a clause requiring
"general standards of decency" as a basis for NEA grants. On
that standard, four performance artists (Karen Finley, Holly
Hughes, John Fleck and Tim Miller) saw their applications for
grants rejected and sued the NEA. Last week Judge A. Wallace
Tashima struck down the "decency" clause as vague and
unconstitutional. The government, he said, does not have "free
rein to impose whatever content restrictions it chooses" on
federally funded art. "The right of artists to challenge
conventional wisdom and values is a cornerstone of artistic and
academic freedom." The NEA Four, as they have been dubbed, will
now try to show that their grants were refused for political,
not aesthetic reasons.

    A Harris poll last February indicated that 60% of
Americans support federal funding of the arts and that 80% feel
"the arts need to operate freely with a minimum of government
control." Tell that to the self-appointed political guardians
of American virtue. Pincered between them and the extremists who
think any denial of a grant to "experimental" art is cultural
fascism, the NEA faces plenty of troubles ahead in this election
year.