"Art Lessons: Learning from the Rise and Fall of Public Arts Funding." By Alice Goldfarb Marquis, BasicBooks, 304 pp.; $25

In recent years, conservative critics have been asking questions such as, "How can the same government that prohibits displays of the cross on public property pay an artist to submerge a cross in his own urine, photograph it, and then display the portrait in government-subsidized art galleries?" Indeed, Andres Serrano's Piss Christ, and the National Endowment for the Arts' indirect subsidy of it, has become something of a metaphor fomenting a public backlash against the arts, spearheaded by Christian leaders such as Jerry Falwell and conservative senators such as Jesse Helms. Responding to a "Time" magazine article that endorsed the NEA, House Speaker Newt Gingrich singled out Serrano's "blasphemy" as one reason why Congress has slashed funding for the NEA-after threatening to abolish the agency altogether.

In "Art Lessons: Learning from the Rise and Fall of Public Arts Funding," Alice Goldfarb Marquis helps readers frame recent debates by presenting a thorough history and penetrating critique of the NEA. Though Marquis advocates continued arts funding, her work reveals an agency that, while trying to serve noble ends, has often been driven by politics and marred by confusion.

Political influence over the NEA began early. Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy were both proponents of government arts funding, not because of any love of the arts per se but because of the political capital to be gained. In fact, both Presidents claimed that government support of the arts was a necessary weapon in the Cold War: the United States could not allow the communist empire to seize the cultural high ground. In later years, both Lyndon Johnson--whose administration established the nea in 1965--and Richard Nixon would be hearty supporters of the NEA, despite the fact that neither man had anything other than an electoral interest in wooing the arts community.

But politics also drove those inside the agency. NEA administrators knew that in order to get Congress to renew the agency's funding each year, it would have to influence as many congressional districts as possible. The result was a very thinly spread largess of mostly small (and hence, at times ineffective) grants.

But the politicized grant system is only one indication of the NEA's persistent fuzziness on what should have been its most well-defined policy point: who is qualified to receive a grant, and who is clearly not. It is this imprecision that, more than anything else, has brought about the NEA's current woes.

As far back as the 1970s, the NEA frequently gave money to "artists" whose works ranged from the silly to the scurrilous. On the silly side, the NEA once granted $6,000 to an artist to "sculpt in space" by tossing crepe paper out of an airplane. It once gave $3,000 to someone who wanted to train porpoises for opera. On the more scurrilous end of the spectrum, in 1977 the NEA subsidized the Gay Sunshine Press, whose publication showcased homosexual group sex and bestiality. In 1984, a New York gallery, subsidized by the NEA, held an exhibition entitled "Carnival Knowledge." This exhibition featured public forums to discuss fellatio; naked lesbians fondling each other on stage; and an 86-year-old woman giving lectures on her sexual exploits with teenagers. (Sometimes the silly and the scurrilous coalesce.)

Marquis reminds readers that the percentage of NEA monies going to such fringe groups has always been puny compared to the amounts given to mainstream artists and organizations. Still, as Marquis observes, the NEA's willingness to support such an "orgy of bad taste masquerading as avant-garde expression helped to move a passing phenomenon from obscure underground venues into mainstream institutions." The nea, Marquis asserts, has routinely "confounded shock with originality, mistaking inflammatory words and scandalous deeds for fresh ideas and sensitive execution."

But Marquis's primary critique is more basic. For, she claims, it is doubtful that a governmental agency could ever produce artistic excellence simply by doling out money (money may, in fact, reward mediocrity or even stunt creativity as artists merely imitate the work of those already successful in securing grants). Money cannot produce talent where there is none to begin with, and anyway, "art experts" have often failed to recognize truly great art at the time it was being produced.

Marquis may be correct that the current system will not encourage or produce good art. Her own solution--to give block grants to local arts managers to seek out and nurture hometown talent--may also be impractical. Still, despite the NEA's poor track record, it seems to me that a restructured agency driven by more careful guidelines should find a niche within our government. For the arts can have an ennobling effect on individuals and, ultimately, on the societies they inhabit. This may explain why most other Western countries contribute heavily to the arts in their societies--in most cases, giving between 5 and 15 times more public money per citizen than the United States has ever given.

The arts ought to be seen as valuable enough to warrant public monies (a society shows what it values by what it is willing to pay for). It is hard to refute the logic of those who argue that a society that can annually find billions to spend on weapons of death and destruction should be able to set aside a few hundred million dollars to promote more life-affirming and culture-building things. Though money alone will not produce such art, providing funds is surely the bare minimum that a government can do both to show the value it places on art and to nurture its development.

Unhappily, the controversies engendered by the NEA have obscured the place and value of the arts for at least some Christians. Of course, even among Christians who support government arts funding, there is often disagreement--what one Christian may regard as fine art another may regard as an unseemly depiction of sin. Preachers frequently discover similar cultural cross-currents after using a movie for a sermon illustration. While some in the congregation are not bothered by a film with some profanity or sexual situations, others are thoroughly scandalized by any movie that contains even slightly objectionable language or depictions.

But though we Christians need to repudiate the clearly raunchy sectors of the arts, and though we rightly protest the use of public monies to finance what most would regard as clearly lurid, this may be yet another area where we need to accept the limits of a pluralistic society. In a diverse society, it will probably always be the case that along with sponsoring lovely and noncontroversial things like symphony orchestras or natural history museums, there will from time to time also be government sponsorship of a work whose merits cannot be agreed upon even among fellow Christians. (Perhaps Christians who don't approve of certain publicly funded forms of art need to tolerate this even as some Christians tolerate--despite their dislike of it--the use of their taxes to build bombs.)

What ought not to be forgotten is the potential goodness of culture and its artifacts. For surely the gifts of artists--whether or not such artists are Christians--are themselves remnants of the divine image in humanity. Most decent works of art, though bearing the wounds of our rebellion, still also bear traces of creative goodness worthy of respect and support. It would be a sad irony if the agency founded to promote the arts in fact caused Christians to shun them.

For if one day, as both Isaiah and John envisioned, the cultural artifacts of the nations will be brought into the New Creation, then surely we are not wasting our time or money when we enjoy and contribute to the arts. By so doing we may even be adding to the greater glory of that New Creation.

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review

Volume 2, No. 2, Page 22

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