Saving the NEA

CONGRESS and the arts community have combined to make it difficult for the National Endowment for the Arts to come to a sensible (and constitutional) resolution of the controversy concerning federal funding of the arts. Of course, the NEA has only itself to blame for initiating the controversy—when establishing the agency in 1965 and directing it to fund projects with “substantial artistic and cultural significance,” Congress surely did not have in mind photographs of men urinating in each other’s mouths or of a crucifix submerged in a bottle of urine and given the title Piss Christ—but it is doubtful that, left to itself, the NEA would have required grant recipients to sign “non-obscenity oaths.” Nor, left to itself, would it have made a fool of itself by rescinding the requirement and then rescinding the rescission. For this, and all the other incidents in what has become a nasty public dispute, Congress and the arts community are also to blame.

Congress is of the opinion that art is one thing and obscenity another, and that a sensible agency can distinguish between the two. But many a work of art and many a literary masterpiece is obscene. As I had occasion to write a year ago when this present controversy began, Aristophanes’ Assembly of Women is so obscene that the Eng lish translator of the play preferred to remain anonymous (that was a long time ago), and Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe, now one of the Louvre’s treasured classics, was considered indecent when first exhibited in 1863. And quite rightly so; it shows not a nude but an undressed woman—her clothes are in a heap beside her—sharing a public picnic lunch with two fully clothed men. Indecent, yes (at least we used to think so), but a wonderful painting.

WB

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Walter Berns

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Alexis de Tocqueville

CONGRESS and the arts community have combined to make it difficult for the National Endowment for the Arts to come to a sensible (and constitutional) resolution of the controversy concerning federal funding of the arts. Of course, the NEA has only itself to blame for initiating the controversy—when establishing the agency in 1965 and directing it to fund projects with “substantial artistic and cultural significance,” Congress surely did not have in mind photographs of men urinating in each other’s mouths or of a crucifix submerged in a bottle of urine and given the title Piss Christ—but it is doubtful that, left to itself, the NEA would have required grant recipients to sign “non-obscenity oaths.” Nor, left to itself, would it have made a fool of itself by rescinding the requirement and then rescinding the rescission. For this, and all the other incidents in what has become a nasty public dispute, Congress and the arts community are also to blame.

Congress is of the opinion that art is one thing and obscenity another, and that a sensible agency can distinguish between the two. But many a work of art and many a literary masterpiece is obscene. As I had occasion to write a year ago when this present controversy began, Aristophanes’ Assembly of Women is so obscene that the Eng lish translator of the play preferred to remain anonymous (that was a long time ago), and Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe, now one of the Louvre’s treasured classics, was considered indecent when first exhibited in 1863. And quite rightly so; it shows not a nude but an undressed woman—her clothes are in a heap beside her—sharing a public picnic lunch with two fully clothed men. Indecent, yes (at least we used to think so), but a wonderful painting.