As an alumna, so to speak, of national review, I have been sadly disappointed at the magazine’s enthusiastic endorsement (for example, in the editorial “Shutter- buggery,” Sept. 1) of Senator Helms’s proposal to emasculate the National Endowment for the Arts. The House of Representatives has just rejected his amendment to the Endowment’s appropriations bill, and conservatives should not hope for its resuscitation in Senate—House conference later this fall. If the Helms amendment became law, it would cripple the peer-panel process through which the Endowment’s grants have always been made by forcing the panels to make their recommendations not on the quality of the art or the artist, but on whether or not a proposed project might be regarded by someone—anyone—as ‘‘obscene or indecent,” or as denigrating “the objects or beliefs of the adherents of a particular religion or non-religion,” or as debasing or reviling “a person, group, or class of citizens on the basis of race, creed, sex, handicap, age, or national origin.” Further, the Endowment’s chairman would have to assume the role of censor and bar any grants that seemed to him to be in violation of these proscriptions— a task for which few people (other, perhaps, than Senator Helms) would feel themselves qualified.
The current controversy raises a broader question than why or whether the agency should have supported the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition or, via a subgrant, the award by the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art to photographer Andres Serrano. The work—or lurid descriptions thereof—of both artists has clearly outraged large numbers of people. This is not the first time that Endowment grants have offended, nor, assuming that the state of the arts in this country continues on its present course and that the agency to survives the current onslaught, will it be the last. But the sound and fury that this particular episode has engendered seem indicative of a more generalized and profound anger than ever before.
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