Dogma And The American Dream Essay, Research Paper

Robert Mapplethorpe began taking photographs in 1970 with a Polaroid camera given to him by a friend. Nearly twenty years later, when Mapplethorpe died at the age of forty-two, he was considered one of the most important photographers of his time. His elegant and sometimes shocking nudes, the black-and-white portraits, flower still lifes, and images of sexual sadomasochism had been exhibited widely and were the subject of serious critical attention in Europe and America. A few months after his death, Mapplethorpe became the focus of an acrimonious debate over federal funding of the arts when an exhibition of his work was cancelled by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C. The director of the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, was subsequently acquitted of obscenity charges brought against him for presenting the same exhibition. LAW: Defining censorship When it rules on an ”indecent art” case, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether not subsidizing an activity is censorship. The National Endowment for the Arts has been giving tax money to artists since the Johnson presidency. Some of its decisions have been controversial. For example, it subsidized an exhibit of menstrual blood, clothing made of condoms, and a depiction of Jesus Christ as a drug addict and sex object. In 1990, after the NEA helped fund Robert Mapplethorpe’s ”homoerotic” photos and Andrew Serrano’s crucifix in a jar of urine, Congress took action. It passed a bill requiring the NEA to consider ”general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the American public,” as well as artistic excellence, in awarding grants. Some NEA supporters objected, including Karen Finley – who had previously received a grant for smearing her naked body with chocolate, an act judged to be artistic excellence. Finley filed a lawsuit, arguing the decency standard was too vague – and also that it violated free speech. Inexplicably, she prevailed on the trial and appellate levels, setting the stage for a Supreme Court hearing next year. Decency is no less vague than artistic merit, the only standard that Finley finds acceptable. The quality of art is very much in the eyes of the beholder. The NEA has defined a bucket of water with two dead flies, an unpainted stick cut from standard lumber and a sculpture of a dozen male sex organs as ”artistic excellence” and awarded subsidies for all three. Many Americans, including legitimate patrons of the arts, would disagree. As for free speech, the NEA statute does not restrict what artists say or do. It merely limits what the NEA itself, a government agency, can do. Congress is elected to represent the American people. It has an obligation to make certain their tax dollars are used in a way a majority deems

appropriate. If the American people have no say in how their tax money is spent, even through their elected representatives, that is taxation without representation. If Finley wants to disrobe and smear on chocolate, she has a right to do that. If she wishes, she can call it art. But the taxpayers are under no obligation to pay her for doing that – except, of course, for those who choose to be part of her audience. Finley says her performance really is a political statement about how America treats women – and it violates the First Amendment when the government discriminates against a statement, based on its content. But if the government is funding political statements, rather than art, then it should provide ”equal time” for dissenting viewpoints. Or, better yet, it should stay away from political statements of all types. There is nothing unconstitutional about making a reasonable effort to satisfy those paying the bill. Encyclopedia Mapplethorpe, Robert 1946 89, American photographer, b. New York City. He is known for his black-and-white studies of male and female nudes, flowers, and celebrity portraits. He credited sculpture as an influence on his work and used traditional techniques of direct lighting and sharp focus. His photographs include homoerotic and sadomasochistic images. Soon after his death from AIDS, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. canceled a traveling retrospective of his work in an unsuccessful attempt to avoid a debate in Congress over public funding by the National Endowment for the Arts of works deemed “objectionable” by fundamentalist religious groups and political conservatives. In 1990 a Cincinnati jury found that city’s Contemporary Arts Center and its director not guilty of obscenity for exhibiting Mapplethorpe’s photographs. His works are included in Lady: Lisa Lyon (1983) and Robert Mapplethorpe: Certain People (1985). The art world is driven by a quest for novelty. Novelty enjoys cultural tensions and controversy, and, in recent years, must descend to violence, obscenity, and vulgarity, to find it. Even the definition of avant garde, always the essence of modern art, has changed. Whereas it once meant “the presentation of classic social themes in new artistic forms”, it now means “the symbolic presentation of behavior and ideas that test the limits of social respectability.” Or as another has defined it: “the progressive exploration of the forbidden frontiers of human experience.” A photographer named Mapplethorpe is a paradigm of this new construction for “artist.” (Like most pervert “artists”, he has died of AIDS.) When the average person views a Mapplethorpe photograph (ie: the “artist’s” buttocks with a bullwhip protruding from the anus) he thinks Perverse, whereas the “progressive artist” sees that “the conventional notion of good taste is based on an illusion of social order that is no longer possible or desirable to believe in.” The forbidden frontier is “tested”, evaporates under the scrutiny, and a new frontier is projected and established, more perverse, more violent, more vulgar, than the previous, which must then be “tested.” Under such retreat, the notion of a distinction between “art” and obscenity disappears. It should come as no surprise that this is exactly what perverted “artists” WANT to happen under the rubric of intellectual freedom: one cannot be called perverted if ALL are perverted by one definition or another. And our culture ratchets down one more level.

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