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The cultural debates between conservatives and liberals at the end of the 1980s andin the early 1990s were termed as “culture wars.”The “culture wars”involved a diverserange of controversial issues, such as the introduction of multicultural curricula ineducational institutions, prayers in schools, whether to allow gays to serve openly in themilitary, and whether abortion should be permitted. The most heated debates of the“culture wars”regarding art raged over the NEA and the question of whether AndresSerrano’s works should have been publicly funded, in addition to the exhibition “RobertMapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment”which were charged as projecting “obscene”or“blasphemous”images.
This paper examines the development of culture wars in art and focuses on severalissues invoked by the NEA debates. However, it is not a detailed chronologicalinvestigation. Rather it pays attention to the several phases of the debates, analyzing andcriticizing the clashes of the political and esthetical points of views between conservativesand liberals.
How could NEA funding, a mere fraction of the federal budget, have become socritical for both sides(conservative and liberal), for politicians and artists’groups, and foracademics and the general public? The art community was astounded by this chain ofevents; artists personally reviled, exhibitions withdrawn and under attack, the NEA budgetthreatened, all because of a few images. For conservative politicians, the NEA debate wasnot only a battle over the public funding of art, but a war over a larger social agenda, awar for “American values and cultures”based on the family, Christianity, the Englishlanguage, and patriarchy. Conservative politicians argued the question was not one of“censorship”but of “sponsorship,”since the NEA charter committed it to “helpingmuseums better serve the citizens of the United States.”Liberals and art communitiesargued that the attempt to restrict NEA funding violated the First Amendment rights ofartists, namely “free speeches.”“No matter how divided individuals are on matters oftaste,”Arthur C. Danto wrote, “freedom is in the interest of every citizen.”
The interesting phase is that both sides are actually borrowing one another’s point of view when they are accompanied by art criticism. Kramer, representative of conservativeart critic, objected the invasion of political contents or values in art, and struggled to keepart’s own realm by promoting pure aesthetic values such as quality and beauty. But, whenhe talked about Mapplethorpe’s works, he advocated political and ethical values. Bycontrast, art experts who argued for Mapplethorpe’s works in the Cincinnati trial defendedhis work, ironically by ignoring its manifest sexual metaphor or content although theybelieved that the issues of AIDS and homosexuality in his work were to be freelyexpressed in the art form. They adopted a formalistic approach, for example, by comparinga child nude with putti, a traditional child-angel icon.
For a while, NEA debates made art institutions, whether consciously orunconsciously, exert self-censorship, yet at the same time they were also producingpositive aspects. To the majority of people, art was still regarded as belonging to the pureaesthetic realm away from political, economical, and social ones. These debates, however,were expanding the very perspective on the notion of what is art and of how art isproduced, raising questions on art appreciation, representation, and power. The interestingfact remains: had the works not been swiped in NEA debates, could the Serrano’s orMapplethorpe’s images gain the extent of power and acceptance that it has today?