The Nature Of The Beast

In essence, I was. I had indicated a desire to leave, but they handed me my hat before I could. I told the president in October that I had a desire to return to private life. In January, I told him I had delayed that somewhat. I got called in on Feb. 20 and was told I needed to announce my resignation the next day.

One of my primary feelings was relief, because this job has been unrelentingly difficult.

I said from the beginning that I believed the Helms amendment of 1989 [which forbade the use of NEA grants to make “obscene” art] was unconstitutional. My conscious decision was to hang a light on it, to put it in the conditions [of a grant]. I got battered for the “loyalty oath,” as Joe Papp called it, but the result was that it was declared unconstitutional and we were done with it. And I defended “Poison” because it was a quality work of art. I don’t think I have ever been in a position where I did not defend a quality work of art.

[What] has gone wrong [are] the politicians who demand that the only art that be funded is that which will not offend a mainstream person. That perspective turns our whole system upside down. The First Amendment protects the speaker, not the listener. It protects the right to articulate an idea which may be offensive to some. And if we are going to fund the arts, we’ve got to be able to deal with ideas that are not mainstream. Otherwise, the funding of art is going to be elevator music, pablum. So for those who claim it’s not a First Amendment issue, I think it is more than a First Amendment issue-it goes to the very soul of what this country is, being able to accommodate differences and live with them.

The government doesn’t sponsor the ideas of any of the artists that we fund; it is merely the enabler that allows these things to happen. The analogy is that the government is the provider of the Hyde Park soapbox, and the artist is the provider of the ideas. The ideas can be in the whole spectrum of beliefs and values that are encompassed in the American people. But to hear some of our critics, you’d think there is a unified American value that somehow everybody can sign on to. That’s not the case.

I think that the White House’s impression of how you deal with the arts endowment is “Just make it noncontroversial.” That doesn’t have a whole lot of relation to reality, because the arts deal with controversy. Bizet was booed out of the opera house; the impressionists were thought to be wild animals in late-19th-century France. To suggest the arts should be noncontroversial is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the beast.

Well, I made one right out of the box. I suspended a grant from Artist’s Space, but I corrected that and reversed myself. We didn’t broaden the base of support for the arts [quickly enough]. What ultimately got us reauthorization [in 1990] was not just the arts world but the AFL-CIO, the American Conference of Mayors, education people, chambers of commerce. We [also] just got drubbed by the fundamentalist religious community in their persuading lots of good, thinking people that what was going on was blasphemy. They pointed to Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” and David Wojnarowicz’s image of Christ with a crown of thorns and a needle in his arm. Mainline theologians didn’t say, “Wait a minute. Both images could be consistent with Christian theology, " namely, taking on the sins of the world by Christ and the terrible degradation to the son of God that mankind did. Yet mainline religion hasn’t come into the debate in any significant way. What fundamentalists call blasphemy may have been the artist’s intent to make a statement on faith, or at least of faith in doubt.

It could happen. But my belief is that it is a very small minority of our populace that is making this noise about being offended, and if the mainstream of America gets off the couch and recognizes that one of the things we lead the world in is culture, and that that leadership is being threatened by this anti-intellectual, hate-based attack on the national endowment (and now on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting). Unless people of good will say they won’t be intimidated by this kind of cultural terrorism, then I think the endowment is threatened. There is [also] a responsibility on the part of the artist to articulate to the public what the artist is trying to do.

I would like very much to run a private foundation which deals with the arts. I hope to continue to speak about the importance of arts for education, for the good of the country. I really wouldn’t have traded my time here. It was not fun, but for being at the vortex of an issue I care deeply about, I couldn’t have found any place like it.

title: " The Nature Of The Beast " ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-13” author: “Deborah Ward”

In essence, I was. I had indicated a desire to leave, but they handed me my hat before I could. I told the president in October that I had a desire to return to private life. In January, I told him I had delayed that somewhat. I got called in on Feb. 20 and was told I needed to announce my resignation the next day.

One of my primary feelings was relief, because this job has been unrelentingly difficult.

I said from the beginning that I believed the Helms amendment of 1989 [which forbade the use of NEA grants to make “obscene” art] was unconstitutional. My conscious decision was to hang a light on it, to put it in the conditions [of a grant]. I got battered for the “loyalty oath,” as Joe Papp called it, but the result was that it was declared unconstitutional and we were done with it. And I defended “Poison” because it was a quality work of art. I don’t think I have ever been in a position where I did not defend a quality work of art.

[What] has gone wrong [are] the politicians who demand that the only art that be funded is that which will not offend a mainstream person. That perspective turns our whole system upside down. The First Amendment protects the speaker, not the listener. It protects the right to articulate an idea which may be offensive to some. And if we are going to fund the arts, we’ve got to be able to deal with ideas that are not mainstream. Otherwise, the funding of art is going to be elevator music, pablum. So for those who claim it’s not a First Amendment issue, I think it is more than a First Amendment issue-it goes to the very soul of what this country is, being able to accommodate differences and live with them.

The government doesn’t sponsor the ideas of any of the artists that we fund; it is merely the enabler that allows these things to happen. The analogy is that the government is the provider of the Hyde Park soapbox, and the artist is the provider of the ideas. The ideas can be in the whole spectrum of beliefs and values that are encompassed in the American people. But to hear some of our critics, you’d think there is a unified American value that somehow everybody can sign on to. That’s not the case.

I think that the White House’s impression of how you deal with the arts endowment is “Just make it noncontroversial.” That doesn’t have a whole lot of relation to reality, because the arts deal with controversy. Bizet was booed out of the opera house; the impressionists were thought to be wild animals in late-19th-century France. To suggest the arts should be noncontroversial is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the beast.

Well, I made one right out of the box. I suspended a grant from Artist’s Space, but I corrected that and reversed myself. We didn’t broaden the base of support for the arts [quickly enough]. What ultimately got us reauthorization [in 1990] was not just the arts world but the AFL-CIO, the American Conference of Mayors, education people, chambers of commerce. We [also] just got drubbed by the fundamentalist religious community in their persuading lots of good, thinking people that what was going on was blasphemy. They pointed to Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” and David Wojnarowicz’s image of Christ with a crown of thorns and a needle in his arm. Mainline theologians didn’t say, “Wait a minute. Both images could be consistent with Christian theology, " namely, taking on the sins of the world by Christ and the terrible degradation to the son of God that mankind did. Yet mainline religion hasn’t come into the debate in any significant way. What fundamentalists call blasphemy may have been the artist’s intent to make a statement on faith, or at least of faith in doubt.

It could happen. But my belief is that it is a very small minority of our populace that is making this noise about being offended, and if the mainstream of America gets off the couch and recognizes that one of the things we lead the world in is culture, and that that leadership is being threatened by this anti-intellectual, hate-based attack on the national endowment (and now on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting). Unless people of good will say they won’t be intimidated by this kind of cultural terrorism, then I think the endowment is threatened. There is [also] a responsibility on the part of the artist to articulate to the public what the artist is trying to do.

I would like very much to run a private foundation which deals with the arts. I hope to continue to speak about the importance of arts for education, for the good of the country. I really wouldn’t have traded my time here. It was not fun, but for being at the vortex of an issue I care deeply about, I couldn’t have found any place like it.