Issues Tearing Our Nation's Fabric The Center for Reclaiming America

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National Endowment for the Arts
Chapter Fifteen

Most Americans hold a high view of art. We are amazed at the splendid lifelike sculptures of the Greeks and Romans; we delight in the magnificent music, paintings, and sculptures of the Renaissance; we are stirred by the probing insight and splendid detail of the Dutch Masters; and inspired by the imagination and joie de vivre of the Impressionists. We can appreciate the playful insolence of Pablo Picasso, Salvadore Dali, and Piet Mondrian, and also the edgy taunts of Claes Oldenburg, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein. But there is a point at which taste, like common sense, has its limits.

Art that inspires, challenges, and uplifts the soul has a rich history and deep significance in the American experience; but inspiring and uplifting art has been in very short supply the last fifty years. As if to reward and encourage the darkest and most destructive visions of modern life, the federal government, through massive funding of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), doles out millions of dollars every year to artists and institutions whose single-minded goal is apparently to assault the sensibilities of civilized people.

As if our tax dollars mean less than nothing, the NEA lavishes grants on artists and works whose only purpose is the debasement of life, the imagination, and the soul. Instead of celebrating the invincible human spirit or the majesty of creation, they wallow in anger and self-loathing. And the works most highly praised and rewarded by the self-seeking arts establishment always seem to trade in pornography, perversion, anti-American and anti-religious bigotry, and the most grotesque forms of sensualism and despair.

When funding time comes each year, the art community trots out its lists of grants to museums, civic theaters, symphonies, and touring exhibits that offer more wholesome fare. But as soon as the cameras are gone, and once the glare of public scrutiny is removed, the real work begins—which is the intentional, systematic, strategic, and meticulous grinding down of artistic sensibilities and public morality disguised under the name of art. All the outraged Hollywood celebrities the NEA can muster cannot hide that fact.

Sense and Nonsense

In his perceptive new book, The Sensate Culture: Western Culture Between Chaos and Transformation, Harold O. J. Brown says that art reflects the spirit of a nation and the spirit of the times. Think, for example, of Michelangelo’s Italy, Gainsborough’s England, or Van Gogh’s Holland. And then consider how the twisted visions of Max Ernst and the "degenerate" artists of Nazi Germany reflected the chaos and spleen of the Third Reich. Art reflects the soul of the nation. Brown writes, "The spirit that pervades the arts and entertainment of the West today is shaping a culture of which only the degenerate can be proud." The consequence, he adds, is just as in economics: "Bad art, like bad money, drives out the good"(Brown 26-27).

It is only natural, when the cultural elites make a habit of promoting, funding, and pushing upon society the darkest and most sordid visions of life, that the citizens should protest and rise up in alarm. It is to be expected, when elitist pronouncements about the deep and therapeutic "messages" of trashy works of art come into conflict with public decency and good taste, that the people paying the bills should expect and demand accountability. But when citizens demur, the arts establishment (flanked by its Hollywood contingent and the liberal media) cry censorship, repression, and intolerance, and accuse the responsible and respectable majority of muzzling their "freedom of expression."

But while the political, cultural, intellectual, and media elites demand unlimited freedom of expression, they are the very first to silence any public expression of religion. While they want the world to applaud homoerotic displays, fetishism, flag-burning, naked dancing, empty canvases, empty stages, empty minds, or live sex acts on stage, they cannot abide the simple decency, honor, and family values that cherish natural expressions of affection and the bond of mother, father, and child. Modesty, decency, self-respect, and discretion have no place in that worldview.

Appeals by those who are shocked and offended by the outrages of the arts league are ignored unless somehow its affects funding. "In the present climate of ‘anything goes,’" writes Harold Brown.

There is little chance to suppress art that is obscene, pornographic, cruel, and depraved. Instead, suppression is aimed at things that were formerly considered edifying, touching, and uplifting, such as religious symbols, affirmations of faith, references to God or salvation. The Ten Commandments, which once were taken for granted as the foundation of public law and justice in the United States, have been removed from schoolrooms and courtrooms. The tendencies to censorship are not limited to religious matters. Portrayals of noble or self-sacrificing figures, wholesome role models, and romantic or sentimental figures from history and legend are prohibited or, if permitted, are shown only in distorted and dishonoring forms (Brown 28-29).

The Record Speaks

When citizens protested arts funding in the early 1990s, the New York media flooded the news with cries of outrage from the luminaries of stage, screen, and the arts. They did not, however, show the works of Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe that created the controversy. ABC showed Mapplethorpe’s flower photos and spoke warmly of his struggle against "homophobia" and intolerance.

They did not show the works of "art" our tax dollars supported featuring frontal male nudity, human waste, Mapplethorpe’s photo of a bullwhip protruding from his own anus, or a homosexual man urinating into another man’s mouth. They did not show Serrano’s photograph of a crucifix in a jar of the artist’s urine, with the title "Piss Christ." Later, art critic Lucy Lippard, writing in Art in America, called Serrano’s photo, "darkly beautiful." But that’s not how America saw it.

"If this is art," one lawmaker protested, "then why not sell it on the open market? The free market is the best proving ground for new ideas. If this is of such value that the NEA will fund it, then why settle for tax dollars? You can go public." But such common-sense reactions inflamed artistic sensibilities. In response, the New York Times ran a two-page feature story on four artists whose grant requests were rejected after the flap in 1990. These "artists" do not paint, write, or sculpt; they rail against society. One of the four, a female, spews four-letter words and vulgar curses while smearing herself with human excrement. The others are homosexuals who scream about the sin of "homophobia." One of them, John Fleck, told reporters, "I became known as the man who masturbated on stage and urinated on the Bible."

Playwright Holly Hughes said, "My work has always been about publicly representing or revealing a lesbian experience. . . . to become visible, to leave the ghetto, to not be marginalized." After the Clinton Administration restored NEA funding, Hughes received not only an official apology but four more grants for new works, including one for her play, "The Well of Horniness," which celebrates lesbian sexuality and masturbation.

Over the last three years, under a more conservative majority in Congress, public funding for the arts has dropped from $170 million to $99 million per year, and many are lobbying aggressively for total defunding of the NEA. The reasons should be clear. Thomas Jefferson said that requiring citizens to support with their own money ideas with which they disagree is "sinful and tyrannical." The arts endowment would like Americans to believe they stand for art and culture, when their record shows conclusively what they really stand for: depravity, deception, and intellectual tyranny.

A Historical Perspective

One has to wonder where the destructive perspectives of the NEA and the elites come from. How can any sane or rational mind believe that the total annihilation of art in the name of free expression can be good for civilization? At least part of the answer has to come from the sources that schooled the minds of the men and women who administer cultural establishments today. It helps to remember that those in authority in the arts world are, by and large, products of the 1960s.

One of those influences was the German social philosopher and college professor, Herbert Marcuse, who came to this country in the 1930s. A radical Marxist devoted to the overthrow of capitalism, Marcuse wrote revolutionary tracts, thinly disguised as philosophy, encouraging American youth to reject their democratic heritage and moral values he called "repressive and conformist." His books, Eros and Civilization, One-Dimensional Man, and The Aesthetic Dimension, became textbooks for revolution in the hands of Leftists. And Marcuse found an army of willing soldiers in the universities.

"Art can indeed become a weapon in the class struggle," Marcuse taught, "by promoting changes in the prevailing consciousness." But first, painting, sculpture, theater, and music had to be stripped of conventional values.

While, in the arts, in literature and music, in communication, in the mores and fashions, changes have occurred which suggest a new experience, a radical transformation of values, the social structure and its political expressions seem to remain basically unchanged, or at least lagging behind the cultural revolution.

However, by the time of his death in 1979, all those things were under attack.

In his analysis of the moral breakdown in American society, E. Michael Jones frames the central issue extremely well.

A mind clouded by passion is like a window covered with dirt. It is not transparent; it is aware only of itself. Virtually all the artistic breakthroughs of the modern age . . . are a function of the mind turned away from truth and focused on its own desires instead. The turning away from the truth at the behest of disordered passions does not mean that the mind will stop functioning; it only means that that mind will not perceive the truth. And after a period of laboring in the dark, the mind can choose disorder over order and create for itself idols that it will serve instead of the truth placed in the universe by the Creator who is synonymous with truth (Jones 259).

Restoring the Moral Order

Given thirty years to foment and resonate within the universities, the arts community, the cultural establishment, and the coffee houses of New York City and San Francisco these fatuous and self-centered nostrums of the sixties reappear in our time, fully fledged as a revolutionary movement now taking its legitimacy from the NEA, the federal government, and your tax dollars.

The apostle Paul said,

whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy; meditate on these things (Philippians 4:8).

For centuries the vision of great art has been the ennobling of the mind, the building of character and perceptions, and a celebration of the world as God made it. How tragic that we could have come so far from that view.

To find out how you can confront these issues and take an active role in the struggle to reassert American character and the moral order, you may want to become familiar with the resources listed below.

For further reading:

Harold O. J. Brown. The Sensate Culture: Western Civilization Between Chaos and Transformation. Dallas: Word, 1996.
E. Michael Jones. Degenerate Moderns: Modernity as Rationalized Sexual Misbehavior. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993.
James Davison Hunter. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. New York: Basic Books, 1991.

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Copyright 1997, Coral Ridge Ministries. All rights reserved.