The portion of Ames' article which I was most interested in is titled "The Politics of Public Taste: Pornography and Blasphemy" and it discusses a time when United States Congress representatives and senators threatened to cut the budget of the National Endowment of the Arts for financing a Robert Maplethorpe exhibition and an Andres Serrano exhibition. (He also gives the details of a similar situation in Canada, but I'll skip that.) Ames goes on to ask the following questions: "What is art, who is it for, who pays for it, who calls the tune?"
When I think of the Hide/Seek exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, I think, "Obviously the art at the National Portrait Gallery is for The Nation, not specifically the Catholic League which called for the removal of part of the show. As I go further in Ames' article, I feel more and more impassioned about this issue. Especially when he drops this beautiful John Updike quote (No, really, John Updike. As in, the author of The Witches of Eastwick. Apparently he writes about art, too.):
"It is perhaps the nature of modern art to be offensive. It wishes to astonish us and invites a revision of our prejudices. If we are not willing to risk giving offense, we have no claim to the title of artists, and if we are not willing to face the possibility of being ourselves revised, offend and changed by a work of art, we should leave the book unopened, the picture unveiwed, and the symphony unheard."
So just as I'm attaining this high of poetic righteousness a la John Updike, Ames plays devil's advocate. I mean, I understand the pressures that were put on the director of the Portrait Gallery. The risk of cut funds, the pressure to serve the widest of audiences.... but Ames brings new light to the issue. He asks if we should set limits out of respect for the community standards of the for sensitivities of others. He points out that that lunatic Jesse Helms is probably not the only person with these sensitivities. Ames questions, "Is art now to be considered such an absolute value that no other standard- no standard of taste, no social or moral standard- is to be allowed to play a role in determining what sort of art is appropriate for the government to support?"
It is the way Ames speaks of art as being an absolute value that really gets me thinking. I guess the idea of the government censoring anything is a frightening one because it seems like it opens the door to even more control over what we Americans are exposed (or not exposed) to. But Ames' does raise some very important questions. I'm still very much in favor of the first amendment and I'm still upset that political pressure resulted in the removal of part of David Wojnarowicz's work, but I am thinking more carefully about the breadth of the audience and the status of art as an "absolute value."
Do we want politics to intervene in areas of intellectual exploration? With a growing conservatism in the United States we face having the very leaders of our country telling us that evolution does not exist and global warming is not a result of our interference with the environment. Academia and museums are among the few places left where challenges can be made on an intellectual platform. While opposition may arise from inside or outside (as when the president of Columbia University invited the president of Iran to speak on campus), it is still possible to air these oppositional viewpoints without fear of reprisal. In eliminating the offending video in Hide/Seek, the director of the NPG capitulated to forces that might have had more respect for him had he not. He might have chosen a number of other ways to acknowledge the Catholic League’s concerns, while not compromising the curatorial integrity of the exhibition. Unfortunately he set a precedent that will be difficult to veer from should another government-sponsored exhibition “wish to astonish us.”
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