Is art free expression?
To the Editors:
Your editorial report (June 1993) on the Museum of Modern Art’s recent event honoring a number of artists and arts advocates for their contributions to freedom of expression sardonically dismisses the notion that denial of government arts funding can ever amount to censorship. What your writer ignores is that the motivation for a government action is often a pivotal question in deciding whether that action violates constitutional guarantees.
In the case of Karen Finley and the three other performance artists whose NEA grants were denied in 1990, your reporter neglects to mention that grants to the four were recommended by experts in the field on the basis of artistic merit, and were rejected by then NEA chair John Frohnmayer for political reasons. Your writer is certainly entitled to dispute the artistic merit of Karen Finley and indeed of performance art in general; and had the NEA made its decision on that basis, no one could complain. But manipulating the funding process for partisan, ideological ends violates the First Amendment, as the federal district court in the Finley case subsequently ruled.
The same principle applies to a university supported by public funds.
The same principle applies to a university supported by public funds. Judgments about the academic quality of teaching and scholarship of course must be made, but neither professors nor students can, consistently with constitutional free-speech guarantees, be adversely treated because of purely political considerations.
Your reporter also failed to grasp the gist of attorney Mary Dorman’s comments about the NEA at the MOMA event, and her suggestions for written letters to President Clinton et al. The point of the letters was to protest the Clinton administration’s decision to abandon its campaign position opposing ideological restrictions on arts fundings, and instead to pursue the Bush administration’s appeal of the federal court decision striking down the so-called “decency and respect” law governing NEA grants that was passed by Congress in 1990. The federal court had found that the law—requiring the NEA to take into consideration “general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the American public”—was unconstitutionally vague and restricted artistic freedom just as surely as a similar standard applied to a public university would restrict academic freedom.
Whether or not one appreciates the work of Karen Finley or other performance artists, it should be evident that constraining the NEA process with considerations as vague and ideologically loaded as “decency” and “respect” is not likely to produce the kind of principled judgments about artistic merit that the NEA was created to make.
Marjorie Heins
Director, Arts Censorship Project
The American Civil Liberties Union
The Editors reply:
We appreciate Miss Heins’s concern: of the $252,000 the courts awarded to Karen Finley and three other artists, $202,000 went to the ACLU for legal fees.