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