On the Record as Supporting Tax-Sponsored Porno/graphy

Over at Time, Richard Lacayo considers a Cabinet-level Department of Culture and decides against it:

[I]n the hope of getting federal dollars, would museums find themselves tempted to avoid mounting shows that might make the U.S. Department of Culture unhappy? In which case, what happens the next time a conservative Republican is in the White House?

What happens under a Republican administration is the U.S. Department of Culture doesn't do anything at all because its budget is slashed to all hell. It's not like the Environmental Protection Agency became a toxic terror during the Bush administration—it was merely prevented from doing its job. You might find under the Grand Old Party's watch an increase in Shakespeare in the Park and jazz festivals along with a decline in fewer biennials and traveling midcareer exhibitions. I'd worry more about other powers that might wind up in a Department of Culture, like the copyright enforcement regimes you see in Departments of Culture elsewhere in the world.

Which is not to say that there is no reason to be concerned about art in the public sphere. I wrote a story along these lines for the Huffington Post after the death of Sen. Jesse Helms:

"More insidious" than conservative challenges to contemporary art "is the chilling effect Helms and his like have had on museums, universities, theaters, and other arts-presenters," writes Wendy Steiner, the Richard L. Fisher Professor of English and Founding Director of the Penn Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania, via e-mail. In The Scandal of Pleasure, Steiner provides the authoritative account of both the public-funding and obscenity-trial scandals associated with the NEA in 1989. "Right-wing politicians do not have as much offensive publicly-funded art to complain about these days, because publicly-funded institutions will not show it."

And here is what this intimidation sounds like (and this ought to date the piece):

John McCain's rhetoric has even come to parallel the culture warriors in its reductive simplicity. Steiner explains in Scandal that Helms's counterpart in the House (Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA)) once threatened his colleagues to support legislation penalizing the NEA with the statement, "Make no mistake about it, we will alert our members that you are on the record as supporting tax-sponsored pornography." John McCain registers a similar note when he goes on about his friends who author pork-barrel spending legislation: "I'll make them famous, and you'll know their names."

But when elected Republican representatives huff and puff about art, the point isn't to actually dial back First Amendment protections. Rather the point is to throw some red meat to voters and win elections. Outrage itself is a constructed thing, cultivated by radical morals groups who benefit from certain structural features of the complaint process. See Ars Technica's Matthew Lasar break down the way that the FCC handles complaint statistics and you'll see that the nation is not so full of shrinking violets as their numbers might have you believe.

Culture wars haven't won conservatives anything recently. A failed culture-war campaign might ultimately cost Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper his job. (Another story I wrote up for HuffPo.) And while the GOP brand is failing, liberals are picking up executive and legislative branches. The opportunity just might be right to push more aggressively for public support for art, what with all this change in the air.

But only, of course, if there's a case to be made for public support. Lacayo's post highlights a concern with government arts administration but doesn't really address the status quo. To do that you'd need to change the question: What happens when museums that are overwhelmingly dependent on private support fail when the economy tanks? To my mind there are worse fates than the specter of censorship under an arts czar.

Posted by Kriston at January 12, 2009 4:50 PM