Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon News

Who's the real underdog?
As Bill Bradley surges, Al Gore claims second-class status. But are Democrats ready for this spacy, aloof anti-candidate?
By Anthony York
[10/02/99]

"Better to lose fighting a noble cause"?
Pat Robertson and the Christian Coalition kick off the "Road to Victory '99" convention.
By Jake Tapper
[10/01/99]

No Gun Ri: What they're saying
Experts grapple with reports that the U.S. committed war crimes during the Korean War.
By Alicia Montgomery
[10/01/99]

Bauer is reborn -- as a feminist!
The Christian rightist's presidential candidacy was going nowhere fast until he discovered that everyone likes a little sex thrown into the mix -- everyone, that is, except his uptight top aides.
By Susan Crabtree
[10/01/99]

Bradley: I'm still the underdog
Bill Bradley stunned the political world by raising more money in the last three months than had Al Gore -- but he's not about to claim front-runner status.
By Anthony York
[09/30/99]

Complete archives for News

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

But the public isn't buying this tale of its own resentment and stupidity. Friday's New York Daily News reports a poll demonstrating that city residents support the museum's right to stage its show by a 2-to-1 ratio -- the majority holding across lines of class, race and religion, including Catholics. The paper reports that "many of those polled were passionate about their positions." Only 10 percent of New Yorkers think the mayor should have the power to cut off the museum's funding. As with Monicagate and impeachment, it would appear that the public's ability to judge matters of sexuality and expression, to distinguish private religious views from public values, runs far ahead of the politicians and pundits.

This matters because one of the most deleterious consequences of a decade of attack on arts funding has been the near-suspension of debate among civil libertarians about the artworks themselves, about the responsibilities and content and mission of art in the public realm. And here, the comparison with that last great New York censorship fight bears some unexpected lessons. Whether an enduring theatrical monument or a flash in the pan, the original "Cradle Will Rock" was a public-spirited artwork about the deepest issues dividing American society.

Blitzstein's musical language, while biting and acerbic, was accessible to anyone who'd heard classical music or jazz. The whole Federal Theater Project was conceived by the same New Dealers who employed classically trained painters to put art in post offices and schools, who paid young writers like Nelson Algren and Saul Bellow and Ralph Ellison to collect the memories of ex-slaves and Dust Bowl refugees and who sent Shakespeare troupes to inner-city neighborhoods and remote towns. The Federal Theater Project and WPA were rooted in a vision of art as deeply embedded in the fabric of life, comprehensible through the prism of daily experience. This is a far cry from the idiosyncratic, inaccessible artistic vision of conceptual art from which "Sensation" hails.

The public's overwhelming and sophisticated rejection of Giuliani's inquisition suggests that it ought to be possible for a defense of free expression to coexist with a more vigorous debate about the content of art. We can defend the NEA, defend the imperative for radical, taboo-bashing, experimental art-making, and still ask if the Whitney would so readily display a sculpture called "Piss Torah," with a scroll dropped in a jar of urine. If civil libertarians and artists want the public's support for free expression, they also ought to trust the public with uncomfortable, even angry questions, and not wait for the mealy mouthed pieties of politicians. Otherwise, the constituency for art will become ever more insular, the defense of free expression finally as abstract as the art itself.

In 1907, William Butler Yeats wrote a poem condemning the "eunuchs" of Dublin's cultural establishment who fomented riots to try to shut down John Millington Synge's play "Playboy of the Western World" because of its frank depiction of Irish womanhood. Yeats envisioned John Synge as "Great Juan" and wrote of his attackers: "Even like these to rail and sweat/staring upon his sinewy thigh." For Giuliani to seize control of the Brooklyn Museum because of "Sensation" would be a crime. But the fact that he rails and sweats at art of such little sinew, that is tragedy.
salon.com | Oct. 2, 1999

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

  Get a printer-friendly version

  E-mail a friend about this article

  Backflip this article to find it again

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Search Salon