‘Gay-Bashing’ as an Art Form : Art: The Mapplethorpe affair reveals a linkage of quirky conservative impulses in art, economics and politics.

Conservatives have cooked up a grimly Malthusian policy for the arts, motivated partly by free-market economic dogma, partly by an ideological (and public-relations) need to indulge in conspicuous displays of moral outrage. Press accounts have concentrated on the fulminations of Jesse Helms, giving scant attention to the real strategists of this cultural battle, the brave lieutenants of the intellectual right.

I’m thinking here of Hilton Kramer, former art critic for the New York Times and currently editor of the New Criterion, and Samuel Lipman, publisher of that journal of conservative cultural opinion. The cultural traditionalism they’ve been refining over the years is now having its day in the limelight, in the controversy over “obscene” art underwritten by tax dollars through the National Endowment for the Arts. The flash point was a scheduled exhibition, partly funded by the NEA, of the late Robert Mapplethorpe’s work, photographs commonly described as “homoerotic” in content.

Kramer and Lipman have been seeking to restrict the funding of the arts endowment since the very beginning of the Reagan presidency. Ideologically, they are committed to a vision of late-modernist culture derived from the earlier modernism of T. S. Eliot. They seek to erect a stable, authoritative canon of great works of the past, and to defend practitioners of contemporary art who have an intelligent and polite dialogue with that canon. Artists with an impolite, aggressive or debunking attitude to the art of the past don’t rank very high with Lipman and Kramer; for example, they don’t like the Dadaists.

Lipman in particular would like to see the NEA become a ministry of dead art, funding only the historical endeavors of museums. This makes sense in conservative terms, since recent tax-law changes have removed incentives for private collectors to donate art to museums, and escalating art prices have made it difficult for museums to compete with these same private collectors. A real institutional crisis is brewing, precisely because of the speculative hypertrophy of the free market. You might say that Lipman favors a modest museum bail-out program based on shifting money from living art to dead art.

These people make a lot of noise about allowing contemporary art to succeed or fail in the marketplace. Kramer has no problem, he claims, with a private culture of homosexual eroticism. What bothers Kramer is the implied moral imprimatur of government funding for public art exhibitions.

Liberals are suffering from a failure of nerve in this regard, allowing the right wing to hold the moral and the economic high ground. We should be aggressive in exposing both the homophobia and the economic inconsistencies of the conservative argument.

Kramer is happy as long as homosexual culture remains in the closet, and he’s even willing to accept a small homosexual aristocracy of taste within the art world. How generous.

What terrifies conservatives like him and Lipman is a truly popular, open homosexual culture, a culture capable of forging alliances and bonds with dissident and mainstream groups in this society. They worry about the sort of politicized gay and lesbian culture that has emerged since the Stonewall Rebellion of 1969 and is gathering strength now in response to the AIDS crisis.

Robert Mapplethorpe and gays in general are being stigmatized for taking seriously one of the utopian promises of the capitalist consumer economy: the promise of liberated desire. According to conservatives, gays and lesbians are suspect because they don’t reproduce “normal” family life. They supposedly don’t have children, and they often work in “frivolous” fields on the fringe of the GNP. In other words, conservatives project their own fears of both unfettered desire and an impotent economy onto gay and lesbian people, who are easily scapegoated in a society obsessed with productivity.

Liberals in government are stigmatized for their willingness to support a “hedonistic” and “bohemian” culture. Lipman chastises the very modestly funded NEA for its “profligacy.” Another conservative intellectual, Gertrude Himmelfarb, recently suggested a connection between the (supposed) spendthrift shortsightedness of Keynesian economics and John Maynard Keynes’ personal life as a homosexual.

These are strange accusations that beg for both economic and psychological analysis. Sigmund Freud understood the phenomenon of the “reaction formation,” the attempt to control a repressed wish. The parsimonious effort to control the orifices of government spending may well be a cover for the spendthrift impulses of conservatives themselves. Maybe conservatives are all closet Keynesians, secret believers in government deficit spending, notably of the military variety.

Samuel Lipman’s New Criterion is handsomely funded by the ultraconservative John M. Olin Foundation. Olin money comes not from some abstract patronage pool in the sky, but from the Olin Corp., a major chemical and munitions manufacturer. And where would Jesse Helms be without his two causes--tobacco subsidies and military aid to brutal Central American rightists? As threats to public health, Robert Mapplethorpe’s deadpan late-1970s pictures of unwittingly unsafe sex between consenting adult men hardly compare.

It has been too easy for the “art world’--a label that suggests both cosmopolitanism and parochialism--to see itself as a unified body under attack by philistines. The art world is perfectly capable of dividing against itself under pressure from without. Some arts administrators have stated their willingness to “live with” a congressional funding compromise that stigmatizes “homoerotic” expression. This will create a zone of moral quarantine. Why should gay and lesbian artists have to live and work under this shadow? Why should any artist who wishes to speak about the complicated vicissitudes of sexuality have to endure the special scrutiny of the government? And why should any other artist accept this stigmatization of his or her colleagues?

A large and distinguished assemblage of artists is boycotting the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Washington institution that volunteered to serve as the laboratory for conservative cultural policy by canceling a scheduled Mapplethorpe exhibition. The boycott is an appropriate and justified response, a kind of strike. The issue now is to develop common ground with other groups seeking to defend civil rights and liberties in an increasingly authoritarian society.