Federal Funding of Controversial Art Defended : Art: ‘Creativity will be the currency of the 21st Century,’ NEA chief Frohnmayer declares at House subcommitttee hearing in Malibu’s Getty Museum.

Declaring that “creativity will be the currency of the 21st Century,” the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts said Monday it is appropriate for the federal government to fund potentially offensive artworks.

John E. Frohnmayer, the NEA chairman, made the remarks before a hearing conducted by the postsecondary education subcommittee of the House Education and Labor Committee. The subcommittee will originate a bill this year to extend the arts endowment’s legislative life for another five years.

The hearing--the first of a series scheduled in the House and Senate this year on bills to renew the NEA’s legislative mandate--was held at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu.

Frohnmayer’s personal affirmation of federal funding for artworks that may be perceived by some as offensive came in response to a question by Rep. Pat Williams (D-Mont.), the subcommittee chairman. The remark appeared to coincide with an effort by Frohnmayer to begin making a public stand against attempts by conservatives in Congress to force the NEA to employ standards specifying appropriate subject matter and artistic approach for federally funded creative projects.

“Every society needs its artists; they are its watchers, its critics, its champions,” Frohnmayer said in his testimony. “It is a commentary on the strength and wisdom of a government which supports the arts without content restraints.”

Endowment observers said Frohnmayer’s testimony appeared to signal a strengthening of the NEA chairman’s resolve to publicly battle challenges to the NEA’s artistic independence. It came at a hearing punctuated by demonstrations outside the hearing room on behalf of both arts advocates who oppose clamping restrictions on art the NEA can support and conservative demonstrators demanding that it be required to do so.

Artists and supporters of the agency clashed with a group opposed to federal arts support. Outside the hearing, during a press conference by a group calling itself Taxpayers for Accountability for Government (TAG), artists and supporters shouted down conservatives holding the press conference as they tried to read prepared statements.

JoEllen Allen, president of Eagle Forum, a national group that advocates traditional values, said the organization supports elimination of the NEA. “Eliminating federal funding of the NEA would save taxpayers over $171 million in 1990 and end the escalating controversy concerning whether guidelines should be established for federally subsidized art.”

Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition and one of the organizers of the new TAG group, complained that the format of the hearing excluded NEA opponents.

Tom Blair, who identified himself as an independent Christian, said, “I have never been so deeply offended as I am” by the thought of an NEA-supported photograph of a crucifix immersed in urine that became one of the rallying points of heated debate last year over funding for the arts agency. But as Blair spoke, artists demonstrating nearby nearly drowned out the conservative speakers with chants of “Shame! Shame!” and “Art is not a crime.”

Conservative demonstrators, carrying picket signs denouncing “obscene” art, clashed visually with artists staging an advocacy demonstration with the same signs many carried last week in a march on the downtown Los Angeles Federal Building at which 27 artists and arts supporters were arrested. The march was the first of several public events in Southern California in the last few days that underscored the volatility of the issue.

Early Monday morning, arts supporters suspended banners supporting artistic freedom from freeway overpasses as far south as downtown Santa Monica. “Stop Censorship Now” signs were stapled to telephone poles along several miles of Pacific Coast Highway.

Getty Museum director John Walsh, who is also president of the Assn. of Art Museum Directors, a national group representing the nation’s largest museums, urged the Williams subcommittee to ward off an attack by a small group of legislators, saying that the chilling of free expression initiated by any clampdown on content of publicly supported art is “a price too high for a free society to pay.”

The audience, which remained orderly throughout the hearing, included a broad variety of people, from Sheldon to Los Angeles video artist Sheree Rose and comedian Bob Flanagan. Rose and Flanagan, who work together, were among nine West Coast artists named in a letter to the NEA from Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) late last year that demanded information on endowment support of specific arts projects.

Artist organizations and individual artists named in the Helms letter have contended the conservative senator’s correspondence was intended to intimidate artists working in controversial media and subject matter. Rose and Flanagan’s work focuses on sadomasochism and visually depicts such practices as piercing of the genital organs.

At Monday’s hearing, Frohnmayer noted that the NEA has undergone legislative reauthorization six times before during its 25-year history. On each occasion, Frohnmayer noted, a debate of some sort has materialized over whether the government should restrict the kinds of artworks that may be paid for with federal funds.

Frohnmayer recalled that when the arts endowment was created in 1965, legislators underscored a series of fears that it might become the equivalent of the ministries of culture in communist countries--forcing the content of art to conform to political dictates.

“For 25 years this agency has not fulfilled that dire warning,” Frohnmayer said. “And it should not do so now. The heart and soul of the arts is creativity, and promotion of that creativity is as old as our government itself.”

Frohnmayer also introduced a key element of his reauthorization strategy, in which the NEA is to refrain from trading body blows with conservative opponents who attempt to focus the debate on artworks of questionable taste the endowment may have supported. Under Frohnmayer’s strategy, emphasis is to be maintained on quality examples of artistic excellence from among the 85,000 grants the agency has given.

Other endowment officials acknowledged that the strategy is not without risk. Alvin S. Felzenberg, the NEA’s senior deputy chairman, said, “I hope he’s right” of Frohnmayer’s decision to focus on positive examples of NEA support and essentially ignore the conservative drumbeat. In a press conference of his own after the hearing, Williams repeated a warning he gave to arts supporters last year: That the vociferousness of the conservative protest may make it nearly impossible to produce an NEA re-authorization bill this year completely free of content controls.

But Felzenberg acknowledged that the situation remains risky for the NEA. “The debate (should be) over whether the NEA shall receive another renewal of its legislative life (based on its established record of artistic excellence).

“If both sides focus on that debate, the chairman’s optimism is well founded,” he said. “If people do not focus on that debate, we may come out of it a little differently poised (in terms of being forced to impose content controls) than when we went in.”

At Monday’s hearing, Norman Cousins, the prominent former magazine editor who is now an assistant dean of the UCLA School of Medicine, argued that “the greatest danger we face is to think that anyone knows enough to tell an artist what to paint or an author what to write. It is the shortest of all steps from telling writers what not to write or a painter what not to paint to telling a citizen what not to think or to think.”

Judith Baca, an internationally known Los Angeles muralist, urged the House subcommittee to not simply renew the legal life of the NEA but to double the arts agency’s budget at the same time. “The United States should be the leader in the free market of ideas,” Baca said, “and remember that an idea with which the majority of people do not agree could foster the greatest creativity in others.”