Congress Urged to Avoid Obscenity Curbs : Art: Commission also calls for the National Endowment for the Arts chairman to stop requiring grant recipients to sign pledge.

An independent study commission, created amid furor over government funding of controversial art, urged Congress today not to impose anti-obscenity curbs on works subsidized by the National Endowment for the Arts.

It also called on the arts agency chairman, John E. Frohnmayer, to scrap a requirement that grant recipients sign a pledge not to use federal funds to produce works that might be deemed obscene.

The bipartisan 12-member panel, established by Congress last fall, also proposed overhauling the grant-making machinery of the endowment.

“Maintaining the principle of an open society requires all of us, at times, to put up with much we do not like, but the bargain has proved in the long run a good one,” the commission said.

The House is preparing to begin debating soon legislative proposals to extend the life of the embattled arts endowment, with restrictions on the kinds of art that can receive federal funds. The NEA’s statutory authority expires Sept. 30.

The NEA has been buffeted for more than a year by criticism from conservative lawmakers and religious fundamentalists over its support for works that some regard as pornographic or sacrilegious.

At the urging of Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), Congress amended the endowment’s current $171-million budget last fall to include a ban on support for works that “may be considered obscene,” including homoerotic and sadomasochistic images.

The commission unanimously urged Congress not to hobble the NEA with anti-obscenity restrictions and, in effect, to trust the endowment chairman to approve grants for works of artistic excellence that are not obscene or otherwise illegal.

“Ensuring the freedom of expression necessary to nourish the arts while bearing in mind limits of public understanding and tolerance requires unusual wisdom, prudence and, most of all, common sense,” said co-chairmen Leonard Garment, a Washington lawyer, and John Brademas, president of New York University.

At a news conference this morning, the study commission recommended diminishing the role of the NEA’s “peer review panels” that select grant applications for approval and giving the NEA chairman sole, explicit authority to make final grant decisions without restrictions by Congress.

The report urged reviving a system under which committees of the National Council on the Arts, the endowment’s advisory body, would review peer panel selections before final grant awards are made.

With the aim of increasing the NEA’s accountability to the tax-paying public, the commission said the peer panels--which consist of outside artists and arts managers--should be expanded to include “persons knowledgeable about the arts but not earning their living in them.”

The report declared that “obscenity is not protected speech” and that the NEA “is prohibited from funding the production of works which are obscene or otherwise illegal.” But it said the endowment should stay out of the business of defining what is obscene, leaving that as a legal matter for the courts to decide.

Likewise, the panel said it unanimously opposed “legislative changes to impose specific restrictions on the content of works of art supported by the endowment.”

It added: “Content restrictions may raise serious constitutional issues, would be inherently ambiguous and would almost certainly involve the endowment and the Department of Justice in costly and unproductive lawsuits.”

The commission suggested that Congress instead approve a “preamble” to legislation reauthorizing the NEA, which would declare that the arts “belong to all the people of the United States” and should foster “mutual respect for the diverse beliefs and values of all persons and groups.”

The obscenity ban approved by Congress last fall was prompted by criticism of past NEA support for exhibitions of works by the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, which contained sexually graphic images, and by artist Andres Serrano, which some critics denounced as blasphemous.

Frohnmayer then instituted the anti-obscenity pledge for grant recipients, setting off widespread protests in the arts community.