Panel Defeats NEA Strictures

A House committee today beat back an attempt by a Mississippi congressman to add new strictures to the kinds of work the National Endowment for the Arts should support.

It was unclear whether the defeat of the restrictive wording offered by Democratic Rep. Jamie L. Whitten was predictive of the fate the NEA faces in Congress this year, but today’s committee vote touched off a new round of speculation that the climax of the 15-month controversy is at hand.

But if confusion over the NEA’s ultimate fate seemed to have been at least slightly reduced, the arts endowment itself may have further muddied the situation by releasing new guidelines detailing what kinds of work it will consider to be obscene--its third major attempt to clarify the issue.

Conceding that its earlier attempts had succeeded primarily in confusing the nation’s arts community, the NEA released revised obscenity guidelines that warn of potential scrutiny of artworks in any media that, among other things, include “hard-core” images or literary references depicting masturbation, excretion or simulated sex.

In Congress, the House Appropriations Committee rejected a proposal by Whitten, the panel’s chairman, to warn the NEA to avoid funding any art project that is obscene, indecent or possibly offensive on religious grounds. He had attempted to insert the provision in a stop-gap bill to provide money to keep the federal government operating through Oct. 20.

Rep. Sidney R. Yates (D-Ill.), chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee with authority over the NEA, moved successfully to strike Whitten’s restrictive language. Yates’ motion carried overwhelmingly on a voice vote.