COVER STORY : 1990 : THE YEAR THE BIG QUESTIONS GOT BIGGER

I n times of political turmoil, it’s natural to seek calm and diversion. But in 1990, as the globe took a revolutionary spin, the last place to look for peace was in the arts and entertainment world, where all hell broke loose.

A storm of moral outrage erupted over the U.S government funding of out-of-the-mainstream performance artists; the salacious lyrics of several rap groups, and the provocative images created by visual artists. But to silence these artists--through cancelled grants, or obscenity charges--smelled, to others, like censorship of unpopular ideas.

The year didn’t merely pass in enlightened argument over knotty questions. Artists lost grants because of Sen. Jesse Helms’ holy war against the National Endowment for the Arts. 2 Live Crew, a Florida record-store owner who sold their album and the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center and its director were all tried on obscenity charges. The movie industry argued the larger question of what’s pornography and what’s merely adult taste.

The ambiguous influence of new technology in the arts was highlighted by the revelation that a popular singing duo didn’t perform on their best-selling record--they’d been hired to front a record producer’s music. And, when another Japanese hardware company bought a major Hollywood studio, questions arose about how technology will change the way we receive entertainment.

Basic questions about freedom of expression became trickier. Can defenders of free speech support the right of artists to traffic in misogyny? Is freedom of expression my right, but not the right of someone maligning my ethnic group? Many people landed in between: They seemed to say “Artists can do whatever they want, but I’m not sure I want to see it, hear it, or have my children exposed to it. Or pay for it with my taxes.”

So it was a year in which the implicit questions artists live with--the questions we raise on our cover--became matters of a noisy public discussion. This essay looks at the year, how it unfolded in the arts, and what it means for our society.

Nowhere has America’s anxiety over incipient collapse been reflected more pointedly than in entertainment and the arts, which have been windswept in 1990 with more confusion and controversy--some of it trivial, some profound--than in any recent year. If art is a pure index of a culture’s self-regard and its becoming, this year’s challenges to it have been so radical and far-reaching that we almost have to go back to the basics in asking just what it means--which is another way of puzzling together what it says about us.

We can begin with the question itself: What is art? “Art is moral,” said D. H. Lawrence. Does that put Lawrence in league with Jesse Helms? Hardly. Is it something determined by market values and the manipulable tastes of the nouveau riche? Is it something with any objective value at all? (Which may be what Oscar Wilde had in mind when he said, “All art is quite useless”).

Is it an agreed-on form of inside exchange among academics, the power elite, the people who pass grants and fellowships and awards among themselves while the rest of us look on congenially, then shell out for the stuff unquestioningly for fear of being considered too stupid or gauche to understand it?

Is it an end product of ethnic or racial self-definition, as, for example, we have seen in the emergence of rap music? Or is it a fundamentally lonely business that catches on because it tells a truth?

What’s real? Now there’s a schoolboy question. But Herbert Blau, who’s been one of our leading theater directors and theoreticians for decades, is no schoolboy. “The post-modern culture is a culture of dispersed identities, and that extends to the audience,” he says. “How can you tell if you’re really standing in a blockbuster exhibit or not? You don’t look at a painting. You look at people looking at you looking at a painting.”

Ah! So we know we’re faking it. We can’t help it. We know our artists are faking it too. Multiple takes. Camera angles. Re-dubbing. A world of technology at the disposal of self-augmentation and distortion. All we require is that they let us in on the illusion behind the illusion.

Why are we so angry at Milli Vanilli then? What esoteric show-biz commandment did they violate to bring down such wrath upon their heads? That they didn’t sing their own lyrics? Do we think our Presidents write their own speeches? Do we think actors speak their own words? If not, why do we identify them so much with their roles?

Maybe it’s because Milli Vanilli didn’t let us in on their game. They were a little bit too fake, on the runic scale by which we measure these things. But maybe all they did was take a further step toward showing us how technology, instead of bringing us the aesthetic, has become the aesthetic.

If we accept that none of it’s quite real, then how do we slake our thirst for reality? Is this why so much of what was once considered obscene has erupted in art? If cursing and filth is conventionally an expression of anger and frustration and hate, is this proliferation of muck an expression of pent-up fury? Is it done for effect in a shockproof cultural environment? Or is it an attempt to shake society into a moral self-definition that works for all its members? You can’t, in any case, deny the visceral sonic boom that greets Andrew Dice Clay in concert.

This, of course, leads to the question of taste. If taste represents connoisseurship, aesthetic discrimination, reasoned or mature choice, why do we put so little store in it? Is it because the parvenus of the ‘80s have insulted us enough with their conspicuous ownership? Is it because the idea of taste is incompatible with the ethos of consumerism in a culture generated by market values?

And who owns that culture? If during the ‘80s we saw an increasing capitulation of art and entertainment to the generic, bottom-line values squeezed into them through corporate ownership, what are the implications of blockbuster deals such as Matsushita’s purchase of MCA/Universal and Paretti’s acquisition of MGM/UA? More corporatization of art, certainly. But what other strains? Does this stepped-up entry into the corporate global village augur a further dispersal of American identity?

Chekhov once said, in effect, that it was more the purpose of art to ask the right questions than to belabor the search for answers. Art, taste, the reality of a given cultural temper, the implications surrounding who owns what--only a pedant would presume to wrap it all up for us and send us on our merry, deluded way.

But the one specter that all the news and disputes and developments and goings-on in the arts in 1990 seem to rise up and congeal into is this: We are experiencing more of the manner of breakdown than the ferment of healthy change.

Social conditions tend to be more amenable to the kind of summary offered up by Wall Street investment banker Felix Rohatyn when he looked at 1990 America and said, “Our cities are really falling apart, our educational system is in great disarray and in order to finance our budget and trade deficits, we’re selling more and more of our businesses. Our government is unable to govern because it has no money, or it is using the fact that it has no money as an excuse not to govern.”

Our cultural climate, however, is harder to pin down, particularly because the general boundaries--however squiggly--that once distinguished the arts from business and politics have now been generally erased.

In the acquisitive, merger-minded ‘80s and (so far) 1990, art and entertainment truly became big business (for the purposes of this discussion, we’ll lump art and entertainment together after suggesting this distinction: Art and entertainment are obverts of the same spinning coin. Art confronts, and expands the realm of possibility; entertainment diverts, and replays the familiar.)

Another element that makes cultural analysis iffy is the odd pockets of silence that have opened up under American society’s observable reactions to cultural events. In the spring of this year, network television executives pondered the mysterious electronic black hole into which 4% of their viewers utterly disappeared. Then, moving in search of their larger consumer market--one hesitates to use the word audience --they sent up 22 TV pilots by autumn of the year, nearly all of which crashed in flames. Network viewership dropped from 90% in 1978 to 66% last year, and it’s not certain that cable has picked up the numbers.

Few of the predicted summer film blockbusters--not even “Dick Tracy,” with a $30-million production budget and a $50-million promotional budget--lived up to their hype. (And in fact the careers of most of our male superstars, such as Warren Beatty, Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford and Paul Newman, have sagged along with their jawlines). The year’s unpredictable hits were, instead, “Pretty Woman” and “Ghost,” which led at least one Hollywood prognosticator to wonder if a movie about a hooker who comes back from the dead might not be a sure thing for next year.

Money and ratings still rule, but with less of the feverish authority they once held in lieu of informed artistic criteria, or, to put it another way, of taste. Van Gogh’s “Portrait of Doctor Gachet” was auctioned off in the spring for $82.5 million to a Japanese buyer, but by year’s end a lot of the big-ticket works weren’t moving--even Liz Taylor couldn’t unload her Van Gogh in early December.

Other markets that had once feasted on dependable patronage also began to implode. Domestic theatrical movie release, which 10 years ago generated 80% of movie revenues, dropped to 30%. Videocassette rentals took up the slack, along with foreign distribution. “America’s imperialism has endured in one area at least,” said Herbert Blau, “and that is in its ability to manufacture fantasy for the rest of the world.”

The art world in 1990 was noisily wracked by ethnic and sexual contentiousness and bitter disputes among the righteous encamped on both the right and the left--each trying to muzzle the other through censorship.

With the introduction of glasnost, the gruppenfuehrers of the right had begun combing the American landscape in search of new subversives tunneling under the American Way; they thought they found them taking cover in the art world and some of its sponsors. Thus the Jesse Helms/Rev. Donald Wildmon crowd read morally destabilizing signals in, among others, Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” the Robert Mapplethorpe photograph exhibition and the smears of chocolate with which Karen Finley ritualistically lards her body--and they besieged Burger King to flush out subversives perceived trying to bugger their cause, euphemistically entitled “traditional family values.”

Mostly, they hounded one of the weakest of all federal funding agencies, the National Endowment for the Arts, into a panicky effort to force artists to take an anti-obscenity oath as well as promise “to reflect our nation’s rich cultural heritage” and “foster mutual respect” before earning the NEA’s relatively skimpy largesse (relative to dispensations for overpriced military hardware, that is, or the government arts budgets of most of the rest of the industrializedworld).

Surprisingly, it was an arts organization that triggered the dispute, when sensitive ears in the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., picked up the thunder on the right and canceled the Mapplethorpe exhibit on the eve of its unveiling.

“If proceeding with this exhibit hurts NEA appropriation, it is detrimental to the Corcoran and every other institution,” said David Lloyd Kreeger, then the Corcoran’s chairman. He probably thought he was acting out of prescience, but other arts groups quickly found his action not only presumptuous but frightening.

In any case, the battle was joined. Citing the number of orchestras, dance companies, nonprofit theaters, opera companies and state arts agencies that have sprung up in America since the NEA came into being in 1965, writer Vince Passaro asked, “Is more art better art? Does better art require a government in order to persist?”

“Under the aegis of the NEA,” he wrote in Harper’s magazine, “. . . there has developed a system of institutionalized patronage--from government, corporations, foundations and universities--that encourages artists to move from one fellowship, award and teaching post to the next. More and more energy is poured into meeting the requirements of this system. More and more art is produced, except that often it is art designed not for the larger public but for colleagues, grant-making panels, in small, well-versed audiences: art in a bottle.”

In effect, Vassaro was wondering aloud about the bureaucratization of taste, and the legitimacy of an enterprise where “ . . . to question art’s quality, to discriminate between one work and another and to delve into the potential meanings of each, is to winnow out the amount of first-rate art, and thus to threaten the economy of the system.”

“Who can tell if what you’ll be funding will be good art or not?” countered historian and art critic Robert Hughes. “That’s not the point.” Whether or not a cadre of arts incumbents remains in competition for perpetual favor, the truth is that, as Hughes pointed out, the bulk of the 85,000 NEA grants distributed since 1965 has been for $50,000 or less, and the weight from their removal “would fall heavily on minority, provincial cultural organizations, and the young.” Just the people who need it most. Besides, one doesn’t fund the past, which is demonstrable, but the future, which is not.

The liberal left followed suit in a series of self-defeating actions that recall Mort Sahl’s old joke about our response to the Cold War: “Every time the Russians threw an American in jail, we threw an American in jail to get even.”

Whether it was a group of Asian-Americans picketing Actors’ Equity to keep Jonathan Pryce out of the Broadway production of “Miss Saigon” because he isn’t Asian, or the pressure group that purged the word “Christmas” from the carols sung by a class of baffled Illinois school kids, censorship was the first knife aggrieved parties reached for, as if cutting the vocal cords of an opponent were the best way of silencing his argument.

“I don’t think it’s a novelist’s job to give people moral lessons,” said Bret Easton Ellis, whose novel “American Psycho” was considered so loathesomely misogynistic that his publisher, Simon & Schuster, capitulated to the complaints of its female staffers and decided not to publish the book. Vintage Books did, however, and the National Organization for Women decided it could give a moral lesson by boycotting all of of Random House, Vintage’s parent company. In the current climate of what the eminently quotable Robert Hughes has termed “the literal tyranny over the diction of sensitivity,” few were willing to concede that you can’t deprive someone else of freedom of expression without jeopardizing your own.

Besides, censorship is invariably counterproductive. If the NEA/Mapplethorpe flap principally succeeded, as Robert Brustein observed, “in making stars out of third-rate artists,” it also played into the hands of gifted self-promoters like Madonna, whose video for her song “Justify My Love” was rejected by MTV (which has otherwise offered itself as her private duchy) for being too sexually outre . She appeared on ABC’s “Nightline,” not normally a forum for video rockers, where we saw the video and heard naive and disingenuous argument, in her post-teeny-bopper voice, about the morality of American media.

What she had to say, of course, was less important than our seeing her say it--posturing for fame and fortune has always been her true genius, and there was nothin’ to it for her to strike a pose of aggrieved earnestness. Actually, her friend Sandra Bernhard encapsulated it better when, at the end of her movie, “Without You I’m Nothing,” she did a bump-and-grind strip, with a sequined American flag cupped neatly over her venus mons. Sex, glitter, patriotic imagery--these are our prominent 1990 American themes.

One could argue that censorship has become the last desperate hammer with which many people are battening down the hatches against what they perceive to be a rising tide of obscenity and hate-mongering in America, and that in the best of all possible worlds no one would want it. The truth is, we may be over-censored already, in peculiar and maddening ways. The debate over rescinding the X rating in movies--a device that had caught a lot of serious artists in a net intended to gather pornographers--caused director Philip Kaufman to wonder, “What does it mean when you can cut a breast off but you can’t caress it?” (After years of lobbying by moviemakers, journalists and critics, however, a new code was introduced, whereby the NC-17 rating has replaced the stigmatizing X.)

If caveat emptor is the ultimate determinant of whether a piece of art settles into place in a culture and its history--as opposed to numbing academic dictates or the approval of cultural paladins--most of the time the buying public hasn’t been permitted to judge. If, for example, newspapers and TV commentators had cited the actual lyrics of 2 Live Crew’s rap song “Me So Horny,” which led to their Ft. Lauderdale bust, instead of sanitizing them with allusion, most people would have probably been repulsed by their gross debasement of not only women but the Crew’s own sensibility. The portion of the public that didn’t listen to the song was kept in the dark while the case became a cause celebre , particularly in the black community.

In 1990, infantilism and regression were hot-ticket items. It’s one thing for kids to cheer “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and Raffi in concert--these are entertainments designed for their tastes alone. And a growing number of cartoons, from “The Little Mermaid” to “Duck Tales: The Movie,” hit the airwaves and the cineplex screens to acknowledge young audiences mixed in with adults.

But for a lot of reasons--the breakup of the family, commercial exploitation of the most manipulable among us--childhood has been disappearing in America for decades, and a lot of people who missed it want it back. Thus, another variant in our seemingly inexhaustible hot- cop-on-the-prowl formula puts Arnold Schwarzenegger at the head of a class of kindergarten tots, our cyborgenic Pied Piper on yet another vengeful march.

In Bart Simpson, cultural iconography blended with theater of the absurd as a gossip tabloid offered a glimpse of his secret love life and a commercial poll revealed that more people would rather dine with Bart than with George Bush. In “Home Alone,” 10-year-old Macauley Culkin climbed to the top of the movie ratings, boy king of the autumn grosses. Melody Beatty, one of the nation’s self-help gurus, published “The Language of Letting Go: Meditations on Co-Dependence,” offering “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” as an inspirational antecedent. “Feel your own feelings,” she told us. “Have a love affair with yourself.” John E. Bradshaw invited his TV audience to close its eyes and contemplate the divine child within while squeezing Teddy bears in its lap. Let us all bow our heads and suck our thumbs.

And what of the real players in this mythic, dewy field of dreams? Was there a true class of the innocent and protected this year, whose genuine claim to exuberance was more poignant for its perishability? In an article in Atlantic Monthly called “Growing Up Scared,” Karl Zinsmeister reported that homicide was the leading cause of death among kids in many American cities, 300,000 American high-school students are physically attacked each year, and in California, the rate of arrest for burglary, car theft, arson and robbery were higher among juveniles than adults.

If some of our most sophisticated minds are engaged in the power of image-making, and we now have nearly two full generations of Americans who have grown up under the flickering light of the TV tube, is it any wonder that we’ve arrived at the canonization of show-biz values?

In 1990, entertainment news and features earned greater play, propagating through CNN News’ “Hollywood Minute,” “Inside Hollywood,” the E Channel, “Entertainment Tonight” and in such magazines as “Premiere” and “Entertainment Weekly” (Just as business and stock market news flourished in the ‘80s).

Never mind that most of what we saw and read was stupefyingly empty and redundant. Celebrity had now come to represent what was hip, inside, privileged and admired--even sacrosanct--and woe to anyone who tries to spoil the fun, as Nora Dunn found out when she refused to share airspace on “Saturday Night Live” with Andrew Dice Clay.

Thus empowered, entertainment and media insiders have become increasingly able to refashion the culture to the cut of entertainment and media tastes and concerns, in a kind of new orthodoxy that refers principally to itself (“feeding frenzies” and their morning-after analyses, the manufacture of pseudo-events, the backstage interview that doesn’t reveal anything, reporters and interviewers featuring themselves in their reportage).

If, as Ezra Pound wrote, “the artist is the antennae of the race,” some of our best writers who published this year gave us depictions of ennui, of melancholy aftermath, and worse. In “Rabbit at Rest,” the last installment of the ‘Rabbit’ tetralogy, John Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom has retired with a bad heart and a chronic, low-grade, unassuagable malaise to the empty, preplanned pleasures of a Florida condominium community. In Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland,” the outlands of California are speckled with paranoid cults--”Tubefreeks,” “Thanatoids” (people who resent being alive) and Kunoichi Attentives (women opposed to male militarism)--in a landscape so bleak that one of his characters longs for membership in “some family in a car with no problems that couldn’t be solved in half an hour of commercials and wisecracks.” In Kurt Vonnegut’s “Hocus-Pocus: Or, What’s the Hurry, Son?”, America has virtually become a Third World country, its citizens in the oppressive employ of foreigners, its resources plundered for foreign consumption--an indifferent old whore up for the world’s grabs.

Whether the meek will ever inherit the earth, the young always do. If art is made up of signposts of culture in perpetual transition, each of those signposts is emblematic. What of 1990, then? Good art continued to be made, good plays written and provocative movie talent given its chance (as in Charles Burnett’s “To Sleep With Anger”). It was a healthy year for the renascence of jazz. Even TV, maligned as it often is, lived up to its potential by linking us with town hall discussions of the Persian Gulf crisis and showing us the beautiful purity of concern on the faces of wives and mothers as they worried about their loved ones dug in halfway around the world.

But the color of America’s world seemed to be darkening, just like the clouds of toxemia that spread through our surrounding air and water. Ken Burns’ PBS series on the Civil War showed us the carnage of conflict, the modern incompatibility of technology and the flesh, and most tellingly--in hearing all those rueful, lyrical and horrific dispatches--how diminished we’ve become in our capacity for articulate self-expression.

In the televised special “Red Hot + Blue,” we heard Cole Porter’s elegant and agile lyrics reconceived in a 1990s setting by a cast of contemporary young rockers and pop singers. The show was a response to AIDS, which now has claimed 83,000 American lives as it spreads through the culture like a bloodstain on a carpet.

What was most affecting about the show was not the haunting sadness over love (and sex) defiled by death, but its overall look of darkness, of chaos and urban decay. It didn’t seem that this particular group of artists would be gripped by the chiliastic fear of Armageddon--that particular paranoia doesn’t appear to be part of their temper. What was as emblematic as anything was U2’s Bono Hewson singing “Night and Day,” looking a bit like a man at the end of a bender braving an unwanted light. His face half-smiled and half-scowled in the now standard American pop expression of derision--our common mask for disbelief.