TV REVIEW : ‘Crisis in the Arts’ Grasps the Obvious

It isn’t necessary to have been raptly attentive to the controversy over artistic freedom and the National Endowment for the Arts since mid-1989 to realize that a new Public Broadcasting Service special adds little that has not already been said.

Indeed, “Crisis in the Arts: Politics, Censorship & Money,” airing tonight at 11 on Channel 28, will probably appear to people even passingly familiar with the issues to belabor the obvious and restate the oft-stated.

The product of a symposium held several months ago in San Diego, the program brings together six talking heads on a stage--moderated by National Public Radio correspondent Susan Stamberg--before a studio audience that looks as if it once slept through a “Donahue” taping.

Production values are worse than ordinary. The identifications superimposed over the participants misstate the names of organizations with which two of them are affiliated.

With the exception of an inspired decision to include playwright Edward Albee on the panel, the blend of voices is a now-familiar mix of arts advocates and conservatives ranging from the radical right to solid constitutional supporters. They agree and disagree on such questions as whether controlling the content of federally supported artworks is censorship, or simply the legitimate exercise of the rights of financial sponsors.

In addition to the insightful Albee, the panel includes Adolfo Nodal, general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs; Joseph Epstein, a noted scholar who was a member of the NEA’s advisory National Council on the Arts at the time the broadcast was taped; Anne Murphy, executive director of the American Arts Alliance; Robert Knight, a fellow in the conservative Heritage Foundation’s office of cultural policy studies, and Alan Sears, an anti-pornography crusader.

There are a few fascinating moments--like when Albee argues that much of the NEA debate has not been about art at all, but rather about the content of certain pieces of art. Robert Mapplethorpe’s now famous homosexually explicit photographs, Albee and Murphy maintain, have been assailed not because of any question about whether they are good art, but because they depict objectionable subject matter.

The rest of the program seems tired and repetitive. Yet that may--strangely--be its significant statement. It shows that today, more than two years after the NEA war first broke out, the country remains deeply divided--perhaps more now than then--over what the role of art should be in this society and how such a role should be supported by government.

If the message here is that we have talked and talked about these questions, we have resolved nothing. There has been rhetoric but no dialogue; argument but no communication, and political skulduggery but no political discourse.

This program’s boring, predictable somnolence is its most important message. Artistic freedom is an issue troubling to many Americans. It continues to snag our social fabric. But we just keep saying the same old things.