Next Time, Say What You Mean : NEA head kills grant--because it’s not art?

Last fall, Times art writer Suzanne Muchnic, writing from Paris, brought a bit of good news for American art. Her article’s headline read: “An American Foot in the Door; Sculptor Robert Gober is first U.S. artist to exhibit in the Jeu de Paume since it was converted to a contemporary museum.”

Gober’s Jeu de Paume show was no fluke. His works are part of the permanent collections of both the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The prestigious art magazine Galeries called him “possibly the most influential American artist in the world.” The Paris show only confirmed his arrival.

Last week Anne-Imelda Radice, acting chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Arts, vetoed a $10,000 grant to the List Visual Arts Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for an exhibit including Gober’s “Genital Wallpaper.”

Radice--installed at the NEA when President Bush yielded to political pressure from Patrick J. Buchanan and fired her predecessor--has justified her decision not on political but on artistic grounds. The works in the exhibit, including Gober’s, “are unlikely to have the long-term artistic significance necessary to merit Endowment funding,” she claims. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Radice has avoided public debate about the merits of any of the works in the exhibit (a second show at Virginia Commonwealth University also lost its grant), but through a spokesman she has maintained that artistic excellence “includes artistry, access and diversity. . . . When subject matter overtakes the artistry, that . . . becomes an issue in the analysis of the project.”

We may grant Radice her principle of evaluation (though by no means all art critics would) and yet insist that, even according to that principle, Gober is an artist of immense merit. “Subject matter overtaking artistry” is, roughly, a definition of pornography. In Gober’s work, the very reverse obtains. His sculpture juxtaposes the cold world of things (sinks, closets, clothing, furniture and now wallpaper) with the warm world of human beings (bodies and body parts). The result, as Muchnic wrote of the Paris show, is a “strange poignant spectacle that evokes feelings of loneliness and human imperfection.”

As we have stated before, it is as unreasonable for artists to expect that decisions about publicly funded art should be entirely theirs as it is for generals to expect the same about weapons. Government, reporting to the people, may not like a weapon that the generals love. The same, analogously, goes for art. But Radice makes an international art fool of this country when she claims that her decision is artistically, not politically, motivated. Imagine the hoots and groans in Paris. (And don’t say we shouldn’t care: We should.)

Our quarrel with Radice is not over money (only $10,000) but over candor. We call on her and on her White House boss to call a spade a spade. Of course, politics has a role in politically funded art. Admit it, take the heat, and stop disguising politics in the robes of art criticism.