PERSPECTIVE ON CULTURAL FREEDOM : Art Is Supposed to Be ‘Difficult’ : If we yield to demands for suppression, we forsake a vital American tradition of challenging the status quo.

The Republican National Committee is reportedly considering a plank in its 1992 platform to abolish or severely curtail the activities of the National Endowment for the Arts. Such a new attack on the agency’s integrity would pose a further challenge to NEA supporters, who are already divided between those who believe that there can be no compromise of artistic freedom and those who believe that some compromise is necessary to save the endowment.

The latter group of NEA supporters has been willing to go along with the tough, restrictive approach of the NEA’s acting chairman, Anne Imelda Radice. In testimony before Congress in May, Radice stated that the endowment would not fund art that deals with “difficult subject matter”; shortly thereafter, she vetoed funding for two university art exhibitions that included sexual imagery. Both grants had been approved by NEA peer-review panels and the National Council on the Arts, the advisory body to the endowment chairman.

The compromisers appear willing to enter into a Faustian bargain with the right: trading artistic creativity and freedom for the continued subsidization of safe art, such as orchestras, operas and large, established museums.

Beyond its sacrifice of constitutional principle, such a compromise would also deny what is most American about contemporary art: an unceasing willingness to challenge the established order to make yet a better order. Our national culture is rooted in change and dissent. Denying artists freedom to address difficult subject matter would in effect be denying any American the same freedom.

Adding to the wrongheadedness of compromise is the fact that a plank hostile to art would serve no real purpose. It certainly would not appease the right, which will continue to press its cultural demands not only out of moral conviction, but also because it has found the arts and culture an easy channel for manipulating deeper American anxieties about economic decline and national purpose.

Over the last decade, the United States has become a more divided and diverse society, bereft of common purpose, anxious over deep-rooted social ills and, above all, fearful that the American Dream is slipping out of reach. This crisis has created stirrings on both ends of the cultural spectrum. Within the nationwide community of artists and arts-presenting institutions, the creative cutting edge of contemporary art has moved out of the abstract and into forms that speak more directly to the problems of society. There has been an increase in art with social and political content--art that reflects and comments on the ills of our society, including AIDS, homelessness, misogyny, homophobia and racism. In other words, art with “difficult subject matter.”

At the other pole of cultural interests, the religious right has gained strength by playing on the fears and alienation of working-class Americans who, in their struggle to make ends meet, feel abandoned by their government. In the minds of many working Americans, our nation’s economic failings have become linked to what they are told are our moral failures, and together these failures are linked, confusedly, to our increasing multicultural diversity, which the arts, perhaps more than any other American institution, have come to reflect.

In sum, the NEA controversy has assumed such intensity because it has become a surrogate battleground for problems in our society that go to the very heart of our national identity. There are, therefore, no quick fixes, no easy compromises, to saving the NEA. As long as the attack on the NEA is a vehicle for tapping deeper political and economic anxieties, and as long as it is convenient for our nation’s political leaders to use cultural and social conflict to deflect attention from their own leadership failings, then those in the arts community who want to strike compromises with the far right will only end up conceding more ground and, thus, more of the NEA’s integrity.

Those who are serious about saving the NEA and preserving its integrity and who are also in leadership positions in the art world need to begin to speak to the larger problems of society--problems of national identity, and whether American society can cohere when some prosper and others suffer--which inevitably affect the climate for artistic expression.

The sad fact is that many such leaders have nothing to say to the American public about these dilemmas. Their comfortable world of gala openings and charitable benefits is as remote to the average working American as is the artist who is struggling to capture the alienation that the victims of AIDS or racism feel when they are abandoned by government.

Leaders in the arts community must begin by rediscovering for themselves what is at the core of America’s existence. Let them hold their ground against the right and reaffirm that America is about enfranchising people--politically, economically and culturally. America does need to be made whole again, but this cannot be done by culturally disenfranchising more Americans. Supporters of the National Endowment for the Arts must instead speak of the strength of diversity and of the tradition of tolerance in America that won out over racism and puritanism in earlier decades. Ways must be found to bring together people all along the cultural spectrum--creative artists and middle America, politicians right and left--to talk about tolerance, freedom and personal integrity.

Art that deals with difficult subject matter is part of a cherished American tradition, that of challenging the status quo, pushing the frontiers of what we think we know. Artists are explorers of the universe of human experience. It is American in the very best sense to support their endeavors.