No Place for Art Lessons

Nullifying a 1990 law, a federal circuit court has delivered a significant ruling that prohibits the National Endowment for the Arts from considering he public’s “beliefs, values” and “sense of decency and respect” before doling out grants to artists.

The NEA may seem a backwater of American politics, but it has been a highly turbulent topic for legislators trying to promote so-called American values. In 1990, a powerful group in Congress demanded the agency’s abolition after having been offended by some of the projects it had funded. The NEA was spared this fate when the critics accepted as an alternative a decency law passed by Congress later that year. Although the law was ruled invalid by a district court in 1992, the Clinton administration’s NEA director, actress Jane Alexander, kept the controversy under control by honoring its spirit. She promised to exercise “better discretion” and to “prohibit obscenity” in the awarding of grants.

The new ruling could restrict the NEA in exercising such discretion, a practice that successfully mollified conservative legislators last year after they made a second attempt to abolish the agency. Even so, the new ruling was the only reasonable course. For in addition to harming the creative process by forcing artists to worry that their work might be considered too controversial, the 1990 law contradicted itself. On the one hand, it required the NEA to respect “general standards of decency.” On the other, it demanded “respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the American public.”

Because diversity often means departing from “general standards,” the statute, in short, demanded the impossible. The new Congress should take the ruling to heart and focus its attention on pressing national needs, not on setting standards for art.