Locked Horns

Deep-seated hostilities perpetually simmer just below the surface of American life. Ten years ago today they boiled over, erupting into vituperative combat.

On June 13, 1989, Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art fired a shot heard ‘round the world. The museum canceled an imminent exhibition containing numerous sexually explicit photographs for fear of offending certain neighbors down the street in Congress. The show, “Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment,” had gone on without incident in nearby Philadelphia, but in newly Republican Washington, where trench warfare had become the norm, “incident” would turn out to be an understatement.

A knock-down, drag-out brawl began, the first major assault in the 1990s culture war. Cultural conservatives, emboldened by the Reagan era’s sharp rightward turn in national politics, saw an opportunity to make inroads on territory occupied by cultural progressives for a quarter-century. The National Endowment for the Arts--an established symbol of America’s aspirations in the 1960s--had been founded on the memory of an assassinated president; now it was being maneuvered into the cross hairs of the culture war.

By 1998, a sitting president would himself be sitting squarely in the culture warriors’ telescopic sight. During last year’s tawdry White House sex scandal, Monica Lewinsky’s blue Gap dress replaced Mapplethorpe’s leather bullwhip as a notorious icon of supposed national depravity, while newspapers that once nervously printed descriptions of sadomasochistic photographs now parsed the tape-recorded particulars of oral sex. A made-for-tabloid fight that began on the political margins, where today a battered NEA is largely irrelevant to the nation’s art life, had finally moved to ground zero in American government. In the effort of cultural conservatives to undo the progressive legacy of the 1960s, the old battle cry “Abolish the NEA!” had been refashioned into the new mantra, “Impeach Bill Clinton!”

The culture war encompasses difficult social issues, ranging from arts funding to abortion, child care, affirmative action, gay rights and more. James Davison Hunter, professor of sociology and religious studies at the University of Virginia, pointed out that these individual battles involve more than a mere expression of opinion. In his helpful 1991 book, “Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America,” Hunter noted that the argument represents conflict at its deepest level, arising over fundamentally different conceptions of moral authority.

Cultural conservatives believe moral authority comes from an external, definable and transcendent authority. For them, it comes from above and for all time.

Cultural progressives, by contrast, redefine historic faiths according to prevailing assumptions of contemporary life. For them, moral authority emerges from a spirit of rationalism and subjectivity.

Needless to say, culture war is much more than a mere political disagreement. “On political matters one can compromise,” Hunter wrote; “on matters of ultimate moral truth, one cannot.”

What made the Corcoran Gallery’s fusillade unusual 10 years ago was that the museum hadn’t taken aim at a natural enemy--those for whom artistic censorship is legitimate, say, or free speech not a public right but a private one, whose protections disappear the moment federal funds are employed. Instead, the Corcoran shot itself in the foot.

The museum, succumbing to fear of Washington’s rising tide of cultural conservatives, canceled an exhibition to protect the NEA, a primary source of federal arts funding. The action argued, in effect, that preserving art’s support systems justifies the suppression of art itself.

Not only was this proposition self-defeating. It also threw gasoline onto a fire, further emboldening cultural conservatives.

Virtually everyone on the side of cultural conservatism would agree that museums committed to contemporary art are prejudiced against the values conservatives cherish most. Consider the current, not atypical shows at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, where retrospectives of Eleanor Antin and Sam Francis and a big survey of 1970s drawings all assert that life is a process of self-creation. The Corcoran’s abrupt cancellation of the similarly minded Mapplethorpe show couldn’t help but be seen as a rare but important victory against the establishment on behalf of moral absolutists. For them, life is not self-creation but the reflection of a higher reality.

Cultural conservatives also find widespread prejudice in mainstream mass media. The so-called “liberal conspiracy” of the press had been the motive for the huge growth in conservative direct-mail advertising, which had proven effective in helping shift the nation’s political center rightward. Direct mail, less useful as a means for raising funds than as a way to mobilize a target audience by going around network TV and newspapers, would prove equally helpful in fanning the firestorm over the NEA.

A month after the Corcoran debacle, the emboldening effect of this “success” was magnified many times. On July 20, 1989, the New York Times published on the front page of its Sunday Arts & Leisure section an astonishing 2,500-word screed by its former chief art critic, Hilton Kramer, beneath the blaring headline “Is Art Above the Laws of Decency?” The rhetorical headline, with its blunt appeal to immutable laws, spoke of the conservative faith that moral authority comes from above and for all time.

The critic claimed, between outbursts of homo-panic, that according to the art world establishment, art itself is “now to be considered such an absolute value that no other standard--no standard of taste, no social or moral standard--is to be allowed to play any role in determining what sort of art is appropriate for the government to support.” The nation’s then-most influential source of journalistic art criticism had stood up on behalf of precisely the kind of absolutist values cultural conservatives hold dear. Another presumed edifice of the progressive establishment had buckled.

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It could be argued, of course, that the complaints of cultural conservatives about the arts and media establishments are overstated, even paranoid. The idea that art museums and mass media are staunch progressives is frankly ludicrous; like most establishment institutions, they in fact tend toward centrism (that’s what makes them “mass”). From over on the far right, the center simply looks way left.

But the culture war is not fought around rational and nuanced arguments. It’s a battle between extremes, like Joan Collins and Linda Evans mud-wrestling in the reflecting pool on “Dynasty.” The NEA’s supporters were fond of insisting--quite accurately--that only a tiny fraction of its grants had ever been controversial, and that extremely small number pretty well matched the tiny fraction of the American public on the other side, whose righteous indignation successfully managed to cripple the popular agency.

The Corcoran cave-in and the New York Times’ Kramer tantrum constituted a one-two punch, from which the National Endowment for the Arts did not recover. Individual grants to artists were eventually abolished; the agency lost its hard-won credibility within the art community; and the NEA became yet another functionally obscure appendix within the federal body.

Just as virtually every poll has shown that Americans in overwhelming numbers frowned on President Clinton’s Oval Office behavior while also opposing his impeachment, so most who are uncharitable toward sadomasochist photographs have never wavered in support of a significant federal role in funding art. Culture warriors tend to find these split decisions puzzling, but they really aren’t: They represent a rejection of extremes on either side.

Meanwhile, the culture war continues, heading toward 2000. One looming battleground is the reintroduction of an already once-defeated constitutional amendment to prohibit desecration of the American flag. Constitutional amendments, led by the Bill of Rights, typically enumerate what our inherent liberties are. This one would be the first since Prohibition to retract a freedom already enjoyed by Americans.

We all know how well Prohibition worked, but in 1999 the amendment appears to have its best chance of passage in years.