NEWS ANALYSIS : Paranoia, Confusion Left in Wake of Arts Debate : Projects That Artists Submit for Federal Funding in the Future May Have Less Controversial Subject Matter

WASHINGTON —  The settling of dust after the fractious censorship crisis that gripped the National Endowment for the Arts from early April until a Senate vote Saturday makes clear that politicians and the arts lost on almost every front.

It will be a while before results are known of the prolonged focus of media and political attention on artistic freedom of expression--and on the limits to which public funding of the arts may be taken in the United States.

Clearly, though, the summer arts debate will have a lasting testament. It will be in the form of increased paranoia and confusion among artists in all media and a possible chill in the subject matter of projects they propose.

And resolution of the controversy--in the form of final Senate passage of a 1990 endowment appropriations bill that contains a first-ever clause regulating the content of federally funded artworks--is nothing more than a temporary cease-fire in the war over what creative activities government may support.

Consider:

* Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and Reps. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Lomita) and Dick Armey (R-Tex.) lost their battle either to strip all funding from the endowment or to impose content controls so extreme they would have made it impossible for the endowment to continue operating.

Helms may have helped enhance his 1990 North Carolina re-election campaign, and some observers contend he triggered the crisis for personal political gain. Helms has vehemently denied the charge.

* The national endowment lost the battle against having any content standards written into law and lost a less noted but possibly just as important fight on the principle of having restrictions imposed on grants it may give to two regional arts agencies.

Specifically, the national endowment must serve 30 days’ notice on Congress that it intends to make grants to the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, in Winston-Salem, N.C., and the Institute for Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania. It must also explain why, in artistic terms, the grants are justified.

* The endowment lost further because, politically, it will be forced to establish internal standards to red-flag those grant applications whose contents may be controversial. The endowment’s new chairman, John E. Frohnmayer, said over the weekend that the new procedures will have to result in each potentially politically risky grant being specifically called to his attention.

* The American system of laws lost in the sense that the content controls finally adopted by Congress portray themselves as prohibiting the funding by the national endowment of obscene artworks. But on only slightly closer inspection, they clearly do nothing of the sort, permitting the endowment’s chairman to fund sexually explicit works as long as they meet what he considers high standards of artistic excellence.

* It is nothing more than a smoke-and-mirrors, wink-and-shrug statute. Whether it will precipitate a confusing and potentially damaging court challenge by conservatives furious over some future endowment grant or someone else angered at the possible constitutional fuzziness of endowment obscenity-control standards cannot be predicted. By the national endowment’s own estimates, more than 90% of the works produced under its aegis are actually executed after a grant is made, introducing for the first time a requirement for control of art before the art is created.

* The endowment’s political supporters in Congress, led by Rep. Sidney Yates (D-Ill.), were forced to expend valuable political credits in the summer-long debate. Yates selected an effective tactic when, after the Senate approved an initial amendment by Helms to slap harsh content controls on the endowment, he bottled the matter up for several weeks to allow arts groups, which had been in nearly complete disarray, to put in place a lobbying campaign.

* Artists lost--big--because the political debate abandoned them at the start. The crisis focused on the work of two photographers, Andres Serrano and the late Robert Mapplethorpe. But a pervasive assumption ruled the political debate that grants to support their work were mistakes and their art was trash.

Indeed, in the legislative compromise that resolved the national endowment crisis, there are specific observations that the endowment “erred” in making the grants that supported work by Serrano and Mapplethorpe and that the work was “without artistic value.”

Serrano brought the wrath of Congress down on himself by making a photograph of a crucifix immersed in a tank of his own urine. Mapplethorpe produced images of sexually explicit homosexual subject matter whose status as art photography, illustration or photojournalism has been the subject of sprited critical debate but whose creative excellence has not been significantly challenged.

To many observers, this abandonment of the artists whose work was most immediately affected is the most unnerving thing of all. “I think politicians were dealing with a subject matter that sounded awful,” said James Fitzpatrick, a Washington arts lawyer with the firm of Arnold & Porter.

Fitzpatrick is president of the board of the Washington Project for the Arts, which agreed to accept the Mapplethorpe show in July after the Corcoran Gallery of Art here canceled it. The Corcoran decision became the catalyst that transformed the controversy into something truly cathartic.

“After the last election, with the focus on Willie Horton (the Massachusetts convict who raped a woman and beat her fiance while on a prison furlough), the flag and the Pledge of Allegiance,” Fitzpatrick said, “it’s very difficult for most politicians to look their constituents in the eye and say that something provocative and discomfiting is a work that they’re going to stand up for.

“It was almost inevitable that the debate was going to go forward with Mapplethorpe and Serrano being thrown to the wolves.”

Ironically, the controversy may have helped boost prices for works by Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDS earlier this year. This will increase money available to a foundation to bear his name that is being financed by liquidation of his personal collection of his own work and other art. The foundation is chartered to support AIDS research. Ironically, then, the campaign against Mapplethorpe’s photography--perceived by some as homophobic--may have driven up Mapplethorpe’s prices enough to significantly increase his foundation’s ability to fight AIDS.

Serrano has found the outcome of the controversy a painful one. “I think Congress has been left weakened by this,” he said over the weekend. “I have a real problem with seeing any restrictions placed on the NEA. Even though this might be a minor victory as far as freedom of expression is concerned, the real damage has been a signal of intimidation.”

To many observers here, the arts funding controversy has been much ado about nothing. Among Washington denizens who follow Congress for a living, there was consternation at the attention the arts brouhaha received, even as its climactic scenes were being played here late last week.

The endowment’s 1990 budget of about $172 million is, after all, a third of the price of a single B-2 Stealth bomber and would pay for fiscal 1990 operations of the Department of Health and Human Services for about three hours.

But that the crisis played out the way it did should scarcely be surprising. It is evidence of an inescapable reality: Visual art, the arts in general and artists stir passions far in excess of their strictly fiscal place in any society that, like this one, trades heavily in the free exchange of ideas and creative enterprise.

“I don’t think we should talk in terms of winners and losers,” said Anne Murphy, executive director of the American Arts Alliance and the arts community’s most visible and politically connected lobbyist. “During the course of this debate, some very serious questions have been brought up. A society owes it to itself to constantly ask them.”

Susan Wyatt, executive director of the New York City organization called Artists Space, worries that in the process of asking the questions, damage may have been done by debate tactics. The result may be the widening of a gap between major arts institutions and younger, less established artists, she said.

It was, after all, cutting-edge art that started this. As the controversy began to unfold, most mainstream museums, production companies and arts advocacy organizations stayed on the sidelines.

“I’m extremely upset about it,” Wyatt said. “For some people involved with larger institutions or not dealing with contemporary artists, it’s easy to sort of view their work as extremist stuff and, therefore, sacrificeable or something. It seems to me that Helms won.”

Hearings and other action in the House--anticipated to start later this year--and in the Senate beginning sometime in early 1990, will focus on legislation to extend the national endowment’s life for another five years. Conservative opponents of the principle of federal arts funding in general and the content of such art in particular, made clear that if the summer battle to gut the endowment seemed withering, the campaign against reauthorization of the endowment next year may be thermonuclear by comparison.

It is not just bravado. The debate in Congress over what the endowment may and may not support was underlaid by questions, even among some endowment supporters, of whether the rules by which federal money is channeled to the arts should be significantly altered or even fundamentally changed.

In that context, many observers here believe that the most overlooked aspect of the compromise solution to the summer crisis may eventually turn out to be its most significant development. That element is a 12-person commission that will study the endowment and make recommendations on how federal support for the arts should be changed.

The commission, which was given $250,000 to support its work and a directive to report its findings within 180 days will, observers here suspect, be made up equally of Republicans and Democrats. It may include some private-sector arts officials and university-based academicians, but could have a far broader focus.

Its report is scheduled to reach Congress just as the 1990 reauthorization debate reaches an almost certain crisis stage. However, some observers here question whether the undertaking can be completed in time and say it is inevitable that the commission will stall.

“I doubt very much that (the Senate vote and passing of this phase of the crisis) ends it,” said Ted Potter, executive director of Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art. “If there’s something we in the arts have learned, it is that the fundamentalists and the ultraconservatives are dedicated and ferocious, and they will fight for what they believe.”

True to his reputation as a consummate consensus-builder, Frohnmayer late last week and over the weekend appealed for time to let emotions ebb and to permit his own administrative attempts to stabilize the endowment take effect.

“I think it’s very difficult to legislate so that there is no chance of something happening that might offend someone,” he said. “If you legislate to do that, you probably would also stifle artistic freedom to the extent that it would be very difficult to produce works of art that would be worth supporting.

“There has to be some judgment. There has to be artistic freedom. What we’re looking for is balance.”