Culture Skirmishes

In recent years the public hearing, the community panel, and the carefully worded press release have become standard features of the art scene in the United States, as has the low profile of the National Endowment for the Arts. All of these developments have been attributed to the culture wars that wracked art and museums in this country in the 1980s and '90s and in many ways are still with us. In those years the advent of taxpayer revolt, the Contract with America, and the rising influence of the Christian Coalition led to attacks not only on certain works of publicly exhibited art but also on the very idea of public funding for art and museum exhibitions. Most talked-about were the brouhaha over sexually charged photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano's religious allegory Piss Christ, followed by then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani's efforts to punish the Brooklyn Museum for its exhibition of Christian-themed paintings by the African artist Chris Ofili by withdrawing operating funding. A "decency clause" was added to grant guidelines for the NEA. However, morality was not the only source of high dudgeon in that era. Richard Serra's site-specific sculpture Tilted Arc was removed in 1989 after years of legal challenge simply because the office workers who shared its plaza found the sculpture inhospitable. In Washington, D. C., memorials erected for Vietnam veterans (1982–84), Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1997–2001), and the soldiers of World War II (1995–2004) went through processes of emendation in response to protests from varied interest groups. A chilling effect descended as museum exhibitions began to avoid charged subjects, including revisionist history. The NEA eliminated grants to individual artists. New foundations arose to channel private funds to avant-garde art, while new processes for vetting public commissions altered permanently the sponsorship of public art. The policy decisions of these years have subsequently been described as both restrictive censorship and a widening of opportunities for public involvement with art.

Michael Kammen's valuable study Culture Shock makes sense of the culture wars by putting events of the 1980s into a long historical context of "art controversies in American culture." By this phrase Kammen means not controversies among artists (for example, the Dadaist Marcel Duchamp's submission in 1917 of an upended urinal to the open exhibition of New York's Society of Independent Artists, an act that strained the limits of the directors' definition of art and led to the rejection and subsequent mysterious disappearance of the offending work). Instead, Kammen looks at the stories behind works, like Piss Christ or Diego Rivera's murals for the Detroit Institute of Arts, that generated outrage among portions of the general public, including calls for removal, or the revocation of funding, or at times outright vandalism. In many cases the art in question received public funding or was displayed in public places. Kammen acknowledges that the virulent controversies he discusses are often exaggerated by sensation-hungry media and may actually be atypical, but argues for their significance (p. 216). They shed light on how cultural anxieties have changed over time and say important things about the democratic process in general. His long historical view demonstrates that controversy over art in American culture is nothing new and offers pragmatic lessons from the past for current artists and administrators involved with public commissions.

The book assembles an unprecedented range of material, from well-known stories of New Deal Murals and the Arts Endowment to new research on dustups in cities from Seattle to Lincoln, Nebraska, to Richmond, where racially charged debates led to the alteration of a picture of Robert E. Lee in a historical photo-mural. Although many of the detailed historical studies of individual nineteenth-century controversies Kammen cites were written in the 1980s and '90s with current events in mind, this is the first book to bring past and present together deliberately in one comprehensive narrative.¹ The advantages of...