Arts: Apocalypse Then, 1990

Crosby, Stills and Nash had it right in 1970: We have all been here before. What we call the culture wars have gone on for a very long time. The Nixon years of the early Seventies were Woke War One, a massive backlash to the excesses of the late Sixties. Progressive critics were stunned when the cultural future turned out to be far closer to Death Wish, Rocky and Star Wars than to Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy, or Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Round Two came towards the end of the Reagan years, when the beleaguered cultural left finally saw an opening and dragged itself up off the floor. When George H.W. Bush took over in 1989, funding of radical art caused trouble a’ plenty. Social conservatives wanted to see some pushback.

At the National Endowment for the Humanities, William Bennett gave them a lot to cheer about. He wielded a veto pen with gusto, cut budgets and made no excuses for it. By contrast, John Frohnmeyer, Bush’s appointee to run the National Endowment for the Arts, was a colorless go-along, get-along administrator who didn’t get that he was supposed to represent Bush’s policies to the artists, not the other way around. A faddish new term was making its way around: “political correctness.” When PC didn’t mean “personal computer,” it meant “woke,” more than a third of a century ago.

When Senator Jesse Helms demanded that NEA rescind grants to four especially egregious recipients, it took Frohnmeyer most of a year of dithering and posturing before he reluctantly pulled the plug. The arts community closed ranks against “government censorship.” John Podhoretz, then a Bush White House staffer, witnessed the whole indecisive train wreck. “As Frohnmeyer surely knew, this sort of talk was even more offensive to Reaganites than the grant itself…if he had said, 'Look, this thing makes me sick but there’s not a legal reason on earth I can think of to not fund it,' that would have been true. Instead, he used the occasion to go with the arts guys.”

Surprisingly, even Tom Carson, a staff writer for the left-liberal LA Weekly, smirked at the pretentions of the self-martyred “NEA 4.” In weeks to come, letters to the editor were overwhelmingly on his side.

“How would you respond if Andrew Dice Clay got an NEA grant? Axl Rose? Pretend that you are Louis-Ferdinand Celine. The book you are working on, Death on the Installment Plan, is a violent and nihilistic denunciation of everything the society around you hold dear. Write an application for a government grant to finish it.”

Charles Krauthammer weighed in (Washington Post, 8/24/90) with what would turn out to be the Congressional answer: eliminating grants to individual artists. “If they didn’t talk about the First Amendment they would have to explain why chocolate-smearing and not bus driving is entitled to a federal subsidy. In other words, they would have to defend the value of their art. Given what passes for art these days, they had rather not... The real problem with eliminating obscenity in art is not that obscenity is impossible to define, but that art has become impossible to define.”

Krauthammer does back a suggestion from conservative historian Gertrude Himmelfarb. “Creativity? On your own time at your own expense. But if you want to expose the good folks of Tempe and Truro to the wonders of the past—Rachmaninoff and Beethoven, Raphael and Rubens…” That’s different.

That September, Harper’s Magazine, a reliably liberal journal since June 1850, caught its readers up with what they’d missed about 1990s summer culture wars. They published a sidebar on Tom Carson’s LA Weekly piece, noting its popularity.

“Have a dream. In the dream, you are describing to Pushkin, Stendhal, Swift, and Brecht your shock and dismay that a government should actually try to politicize its arts funding process. For five points, try to make yourself heard over their laughter.” Today it sounds like a conservative view, but in 1990 even liberals wrote like that. Very different times than today’s.

Bush 41, no culture warrior, listened to (relatively) liberal former Rockefeller Republicans like Roy Goodman and Jocelyn Levi Strauss, and didn’t fire the increasingly flaky Frohnmeyer until early 1992. Frohnmeyer had already fired one deputy for being willing to work with the White House. By then it was obvious that GOP rebel Pat Buchanan’s political prospects had benefited greatly from John Frohnmeyer’s inept and inadvertent contribution towards outrage on the right.

With Frohnmeyer out, his other deputy, Anne-Imelda Radice, took over as acting NEA director for the final ten months or so of the politically doomed Bush administration. She did well, but Radice instantly ran afoul of cancel culture, 1992 style, because she understood the job, dealt with problems herself and didn’t embarrass the White House. Worse, she was considered a class traitor because although she was never on the left, she was a genuinely distinguished, widely recognized classicist and museum expert, seemingly part of the team, culturally speaking.

But worst of all for her critics on the left, Radice was a lesbian who’d matter-of-factly neither hidden it nor made a statement about it. Like today’s CBS’s Bari Weiss, similarly the focus of much media venom, Radice’s 1992 professionalism constituted unwillingness to conform to a knee-jerk stereotype of sisterly solidarity, and that made her an object of ostracism.

A sardonic postscript. When I worked there, 1986-’97, the American Film Institute gave grants to individual filmmakers. (Figuratively and literally not my department.) One of them was transgressive gay black artist Marlon Riggs, who made the controversial documentary Tongues Untied, which inflamed conservative opposition to the NEA and to PBS. He died of AIDS in 1994, after the NEA 4 controversy peaked.

Federal arts grants, including AFI’s, were up for review. I ran into the institute’s second-in-command in the hallway. He’d heard the good news that the budget for our 1895-1995 movie centennial project was approved and would move forward as planned. He briefly noted the cultural storm, which mostly had passed us by to his great relief, because he was one of the AFI’s biggest, loudest, most public boosters of problematic art, let alone “art”.

But expressing the financial self-interest of his professional role, he said with feeling, and total lack of irony, “Thank God Marlon’s dead.”

It was a moment of truth about the cynicism of certain arts administrators: it’s not just that they didn’t believe what I believed; apparently many of them didn’t even believe what they believed in.