By Phyllis Schlafly, Copley News Service
October 1993 – The good news is that 20 more congressmen than last year voted not to fund the National Endowment for the Arts. The bad news is that the House voted 322-105 to reward that contemptible agency with $130,000 more of the taxpayers’ money than it spent last year.
Few things show Congress’ total decadence and disdain for the American people so well as the vote to increase funding for the NEA in the face of its most recent atrocity. We’re still waiting for some Congressman to answer, “the National Endowment for the Arts,” when TV talk show hosts belligerently ask, “Well, what would you cut out of the federal budget?’’
The NEA has given $302,000 to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City since 1990. On display there from June 23-August 29 was an exhibition called “Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art.”
No words of mine can describe the exhibit as appropriately as the Whitney Museum’s own catalogue. The choice of the word “abject” is apt: it means wretched, despicable, degrading or base.
“Although ‘abject art’ is a play on ‘object art,’ the term does not connote an art movement so much as it describes a body of work that incorporates or suggests abject materials such as dirt, hair, excrement, dead animals, menstrual blood and rotting food in order to confront taboo issues of gender and sexuality. This work also includes abject subject matter—that which is often deemed inappropriate by a conservative dominant culture.”
Let’s continue reading from the Whitney Museum’s own description of this offensive exhibit: “Employing methodologies adapted from feminism, queer theory, Post-structuralism, Marxism and psychoanalysis, our goal is to talk dirty in the institution and degrade its atmosphere of purity and prudery by foregrounding issues of gender and sexuality in the art exhibited.”
Now hold your nose for a list of some of the “art” on display in this exhibit: a young woman urinating in a toilet, a three-foot mound of excrement, a photograph of a naked woman holding a large fake penis to her private parts, a dismembered sculpture of two women having oral sex, framed samples of baby fecal stains, a film by porn performer Annie Sprinkle called The Sluts and Goddesses Video Workshop or How to be a Sex Goddess in 10 Easy Steps, and a film by Susie Silver titled A Spy with Jesus Christ depicted as a woman standing naked with her breasts exposed.
That’s not all. Other items are so obscene I can’t bring myself to describe them in a column that runs in family newspapers. Calling this stuff “art” is a perversion of the word.
The Whitney Museum’s permanent collection includes two items made famous in the controversy about the NEA a couple of years ago. They are Andre Serrano’s “Piss Christ” (a photograph of a crucifix in a jar of urine) and Robert Mapplethorpe’s self- portrait of himself with a bullwhip up his rectum.
Of course, NEA supporters in Congress didn’t defend the Whitney exhibit. They just demogogued about how wonderful it is for Americans to enjoy art by attending symphony orchestra performances.
Leading the valiant battle to not fund the NEA was Rep. Philip M. Crane, R-Il. He pointed out that there is no constitutional authority for Congress to give taxpayers’ money to individual artists to advance their careers, which is exactly what the NEA does.
In 1992, the NEA reviewed 17,677 applications for grants, from which 4,251 were anointed with taxpayers’ cash. Government endorsement is used to promote the careers of those so-called artists at the expense of their competitors.
The lucky recipients are usually those who know how to work the system by getting their pals on the peer review panels. Even if the grant procedure were not an outright scandal, its obvious that the peculiar biases of those doling out the money play a dominant role in who gets the cash.
The NEA functions as a sort of ministry of culture from which the art commissar decides which art should be endorsed and subsidized and which should not.
That doesn’t sound very American, does it?
Not only are many choices of the art commissar offensive to the American people, not only is the whole selection process inherently unfair and plagued with scandal, not only does the federal deficit demand major cuts throughout the budget, but art in America is probably the least needy category of all federal spending. NEA expenditures of $178 million in 1992 were a drop in the bucket compared to the $9.3 billion given to the arts by the private sector (from individuals, bequests, corporations and foundations).
Art in America was alive and well long before Lyndon Johnson created this NEA monster as part of the Great Society, and art will do very well, indeed, if the NEA is abolished. Private spending on art continues ues to climb, despite higher taxes.
Find out how your congressman voted on the Crane Amendment to H.R. 2520 and let him know your feelings. Write him at:
U. S. House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515. 
How they voted
Congressmen listed below recently voted to abolish the NEA. Congressmen not listed voted to continue funding NEA’s “art” with your tax dollars.
AK - Don Young
AL - H.L. Sonny Callahan
AL - Spencer Bachus
AL - Terry Everett
AR - Jay Dickey
AR - Tim Hutchinson
AZ - Bob Stump
AZ - Jon Kyl
CA - Al McCandless
CA - Bill Baker
CA - Carlos J. Moorhead
CA - Christopher Cox
CA - Dana Rohrabacher
CA - David Dreier
CA - Duncan L. Hunter
CA - Edward Royce
CA - Elton Gallegly
CA - Gary Condit
CA - Howard McKeon
CA - John T. Doolittle
CA - Ken Calvert
CA - Randy Cunningham
CA - Richard W. Pombo
CA - Robert K. Dornan
CA - Wally Herger
CO - Joel Hefley
CO - Wayne Allard
FL - Charles Canady
FL - Cliff Stearns
FL - Earl Hutto
FL - Tom Lewis
GA - Jack Kingston
GA - John Linder
GA - Mac Collins
GA - Newt Gingrich
IL - Donald Manzullo
IL - Harris Fawell
IL - Henry Hyde
IL - J. Dennis Hastert
IL - Philip Crane
IL - Robert Michel
IL - Thomas Ewing
IN - Dan Burton
IN - John T. Myers
IN - Steve Buyer
KS - Pat Roberts
KY - Jim Bunning
LA - Bob Livingston
LA - Jimmy Hayes
LA - Richard Baker
LA - W.J. Billy Tauzin
MD - Roscoe Bartlett
MI - James Barcia
MI - Joseph Knollenberg
MI - Nick Smith
MN - Rod Grams
MO - Bill Emerson
MO - Ike Skelton
MO - James Talent
MO - Melton D. “Mel” Hancock
MS - Gene Taylor
NC - Charles H. Taylor
NC - Howard Coble
NV - Barbara Vucanovich
NY - David Levy
NY - Gerald B. Solomon
NY - Jack Quinn
NY - John McHugh
NY - L. William Paxon
NY - Peter T. King
OH - John A. Boehner
OK - Ernest Jim Istook
OK - James M. Inhofe
OR - Robert F. Smith
PA - Bob Shuster
PA - George W. Gekas
PA - Jim Greenwood
PA - Robert S. Walker
PA - Tim Holden
PA - William F. Goodling
SC - Bob Inglis
TN - Don Sundquist
TN - James H. Quillen
TN - John J. Duncan
TN - John Tanner
TX - Bill Archer
TX - Bill Sarpalius
TX - Charles Stenholm
TX - Greg H. Laughlin
TX - Henry Bonilla
TX - Jack Fields
TX - Joe Barton
TX - Lamar Smith
TX - Larry Combest
TX - Pete Geren
TX - Ralph M. Hall
TX - Richard K. Armey
TX - Sam Johnson
TX - Thomas DeLay
UT - Bill Orton
VA - Robert Goodlatte
VA - Thomas Bliley
WI - James Sensenbrenner
WI - Toby Roth
WI - Tom Petri
Did not vote: IL, Robert Michel; IA, Jim Leach, Jim Lightfoot and Neal Smith; MA, Barney Frank and Gary Studds; MI, Paul Henry, John Conyers and John Dingell.
