Did the Gay and Lesbian Art Exhibit Produce a Lopsided Debate?
In the afterglow of the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibit of gay and lesbian artists, one story has dominated all else: freedom of speech. That is because a video that included nudity and ants crawling on a crucifix—a film by gay rights artist David Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS—was removed from the show when members of Congress said it offended taxpaying Catholics.
For the arts community, the fight against “censorship” became a cause célèbre larger than the Portrait Gallery exhibition itself. The exhibition included works ranging from poet Walt Whitman and painter Thomas Eakins to Wojnarowicz and celebrity lesbians such as photographer Annie Leibovitz.
To remedy the impression that art is only about free speech, the Smithsonian Institution has just produced a report on the many kinds of positive experiences visitors had. After all, this was the first-ever federally sponsored exhibit of gay and lesbian art: “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture.” The report bespeaks a great success. With the report, the Smithsonian hopes to create a memory besides the censorship headlines.
However, some topics raised by these recent events have been avoided in the public discussion.
However, some topics raised by these recent events have been avoided in the public discussion.
First, the complaint against the video came from a religious anti-defamation group. Everyone has an active anti-defamation office these days: blacks, Jews, Muslims, gays—and Roman Catholics, who filed the complaint over the Wojnarowicz art. They saw the art as defaming Jesus’ crucifixion. Since the time of Baudelaire, and later the Surrealists, modern art has proudly and deliberately offended Christianity. Naturally, Christians have protested back. Nobody should be surprised by this historic give-and-take.
Second, modern art aims to “challenge” social conventions. In other circles this has been called civil disobedience. Thoreau succumbed passively to the lock-up for refusing to pay taxes. Gandhi accepted a stick-beating for not moving. Martin Luther King quietly went to a Montgomery jail. In short, they took the bane of society to prove the moral superiority of their principles. By comparison, some artists cry persecution at the smallest slight. In art, for some reason, there is little willingness to take a hit to claim the high moral ground, if that’s what art is claming.
Third, as the Portrait Gallery exhibit showed, many artists, whatever their sexual orientation, prefer to “stay in the closet.” They prefer to emphasize their skill, craft, and aesthetic virtuosity over their sexual lives. Of course, another wing of gay and lesbian artists prefers to be sexually “out.” That is the stance of the show’s curator, art historian Jonathan D. Katz, a proud gay activist. This political approach demands that the public look beyond the art to the sexual complexities of human experience. Not everyone is a Freudian, however, or interested in the promiscuous side of sex, whether it be Courbet’s pornographic paintings or Mapplethorpe’s photos of a bullwhip in his anus.
From its founding, the United States has experienced a cultural battle between puritans and libertines, between believers in modesty and celebrants of decadence. It will never end. The public divide over the value of displaying homoerotic art is just the latest version of the debate.
This debate is sorted out, some art critics tell us, by each kind of art having its own constituency. Each group will champion its favorite art—either Mapplethorpe’s leather-and-sex or Norman Rockwell’s happy genres. By the attendance estimates, the Portrait Gallery drew a particular art audience: four in ten visitors came specifically for “Hide/Seek,” and half of all visitors hailed from the D.C. metro area, with its large gay community. The exhibit spoke to its gay and lesbian constituency, which a new study (by an out gay demographer) puts at just 1.7 percent of the U.S. adult population.
Like the American social fabric, the art world fabric is also made up of these constituent factions. That we disagree on what kind of art taxpayers should fund is no surprise. In the end, the offended Catholics scored a point, but so did the art world, showered as it was with sympathy for being "censored." Like it or not, the Smithsonian gave us a look at our American “difference and desire” in sex. What should surprise us, however, is not the private lives of artists, but the quality of the work they make.
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