Abstract
In early 1996 the Phoenix Art Museum displayed the exhibit “Old Glory: The American Flag in Contemporary Art.” This exhibit produced a truly astounding amount of public controversy—most of it quite shrill—and even led some members of the Phoenix City Council to consider withdrawing financial support from the museum. Kate Millett’s 1970 “The American Dream Goes to Pot” (an American flag in a toilet bowl) and Dread Scott’s 1988 “What is the Proper Way to Display the U.S. Flag?” (an American flag positioned on the floor so that people might walk on it) were the objects most under discussion. Thus did Kulturkampf (culture war) finally come to Arizona—Millett and Scott doing here what in other locales had earlier been done by Robert Mapplethorpe’s “X Portfolio,” Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” performance artist Karen Finley’s chocolate-smeared naked body, and the song lyrics of the rap group Two Live Crew.
Everything is what it is, and not another thing.
Bishop Butler
We have Art in order that we may not perish from Truth.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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References
See Owen M. Fiss, Liberalism Divided: Freedom Of Speech And The Many Uses Of State Power 89–107 (1996); Owen Fiss, The Irony Of Free Speech 27 – 49 (1996).
It was comical when, during the trial of the museum curator who exhibited the “X Portfolio,” one photography expert suggested ignoring entirely the fact that the picture was of an anus with an arm inserted in it and concentrating instead solely on formal properties of light and shade. If we are to discuss Mapplethorpe seriously, we must not pretend—as one of the conference participants did—that his images are simply like classical nudes—”beautiful bodies in the act of love.” This is certainly true of some of Mapplethorpe’s pictures, but not of all—e.g., the one of one man in a leather mask urinating in the mouth of another man. Suppose this man had been urinating in the mouth of a woman. Would there have been an outcry from feminists?
Wendy Steiner, The Scandal Of Pleasure: Art In An Age Of Fundamentalism (1995).
See id. at 52–59.
See Robert Hughes, Culture Of Complaint: The Fraying Of America 171–74 (1993).
One of the participants at the conference suggested that, if I had known more about the history of art, I would have realized that ready-made objects can be used to make a statement about the nature of art. Well, I do know about Marcel Duchamp and his famous display of a urinal as a work of art. But this was in 1915, and so surely by the time Millett did something similar this was, as a matter of aesthetics, boring old hat.
Limitations of space (and knowledge, too, let it be admitted) force me in this paper to speak mainly of “the arts” in a very general sense. A complete account of artistic expression would, I suspect, have to make rather different claims for the various specific arts—e.g., would have to note important differences between music and literature. Such differential treatment would also, I suspect, be required in a full discussion of the issue of public funding for the arts.
See Ronald Dworkin, “Do We Have a Right to Pornography?” in A Matter Of Principle 335–72 (1985); Thomas Scanlon, “A Theory of Freedom of Expression” 1 Phil. & Pub. Aff. 204 – 26 (1972).
Hughes, supra note 5, at 181.
Philosophers will recognize the Butler quotation from G.E. Moore’s important book Principia Ethica, where he used it as an epigraph to make the point that moral value cannot be reduced to such non-moral values as want satisfaction. G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Thomas Baldwin ed., rev. ed. 1993 ).
In the first publication of this essay, in Arizona State Law Journal, this footnote consisted simply of a cartoon. I have not, alas, received permission to reproduce the cartoon in the present collection and will have to content myself with describing it. The cartoon, by “Mr. Fish,” shows an artist, standing before a portrait of a man labeled “Fucking Assho…,” saying to that very man: “Can I have a grant so that I can finish my art?”
See Ronald Dworkin, “Liberalism” in A Matter Of Principle 181-204 (1985); Ronald Dworkin, “Can a Liberal State Support Art?” in A Matter Of Principle 221 – 33 (1985).
See, e.g., Ronald Dworkin, “Bakke’s Case: Are Quotas Unfair?” in A Matter Of Principle 293 – 303 (1985).
For these two conceptions of democracy, see the introduction to Ronald Dworkin, Freedom’s Law: A Moral Reading Of The Constitution 1–38 (1996).
A plausible argument can be made that it is permissible in principle for the liberal state to attempt to do some things with a tendency to mold character around values that are themselves basic to liberalism—e.g., respect for persons, due process of law, religious toleration, etc. I do not have space to pursue this matter here, however.
According to National Geographic, the city of Berlin, Germany, spends nearly eight times more on art than the entire budget of America’s National Endowment for the Arts. Peter Ross Range, “Reinventing Berlin” Nat’l Geographic, Dec. 1996, at 96, 113.
This is the transcript of a public lecture that was given at the Free Speech and Community Conference at the College of Law, Arizona State University, Feb. 6–8, 1997. It was presented to stimulate discussion and does not claim to be a careful scholarly study of all the complex moral, political, legal, and aesthetic issues that are engaged by the topic. Many persons were kind enough to provide me with critical comments on this paper, and I hope to be able to take account of those comments if I have an opportunity to do a more substantial piece in the future.
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Murphy, J.G. (1998). Freedom of Expression and the Arts. In: Character, Liberty, and Law. Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9066-2_7
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