A Question of Morality: Artists' Values and Public Funding for the Arts

• Date: 01 January 2005
• Published date: 01 January 2005
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6210.2005.00426.x

8 Public Administration Review •January/February 2005, Vol. 65, No. 1

Gregory B. Lewis

Georgia State University

Arthur C. Brooks

Syracuse University

A Question of Morality: Artists’ Values and

Public Funding for the Arts

In 1989, the combination of art, religion, homosexuality, and public dollars set off an explosive

two-year battle and a decade of skirmishes over funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.

To promote artistic freedom and to avoid political controversy, federal arts policy delegates spe-

cific funding decisions to private donors and arts professionals. In an era of morality politics—hot-

button issues driven by deeply held beliefs rather than by expertise—that strategy no longer works.

Artists, donors, and arts audiences diverge widely from the rest of the American public in their

attitudes toward religion, sexual morality, and civil liberties, as General Social Survey data show.

Delegating funding decisions to them has naturally led to some subsidies of art offensive to impor-

tant segments of the population.

“Americans for the most part are moral, decent people and

they have a right not to be denigrated, offended, or mocked

with their own tax dollars.”

—Former North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms

In 1989, two grants totaling $45,000 turned a small fed-

eral arts agency into a battlefield in the “culture wars.” The

photography exhibits receiving the grants included a pic-

ture of a crucifix immersed in urine and several explicitly

homoerotic and sadomasochistic images. Cultural conser-

vatives charged the National Endowment for the Arts

(NEA) with funding blasphemy and indecency. Artists and

cultural liberals charged NEA critics with censoring free

expression. The combination of art, religion, sex, homo-

sexuality, and public dollars set off an explosive two-year

political battle and a decade of skirmishes.

How did public funding for the arts briefly generate the

kind of controversy typical of issues such as abortion, gay

rights, and capital punishment? Like these other “morality

politics” issues, NEA funding became a fight over “first

principles,” over “legal sanctions of right and wrong”

(Mooney 2001, 3). Opposing sides framed the battle as a

fight between decency and immorality, or between free

expression and censorship, making the issue easy—people

could confidently take sides without studying the issue

(Carmines and Stimson 1980; Haider-Markel and Meier

1996)—and politically salient—people cared enough that

public opinion mattered more than usual to elected offi-

cials (Mooney 2001).

Why was the NEA susceptible to having its existence

framed as a legal sanction of right and wrong? We argue

that a weak normative justification for public funding of

the arts, a divergence in values between the arts commu-

nity and others, and the political mobilization of Christian

conservatives made public money for the arts a hot-button

issue. Congress has traditionally tried to shelter federal

subsidies to the arts from political controversy by delegat-

ing specific funding decisions to private donors or experts.

Because the arts community differs from the rest of the

country in its attitudes toward religion, sex, and sex roles,

however, this divergence of values left public funding for

the arts susceptible to political controversy when Chris-

Gregory B. Lewis is a professor of public administration and urban studies

at Georgia State University and director of the joint PhD program in public

policy of Georgia State and the Georgia Institute of Technology. His re-

search focuses on the effects of race, sex, sexual orientation, and other

personal and organizational characteristics on the careers of public em-

ployees. E-mail: glewis@gsu.edu.

Arthur C. Brooks is an associate professor of public administration at Syra-

cuse University’s Maxwell School and director of the nonprofit studies pro-

gram at the Alan K. Campbell Public Affairs Institute. His research focuses on

philanthropy, cultural policy, and the economics of nonprofit organizations.

E-mail: acbrooks@maxwell.syr.edu.