Liberal Arts

...Unfortunately, this is as far as Exhibitionism goes...

...Suddenly, being shocking or offensive or just anti-art was the safest approach an artist could take...

...Of course, our instincts tell us that Munson is right about the conclusions she wants to draw: There's that feeling of weary indignation you get looking at Robert Mapplethorpe's homoerotic photographs, for instance, and that gloom of exhausted outrage you feel when you read in the newspaper that Karen Finley has opened yet another easy-pour bottle of Hershey's chocolate syrup...

...Exhibitionism offers a fascinating intermittent look at such things as the National Endowment for the Arts from 1966 to 1995, at the museum reorganizations in the 1970s and 1980s, and at the implosion of Harvard University's art department...

...One can infer from her criticisms that good art is not "amorphous" or "trivial...

...Mun-son's review of the meritless art rewarded by the 1995 panel, for example, cites works done long before, or after, the NEA grants...

...Munson does effectively notify us that the American art scene is polluted by an intolerant, undignified, and repulsive academy...

...Their advice was to be discriminating and to avoid falling into the trap of funding anyone and everyone who claimed to be an artist...

...Modern exhibitions are attacked because museum entrances are no longer difficult to climb up...

...Munson's snapshots of the 1966 and 1995 panels are quite entertaining...

...But then, anyone—except, of course, the doyens of contemporary American art—can recognize what's wrong with works like Piss Christ and Public Cervix Announcement...

...And this corrupt aesthetics, she argues, has been brutally imposed on all artists, museum patrons, and students of art history...

...Several grants went to performance artists and visual artists whose primary goal was to advance political causes...

...But she also has a strong sense—which, one sometimes feels, many culture-warriors do not—that there is finally such a thing as good art and it may be the duty of an affluent society to help support it...

...Geldzahler is praised for running his visual arts panel as "an elite private institution...

...We can only wait for Mun-son's next book, which must not merely recount anecdotes of the academy's vile past, but also instruct us how to change things in the future...

...In only one case does she explicitly describe particular offensive work done with 1995 funds...

...She excoriates Nixon's NEA chairman, Nancy Hanks, for extending NEA grants to American crafts...

...Now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, she writes with feeling about the modern art "academy," which favors controversy over artistic worth...

...Munson starts Exhibitionism with the promising idea of contrasting the artists given grants by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1966 (the first year of the NEA's visual arts program) with the artists given grants in 1995 (the last year before Congress cut funding for individual artists...

...Elsewhere, Munson has written that big popular exhibitions "serve a public purpose—they bring high-quality art to masses of people...

...Most grantees used their funds not to pursue their art, but to further their art careers...

...An artist should not treat "aesthetic concerns as below contempt" or "substitute cleverness for visual interest...

...Back in a previous Bush administration, Munson served as special assistant to National Endowment for the Humanities chairman Lynne Cheney...

...But what now...

...Munson does give some hints...

...The reader is left with no real sense of exactly how the NEA declined—and how much negative effect that had on decent artists...

...Apparently Munson has not mounted the entrance to the Getty: Talk about breathless...

...They're offensive, blasphemous, and very, very tired—per-haps most shocking in their belief that they're doing something new by being shocking...

...Painting figures, landscapes, or even just painting at all placed an artist on the margins of establishment taste...

...What we need from a book like Exhibitionism is instead an explanation of the standards by which we ought to judge this junk as worthless, and, by extension, real art as worthwhile...

...BY MARGARET HILDEBRAND If you're not planning to send out Christmas cards this year decorated with the urine-soaked Piss Christ or the elephant-dunged Holy Virgin Mary—in fact, if you're appalled by most contemporary American art—then Lynne Mun-son's book, Exhibitionism: Art in an Era of Intolerance, is inviting...

...Munson speaks of the appalling Public Cervix Announcement that Annie Sprinkle performed in 1990 not at The Furnace (as Munson says) but at The Kitchen, which was not then receiving NEA grants...

...These panels, Munson notes, "stressed quite emphatically the need to deliver support only to artists of proven merit, whose seriousness and accomplishment was recognized by other visual artists...

...It never "sublimates aesthetic concerns to the demands of a social critique...

...Karen Finley, an NEA-financed performance artist who smeared her naked body with chocolate (and whom Munson quite rightly criticizes), has not received a grant since her 1990 application was rejected— despite her lawsuit against the NEA...

...One longs to have Munson explain exactly how the new academic art failed to deliver what her idol Henry Geldzahler called "the shock of quality, that instantaneous weakness, that breathlessness that we feel when in the presence of something that is absolutely right...

...But in Exhibitionism she seems at times to give up on the ability of ordinary Americans to arrive at the breathlessness Geldzahler described...

...So, what can we as ordinary taxpayers and citizens do both to abolish the contemporary academy's junk and to foster worthy art...

...The American art world of the 1970s and 1980s put a new spin on the idea of 'academic' art," Munson observes...

...The 1966 grants were directed by Henry Geldzahler, an art curator, patron, theorist, and historian of impeccable taste and credentials...

...The 1966 grantees used their awards to continue serious work under reduced financial pressure...

...Margaret Hildebrand is a lawyer in Los Angeles...

...The 1995 grants, however, were bestowed by panels composed of few painters, many administrators, and almost no one with serious credentials as an artist...

...Still, these hints are insufficient help for a viewer confused about why we should reject the hype surrounding much of the contemporary art scene but accept, for instance, Munson's praise for Malinda Beeman's Tree Wall (Winter)—a work that combines a taxidermist's deer, ceramic chainsaws, and undulating tire tracks the artist finds "both ominous and 'kind of beautiful.'" What makes Exhibitionism worthwhile is the fact that it is not simply another culture-wars book...

...Under Geldzahler's guidance, panels of respected artists awarded fellowships to painters and sculptors with proven bodies of serious work...