1989 : Controversia sobre la obra de Robert Mapplethorpe

Mad about Mapplethorpe - controversy about exhibit of artist Robert Mapplethorpe's works
National Review , August 4, 1989 by Andrew Ferguson

WASHINGTON, D.C.-Bureaucrats in the arts, like their brethren elsewhere, are the Greta Garbos of democratic society: all they want is to be left alone. They Labor in a tiny vineyard, a hermetic subculture of thousands of artists and dozens of customers; here, a show of fingerpainted toilet seats hung on the walls of a county welfare office; there, a nude dance performed in the basement of a Presbyterian church. Their obscurity is their happiness-that, and the $150 million they annually dispense through the National Endowment for the Arts.

Every so often, however, there's a leak in security. Controversy-the bureaucrat's nightmare of nightmaresinevitably ensues. There was the flap this spring, for example, when Senator Alfonse D'Amato discovered that a photographer called Andres Serrano had used $15,000 of NEA money to finance Piss Christ, a photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine. And then Congressman Dick Armey of Texas heard about Robert Mapplethorpe.

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