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                  Imprimis, On Line  -- January, 1993
        
        Imprimis, meaning "in the first place," is a free
        monthly publication of Hillsdale College (circulation
        428,000 worldwide). Hillsdale College is a liberal arts
        institution known for its defense of free market
        principles and Western culture and its nearly 150-year
        refusal to accept federal funds. Imprimis publishes
        lectures by such well-known figures as Ronald Reagan,
        Jeane Kirkpatrick, Tom Wolfe, Charlton Heston, and many
        more. Permission to reprint is hereby granted, provided
        credit is given to Hillsdale College. Copyright 1992.
        For more information on free print subscriptions or
        back issues, call 1-800-437-2268, or 1-517-439-1524,
        ext. 2319.
        
                     ------------------------------
        
                            "But Is It Art?"
                  by Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington
                 Author, Picasso: Creator and Destroyer
        
                     ------------------------------
        
                          Volume 22, Number 1
              Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan 49242
                              January 1993
        
                     ------------------------------
        
        Preview: It's an old adage that if you want to gauge
        the health of a nation like America, you must look
        beyond its political power and its economic resources
        to its culture.
        
             Art is one of the most powerful and moving forms
        of culture we know. But in looking at the art world
        today, what we see all too often is merely cynicism,
        nihilism and exploitation.
        
             "Is this really art? Is there no connection
        between art and morality?"--these are the kind of
        questions we are asking with increasing frequency. This
        Imprimis issue addresses them in no uncertain terms.
        Mrs. Huffington's remarks were delivered during
        Hillsdale's Center for Constructive Alternatives
        seminar, "Culture Wars" in March 1992.
        
                     ------------------------------
        
        In the fall of 1989, 14 photographs by Robert
        Mapplethorpe were sold at auction at Christie's for
        $129,690. In the same week, 23 Mapplethorpe photographs
        were sold at auction at Sotheby's for $396,275. Art
        dealers were furiously bidding against each other for
        photographs of leather-clad men and cropped close-ups
        of an "obscene" nature. Once more, hype is confused
        with art in the "bazaar of the bizarre" that our
        culture has become.
        
             At the height of the controversy surrounding
        Mapplethorpe's photographs, the Whitney museum took a
        full-page ad in the New York Times to protest the
        cancellation of a Mapplethorpe show by the Corcoran
        Gallery in Washington. "Are you going to let politics
        kill art?" the ad asked in block letters. A
        Mapplethorpe photograph of a tulip was used for
        illustration.
        
             Of course the trustees of the Whitney knew as well
        as the rest of us that Mapplethorpe's fame and his one-
        man shows at the Whitney and other venerable
        institutions around the country were not based on his
        photographs of flowers. But the trustees also knew that
        the ad would have been self-defeating in terms of
        garnering public support if it were illustrated by one
        of Mapplethorpe's photographs celebrating
        sadomasochism, which Mapplethorpe, in a farewell
        interview before he died of AIDS, described as sex and
        magic.
        
             Yet it was precisely these photographs of torture
        and degradation that put Robert Mapplethorpe on the
        map, otherwise known as "the cutting edge" of art--what
        our culture decides is worth exhibiting, reviewing and
        talking about. If art is in danger of being killed, as
        the Whitney ad implies, it is our culture, not
        politics, that is the culprit. In fact, Congress is not
        the right forum for this particular debate. The larger
        issue is not what art is supported by public funds, but
        what art is encouraged and rewarded by our culture.
        
             At the moment, art that deals with rage, violence,
        disgust and brutality rises to the top. The message
        from the art world is clear: life is rotten, human
        beings are rotten, love is rotten, society is rotten.
        Art that may show the darkness but also gives us a
        glimpse of the light beyond is seen as too "soft," too
        unrealistic.
        
             What Tom Wolfe said in The Painted Word is even
        more valid today: "If a work or a new style disturbed
        you, it was probably good work. If you hated it, it was
        probably great....To be against what is new is not to
        be modern. Not to be modern is to write yourself out of
        the scene. Not to be in the scene is to be nowhere." As
        a result, the art world has for years now been stuck in
        the very modern and very adolescent stage of rebellion.
        
             There is another world--of light, spirit, harmony
        and truth that seems foreign to our contemporary
        culture. Schumann said in the 19th century, "To send
        light into the darkness of men's hearts--such is the
        duty of the artist." He would be hard put to find many
        such artists thriving today.
        
             In all the huffing and puffing and booming of art
        that celebrates darkness and inhumanity the same note
        is struck: how powerful the work, how exquisite the
        technique! The fact that adding elegance to brutality
        only helps to desensitize us to its reality is glossed
        over. And our response has nothing to do with defending
        our civil rights and a lot to do with losing our
        capacity to be shocked.
        
             There have been great photographers who have
        captured strong images of violence and cruelty
        intending to shock us, often to shock us into action--
        such as Jacob Riis with his pictures of New York slums,
        or Lewis Hines with his pictures of children working in
        coal mines.
        
             But when we detach ourselves from the brutality
        and admire the technique, we are conceding that human
        beings are inert things to whom you can do anything--
        sometimes in the name of art, sometimes in the name of
        sexual kicks, sometimes in the name of the state. It is
        a concession we cannot afford to make--the first step
        on the road to Auschwitz and the Gulag Archipelago.
        
             Discussing the arts controversy on "Phil Donahue"
        two years ago, I told Tim Rollins, a young artist on
        the panel who works in the South Bronx helping children
        transmute violence into art, that Robert Mapplethorpe
        might have benefited greatly from working with him. He
        replied that Mapplethorpe's violence was between
        consenting adults. I asked him if he also thought that
        the consent of his followers in Jonestown exonerated
        the Rev. Jim Jones.
        
             "Jim Jones," he answered, "was not an artist."
        This is a succinct expression of the feeling prevalent
        in our culture that there is one moral standard for
        ordinary mortals and another for artists.
        
             "Just pronounce the magic word, 'art,' and
        everything is OK," wrote George Orwell 45 years ago in
        an essay on Salvador Dali. "So long as you can paint
        well enough to pass the test, all shall be forgiven
        you." And then he made the ultimate pronouncement not
        only on Dali but on the whole debate on art and
        morality:
        
             "One ought to be able to hold in one's head
        simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good
        draftsman and a disgusting human being. The one does
        not invalidate, or, in a sense, affect the other. The
        first thing that we demand of a wall is that it shall
        stand up. If it stands up it is a good wall, and the
        question of what purpose it serves is inseparable from
        that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves
        to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp.
        In the same way it should be possible to say, 'This is
        a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be
        burned by the public hangman.' Unless one can say that,
        at least in imagination, one is shirking the
        implications of the fact that an artist is also a
        citizen and a human being."
        
             Our culture would do well to take Orwell's words
        to heart. The rest of us have a duty to distinguish
        constantly between the true and the false. And perhaps
        to follow the example of the small boy in the fairy
        tale who had the courage to cry out that the emperor
        wore no clothes.
        
             Our secular culture is finding it increasingly
        hard to satisfy on a purely aesthetic diet the
        spiritual instinct in us that longs for a larger
        meaning. With an almost pathetic desperation, we
        overestimate the significance of everything "artistic,"
        including Andy Warhol's cookie jars, with ever-
        diminishing emotional returns. But aestheticism--the
        notion that all of existence can be sanctified as an
        aesthetic phenomenon-- is exhausted. Its champions,
        still dominating the art world while fighting off a
        nasty case of existential dread, have failed to
        recognize that it is the connection between the
        aesthetic and the ethical that gives art its dignity,
        its meaning, and its power. It is not an explicit
        socio-realistic connection made by the artist, but a
        connection made within ourselves when art pierces
        through all the crusts of our narrow interests and
        preoccupations and liberates the truth and the vision
        of wholeness we carry within us.
        
                     ------------------------------
        
        Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington is a writer, lecturer
        and broadcaster. Born in Greece, she was educated at
        Cambridge and there became president of the famed
        debating society, the Cambridge Union. She has appeared
        on numerous television programs in the U.S. and Great
        Britain, including a series she recently hosted, "From
        the Heart." Her many books include The Female Woman
        (translated into 11 languages, 1974), After Reason
        (1978), Maria: Beyond the Callas Legend (1981), The
        Gods of Greece (1984), and one of the most talked-about
        biographies of recent years, Picasso: Creator and
        Destroyer (1988). Her next book, The Fourth Instinct,
        will be published shortly by Simon and Schuster.
        
                                  ###
        
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