Arts panel votes to delete pledge against obscenity

WASHINGTON — The advisory body of the National Endowment for the Arts voted overwhelmingly Friday to eliminate an anti-obscenity pledge that artists and arts institutions must sign before they can receive federal grants.

After an emotional debate, the National Council on the Arts urged endowment chairman John E. Frohnmayer to stop requiring grant recipients to agree in writing to comply with a congressional ban on using federal funds for works that might be deemed obscene.

The 17-2 vote by the presidentially appointed council is not binding on Frohnmayer. “I’m going to consider it and take my action in due course,” he said.

The motion to remove the anti-obscenity pledge was sponsored by council member Roy Goodman, a New York state senator and arts patron, who called it “a loyalty oath reminiscent of the McCarthy era” of anti-communist witch hunts led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wis., in the 1950s.

Goodman said the pledge insulted and alienated the arts community and worsened the furor surrounding the endowment. “The artist knows what the law is,” he said. “We don’t have to rub his nose in it.”

Frohnmayer instituted the pledge after conservatives led by Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., persuaded Congress last October to amend the arts endowment’s current $171 million budget to include a prohibition against federal support for obscene art.

The ban, prompted by protests over an NEA-supported exhibition of works by the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, includes “depictions of sadomasochism, homoeroticism, the sexual exploitation of children or individuals engaged in sex acts.”

Frohnmayer placed the text of the anti-obscenity ban in the regulations that govern the award of endowment grants. Of the 2,000 NEA grants approved by early July, a dozen recipients have signed the pledge under protest, a half-dozen have refused to sign and forfeited their grants, and two have challenged the requirement in federal court.