米国における芸術的検閲の簡単な歴史

Donald Trump’s wide-sweeping executive orders are impacting many areas of American life, including the art world. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), which distributes cultural funding in the US, has changed its grant guidelines following directives from the president. It has just axed Challenge America, for example – a programme that funded small arts organisations with the aim of “extending the reach of sets to underserved groups/communities” – following Trump’s order to ban “radical and wasteful” DEI programmes. While conservatives would have you believe that Challenge America only distributed funding to Marxist theatre troupes and demisexual mime workshops, quite a lot of the programmes that Challenge America funded were aimed at children or people in rural areas.

The new NEA guidelines make for grim reading: applicants have to ensure that they follow all executive orders from the President, which includes not promoting “diversity, equity and inclusion” and “gender ideology”. Make no mistake: this is the federal government dictating what subject matter is acceptable, and it is likely to function as a de facto ban on funding for art related to race, transness, reproductive justice or any theme that could be related to the vague banner of “DEI”, which means whatever the right says it means. From now on, the NEA will instead prioritise projects that “celebrate and honour the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence”. During his first term, Trump tried to eliminate the NEA altogether; now it seems he is enlisting it in service of flag-waving patriotism.

While the US prides itself on having an iron-clad commitment to freedom of speech, it actually has a long history of artistic censorship, in which the NEA – established by President Lyndon Johnson in the early 1960s – has played a key role. Here is a brief and not at all comprehensive rundown of the American government telling artists what to do.

The 1950s was a time of feverish, paranoid anti-communism at all levels of American life, and this is the form that the decade’s cultural censorship took (most famously in the Hollywood blacklists, which ruined the careers of hundreds of actors, screenwriters and directors.) One Republican who took a particular interest in visual arts was George A. Dandero, a representative from Michigan who argued that all modern art was a communist conspiracy and that the Kremlin’s payroll included figures like Picasso, Dali, Miro and Duchamp. “Modern art is communistic because it is distorted and ugly, because it does not glorify our beautiful country, our cheerful and smiling people, and our material progress,” he said in an interview, a sentiment echoed every day on Elon Musk’s X/Twitter by people who think AI renditions of buxom, rosy-cheeked farm wives are the pinnacle of creative expression.

In 1949, Dandero made a speech in Congress explaining exactly why different schools of modern art were evil and in the process unwittingly made them sound very cool:

Cubism aims to destroy by designed disorder. / Futurism aims to destroy by the machine myth . . ./ Dadaism aims to destroy by ridicule. / Expressionism aims to destroy by aping the primitive and insane. / Abstractionism aims to destroy by the creation of brainstorms . . . / Surrealism aims to destroy by the denial of reason.

Wow! If you ever stage an exhibition of radical art, consider hiring the ghost of George A. Dandero to write the catalogue. 

The right’s campaign against the NEA reached a fever pitch in the 80s. This time around, gay people had fully replaced communists as the villains of the day, and their opponents were motivated by religious fervour and anxieties about moral decline rather than national security. As with today, there was a large crossover between Republican politicians who wanted to defund the arts and those who opposed funding for the Aids crisis, and many of the artists who came under attack themselves had HIV.

One of the decade’s most controversial artworks was “Immersion (Piss Christ)” by Andres Serrano, a 1987 photograph which depicts – as the name suggests – an image of Christ on the cross submerged in urine. After being exhibited at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond in 1989, the work attracted the attention of Republican politicians and caused a huge scandal, both for its supposedly blasphemous content and the fact that Serrano had received funds from the NEA. Later the same year, the moral panic around obscene art escalated with The Perfect Moment, a planned retrospective of the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, who died that year, which included five sadomasochistic portraits and two images of naked minors. Following a campaign by Republican politicians, the Corcoran Gallery in DC cancelled the exhibition. When it was shown at the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Centre, the centre’s director was prosecuted on charges of “pandering obscenity”, although he was later acquitted.

The next major controversy was sparked later that year by “Witness: Against Our Vanishing”  – a group show, curated by Nan Goldin and sponsored by the NEA, which was the first major exhibition to focus on the artistic response to the AIDS crisis. It wasn’t actually any of the pieces on display that caused the trouble, but an essay Wojnaworicz contributed to its accompanying catalogue. It’s a great piece of writing, but you can understand why some of the homophobic politicians and religious figures mentioned in it weren’t best pleased: “In my ungoverned imagination,” he writes, “I can fuck somebody without a rubber, or I can, in the privacy of my own skull, douse Helms with a bucket of gasoline and set his putrid ass on fire or throw Congressman William Dannemeyer off the Empire State Building.” After this essay was made public, the NEA at first tried to distance itself from the show and then asked for its grant money back. 

This string of controversies created enough momentum for the Republicans to push through an amendment which meant that NEA grants would henceforth have serious strings attached: no funds would be awarded to anything the institution considered obscene, “including but not limited to depictions of sadomasochism, homoeroticism, the sexual exploitation of children, or individuals engaged in sex acts which do not have serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value”.  The right had won this round of the culture war.

9/11 and the Iraq War ushered in a new era of artistic repression, during which several artists had exhibitions cancelled for expressing anti-war sentiments or critiquing American foreign policy. In 2006, for example, artist Al Brandtner was visited by the FBI after exhibiting a piece, titled “Patriot Act”, which depicted George W. Bush with a gun pointing at his head. During the 2010s, a timeline of incidents by the National Coalition Against Censorship suggests that as many exhibitions were cancelled and artworks removed due to complaints from progressives than from conservatives, but the pendulum is swinging back in a big way.

In recent years, experts have warned that freedom of expression is increasingly under threat in the US. The response of artists to Israel’s genocide in Gaza led to a wave of repression and censorship in the art world. In a recent survey by the non-profit PEN, art museum directors described “considerable pressure” to refuse to exhibit the work of Palestinian artists, and there have been a raft of cancelled exhibitions and events. This oppressive climate goes beyond Palestine: in 2023, an exhibition in Idaho – which dealt with reproductive health – was cancelled after the organisers were accused of violating the state’s anti-abortion legislation. Such an intervention wouldn’t be possible at the federal level, for now, but under these new guidelines, it seems unlikely that the NEA under Trump would award funding to any project related to abortion or reproductive justice.

Maybe it’s debatable whether it counts as ‘censorship’ to deny artists funding on ideological grounds: Trump’s supporters might argue that he is not sending anyone to prison for exercising their right to freedom of expression, that no one has an inalienable right to public money and that the free market should be the only barometer of artistic value. But there’s no denying that Trump is using government power to shape the art which finds an audience, as well as the art which gets made in the first place. 

Donald Trump’s wide-sweeping executive orders are impacting many areas of American life, including the art world. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), which distributes cultural funding in the US, has changed its grant guidelines following directives from the president. It has just axed Challenge America, for example – a programme that funded small arts organisations with the aim of “extending the reach of sets to underserved groups/communities” – following Trump’s order to ban “radical and wasteful” DEI programmes. While conservatives would have you believe that Challenge America only distributed funding to Marxist theatre troupes and demisexual mime workshops, quite a lot of the programmes that Challenge America funded were aimed at children or people in rural areas.

The new NEA guidelines make for grim reading: applicants have to ensure that they follow all executive orders from the President, which includes not promoting “diversity, equity and inclusion” and “gender ideology”. Make no mistake: this is the federal government dictating what subject matter is acceptable, and it is likely to function as a de facto ban on funding for art related to race, transness, reproductive justice or any theme that could be related to the vague banner of “DEI”, which means whatever the right says it means. From now on, the NEA will instead prioritise projects that “celebrate and honour the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence”. During his first term, Trump tried to eliminate the NEA altogether; now it seems he is enlisting it in service of flag-waving patriotism.

While the US prides itself on having an iron-clad commitment to freedom of speech, it actually has a long history of artistic censorship, in which the NEA – established by President Lyndon Johnson in the early 1960s – has played a key role. Here is a brief and not at all comprehensive rundown of the American government telling artists what to do.

The 1950s was a time of feverish, paranoid anti-communism at all levels of American life, and this is the form that the decade’s cultural censorship took (most famously in the Hollywood blacklists, which ruined the careers of hundreds of actors, screenwriters and directors.) One Republican who took a particular interest in visual arts was George A. Dandero, a representative from Michigan who argued that all modern art was a communist conspiracy and that the Kremlin’s payroll included figures like Picasso, Dali, Miro and Duchamp. “Modern art is communistic because it is distorted and ugly, because it does not glorify our beautiful country, our cheerful and smiling people, and our material progress,” he said in an interview, a sentiment echoed every day on Elon Musk’s X/Twitter by people who think AI renditions of buxom, rosy-cheeked farm wives are the pinnacle of creative expression.

In 1949, Dandero made a speech in Congress explaining exactly why different schools of modern art were evil and in the process unwittingly made them sound very cool:

Cubism aims to destroy by designed disorder. / Futurism aims to destroy by the machine myth . . ./ Dadaism aims to destroy by ridicule. / Expressionism aims to destroy by aping the primitive and insane. / Abstractionism aims to destroy by the creation of brainstorms . . . / Surrealism aims to destroy by the denial of reason.

Wow! If you ever stage an exhibition of radical art, consider hiring the ghost of George A. Dandero to write the catalogue. 

The right’s campaign against the NEA reached a fever pitch in the 80s. This time around, gay people had fully replaced communists as the villains of the day, and their opponents were motivated by religious fervour and anxieties about moral decline rather than national security. As with today, there was a large crossover between Republican politicians who wanted to defund the arts and those who opposed funding for the Aids crisis, and many of the artists who came under attack themselves had HIV.

One of the decade’s most controversial artworks was “Immersion (Piss Christ)” by Andres Serrano, a 1987 photograph which depicts – as the name suggests – an image of Christ on the cross submerged in urine. After being exhibited at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond in 1989, the work attracted the attention of Republican politicians and caused a huge scandal, both for its supposedly blasphemous content and the fact that Serrano had received funds from the NEA. Later the same year, the moral panic around obscene art escalated with The Perfect Moment, a planned retrospective of the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, who died that year, which included five sadomasochistic portraits and two images of naked minors. Following a campaign by Republican politicians, the Corcoran Gallery in DC cancelled the exhibition. When it was shown at the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Centre, the centre’s director was prosecuted on charges of “pandering obscenity”, although he was later acquitted.

The next major controversy was sparked later that year by “Witness: Against Our Vanishing”  – a group show, curated by Nan Goldin and sponsored by the NEA, which was the first major exhibition to focus on the artistic response to the AIDS crisis. It wasn’t actually any of the pieces on display that caused the trouble, but an essay Wojnaworicz contributed to its accompanying catalogue. It’s a great piece of writing, but you can understand why some of the homophobic politicians and religious figures mentioned in it weren’t best pleased: “In my ungoverned imagination,” he writes, “I can fuck somebody without a rubber, or I can, in the privacy of my own skull, douse Helms with a bucket of gasoline and set his putrid ass on fire or throw Congressman William Dannemeyer off the Empire State Building.” After this essay was made public, the NEA at first tried to distance itself from the show and then asked for its grant money back. 

This string of controversies created enough momentum for the Republicans to push through an amendment which meant that NEA grants would henceforth have serious strings attached: no funds would be awarded to anything the institution considered obscene, “including but not limited to depictions of sadomasochism, homoeroticism, the sexual exploitation of children, or individuals engaged in sex acts which do not have serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value”.  The right had won this round of the culture war.

9/11 and the Iraq War ushered in a new era of artistic repression, during which several artists had exhibitions cancelled for expressing anti-war sentiments or critiquing American foreign policy. In 2006, for example, artist Al Brandtner was visited by the FBI after exhibiting a piece, titled “Patriot Act”, which depicted George W. Bush with a gun pointing at his head. During the 2010s, a timeline of incidents by the National Coalition Against Censorship suggests that as many exhibitions were cancelled and artworks removed due to complaints from progressives than from conservatives, but the pendulum is swinging back in a big way.

In recent years, experts have warned that freedom of expression is increasingly under threat in the US. The response of artists to Israel’s genocide in Gaza led to a wave of repression and censorship in the art world. In a recent survey by the non-profit PEN, art museum directors described “considerable pressure” to refuse to exhibit the work of Palestinian artists, and there have been a raft of cancelled exhibitions and events. This oppressive climate goes beyond Palestine: in 2023, an exhibition in Idaho – which dealt with reproductive health – was cancelled after the organisers were accused of violating the state’s anti-abortion legislation. Such an intervention wouldn’t be possible at the federal level, for now, but under these new guidelines, it seems unlikely that the NEA under Trump would award funding to any project related to abortion or reproductive justice.

Maybe it’s debatable whether it counts as ‘censorship’ to deny artists funding on ideological grounds: Trump’s supporters might argue that he is not sending anyone to prison for exercising their right to freedom of expression, that no one has an inalienable right to public money and that the free market should be the only barometer of artistic value. But there’s no denying that Trump is using government power to shape the art which finds an audience, as well as the art which gets made in the first place.