Ben Shapiro Shapiro is a second-year
political science student bringing reason to the masses. E-mail him
at bshapiro@media.ucla.edu.
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Art is generally under-appreciated in society. But just because
the masses tend to neglect art doesn’t mean everything
neglected by the masses is art. Sometimes, there is a very good
reason that the public dislikes a certain type of art ““ the
art is bad.
Despite this reasonable statement, intellectuals refuse to cede
any sovereignty to the public in the sphere of art. They believe
anything the public believes to be crude or vile must be great art,
too deep for the masses to fathom.
UCLA’s “Rash: Secret Itch” exhibition in
Dickson Hall is but one example of the growing divide between the
public and “art” as defined by the intellectuals. Less
than half of the artwork is understandable, and several of the
pieces are patently offensive.
The most memorable and infamous piece is a series of photographs
portraying a young girl, no more than 10, in several poses
reminiscent of adult models. The artist voyeuristically
compares little girls to adult women, and the distinction between
this act and child pornography, if it exists at all, is paper
thin.
This spate of false and disgusting art is not relegated to UCLA
alone. At the San Francisco Art Institute, Jonathan Yegge, a
student of art, carried out a “performance piece” in
which he took a volunteer out into a public area at the university,
and proceeded to commit acts of oral sex with him, after which both
excreted into each other’s anal cavity. Said Yegge:
“It’s about Heidegger, Derrida ““ all this stuff.
It’s about pushing the notion of gay sex, pushing the notion
of consent, pushing the notion of what’s legal.”
The university’s only complaint with the act was the
“exchange of bodily fluids,” which could have been
unsafe. Not sick. Not twisted. Not perverted. Unsafe.
This artwork has also been forced into the universal sphere.
Jock Sturges takes photos of naked young children in seductive
poses. Andres Serrano places sculptures of Jesus and the Pope
in bottles with his own urine.
“Well,” the intellectuals say, “you just
don’t understand. You’re not deep enough, not
knowledgeable enough to judge such fine art. Your opinions are
meaningless; the common man cannot be the judge of such
art.”
The intellectuals are wrong. This kind of art should and must be
banned under the Constitution. It is not protected by free speech.
Under the Supreme Court’s judgment in Miller v. California
(1973), free speech does not protect works “appealing to the
prurient interest,” works which describe, “in a
patently offensive way, sexual conduct,” or any work which,
“taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic,
political, or scientific value.”
The judge of whether a work is art is not the intellectual, nor
the “art” major ““ it is the “average
person.”
No average person finds child pornography to have serious
artistic value, or finds homosexual oral acts to be art.
There is no justification for this. This type of art must be
outlawed, as should the National Endowment for the Arts.
The NEA began with a noble purpose to “provide national
recognition and support to significant projects of artistic
excellence, thus preserving and enhancing our nation’s
diverse cultural heritage.” But with no one to set an
objective standard for art, federal tax dollars have been used to
fund “artists” such as Karen Finley, who shoves candied
yams into her anal cavity and excretes it, letting another artist
eat it, and then has audience members lick goo off of her naked
body.
The only way to prevent such exercises in reprehensibility is to
end public funding of the arts. Artists must be made accountable to
the people and private funding, not to some amorphous federal
agency.
This generation has seen the corruption of art. It has been
transformed from a field that uplifts the human spirit, enriches
the human experience, and appeals to the higher capacity of
mankind, into one that merely degrades the human condition. The
only way to return art to the sphere of higher meaning is to return
it to the people.