On Thursday’s PBS NewsHour, they devoted almost seven minutes to leftist porn-art icon Robert Mapplethorpe, about a month after the HBO documentary honoring him. The only difference? Unlike HBO, PBS censored all the most outrageous images, since it’s a broadcast network. (Not that they’d have to worry much about Obama’s FCC.)
PBS correspondent Jeffrey Brown explained “Mapplethorpe was best known for his homoerotic photographs and explicit sadomasochistic imagery, and the political and legal battles around them. Even now, we’ve chosen not to present his most controversial work.”
But PBS didn’t just censor the art. They couldn’t even bring themselves to describe it. We’re not told about Mapplethorpe’s naked self-portrait with a bullwhip us his anus. We’re not told about his pornification of a little boy and a little girl. We’re not told about “Jim and Tom, Sausalito” – a photo in which one man urinates into another’s mouth.
So when the liberal curators say that Mapplethorpe’s art wasn’t properly appreciated because we were “preoccupied” with it as evidence in an obscenity trial, they’re making a (disguised) case for obscenity.
BRITT SALVESEN: For several years after the culture wars debate of the late ’80s, early ’90s, it was impossible to see the work as art because we were preoccupied with its status as evidence, let’s say.
JEFFREY BROWN: As part of that culture war.
SALVESEN: Yes. And that really forestalled an assessment of his artwork.
BROWN: Mapplethorpe grew up in a conservative Irish Catholic household in Queens, New York, and in the 1970s became part of the city’s burgeoning gay scene. He focused from the beginning on three main subjects: portraiture, including artists and celebrities of the day, floral still lifes, and sex and the body.
That’s as close as PBS gets to describing the outrageous sex shots – they explore “sex and the body.” So when the late Sen. Jesse Helms is brought in as the only contrary soundbite, he’s dramatically out of context. For all the PBS viewer knows, he just didn’t like tasteful nudes, like he’d disapprove of Michelangelo:
BROWN: He would achieve fame, but for the public at large that came in 1989 when North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms took to the Senate floor to decry federal funding for a traveling exhibition of Mapplethorpe’s work.
SEN. JESSE HELMS: I don’t even acknowledge that it’s art. I don’t even acknowledge that the fellow who did it was an artist. I think he was a jerk.
BROWN: Bowing to political pressure, Washington’s Corcoran Museum cancelled the show, and when it went on to the Cincinnati Arts Center, its director was arrested and charged with obscenity. He was later acquitted.
But Mapplethorpe’s work would for years after be seen in this context. The Los Angeles exhibitions contain the controversial work, accompanied by warning signs of their explicit content. Mapplethorpe himself, this is his last self-portrait, died of AIDS, at age 42, just before the cultural tempest burst.
Late in the piece, Brown ushered in the HBO filmmakers/propagandizers, where again there is a reference to Mapplethorpe’s shock tactics, with no examples:
FENTON BAILEY: I think he was playing something of a game of cat and mouse with his audience and critics. I think he knew that it would provoke, but he also said he never was intending to shock people.
BROWN: I mean, do you take that at face value? How could it not shock people?
BAILEY: I do and I don’t. You know, exactly. I mean, he knew that the key here was to photograph things, to document things that people considered outside of the realm of art. The way he did it was to elevate them and make them beautiful. The composition and the lighting was incredible. And so, he made what other people just dismissed as pornography, he made it art, and made us look at it seriously.
But photographs (or paintings, or sculptures) are judged not just on their composition, but on their subject matter. If Mapplethorpe had taken a gloriously well-lit black-and-white photograph of a baby aborted at eight months, that would be seen as obscene by his leftist mythologizers.
Brown and PBS find it unnecessary to discuss the objection that taxpayers shouldn't be forced to subsidize art that is obscene...since PBS wouldn't want to discuss how taxpayers shouldn't be forced to subsidize TV news shows with a very one-sided tilt to the left. In this case, it was doubly offensive to the conservative, like a sanitized version of the 1991 outrage Tongues Untied.
