For conservatives and fundamentalists, the arts community plays a significant role in setting standards and shaping public values: Buchanan writes, “The decade has seen an explosion of anti-American, anti-Christian, and nihilist ‘art.’ .. . [Many museums] now feature exhibits that can best be described as cultural trash,”"* and “as in public television and public radio, a tiny clique, out of touch with America’s traditional values, has wormed its way into control of the arts bureaucracy.”’* In an analogy chillingly reminiscent of Nazi cul- tural metaphors, Buchanan writes, “As with our rivers and lakes, we need to clean up our culture: for it is a well from which we must all drink. Just as a poisoned land will yield up poisonous fruits, so a polluted culture, left to fester and stink, can destroy a nation’s soul.”"

attacked the photo, the exhibition and its sponsors. The association and its executive director, United Methodist minister Rev. Donald Wildmon, were practiced in fomenting public opposition to allegedly “immoral, anti-Christian” images and had led protests against Martin Scorsese’s film The Last Temptation of Christ the previous summer.

the artist’s urine.

it becomes possible, and necessary, to reverse that view and recognize the way in which his aesthetic strategy begins to subvert the hierarchy of the cultural codes that separate the pure and noble values of the fine art nude from the filthy and de- graded form of the commonplace racist stereotype

. Framed within such generic conven- tions of the fine art nude, their bodies are aestheticized and eroticized as "objects" of the gaze and thus offer an erotic source of pleasure in the act of looking

The ignorance and confusion enforced by government and the dominant media

"Artists are supposed to represent the human condition . . ." (a condition that is, of course, assumed to be universal

There was a time when, with few excep- tions, works of art remained generally in the same location for which they were made.

"From today painting is dead"

Not innovation, but originality, individuality and synthesis are the marks of quality in art today, as they always have been

It proved that faith in painting had indeed been fully restore

We are given little choice: accept rhepicture and live as shadow, as insubstantial as the image on a televisionscreen, or feel left out, dissatisfied, but unable to do anything about it.

T'he painting in fact beiame a schnabel

diptych format Salle favors

particularly bourgeois order

FYB, pAoy'] YUeLy

rtists and the organizations

tcannot be subject to generalization and has overwhelmed art history;