in the eye of the beholder: bifurcated beauties in the age of robert mapplethorpe

________________________________________________________BOWDOIN JOURNAL OF ART, 2015

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In the Eye of the Beholder: Bifurcated Beauties in the Age of Robert Mapplethorpe JUSTIN M. SANDULLI Duke University, Class of 2016 ABSTRACT The American Culture Wars of the later 20th century unleashed a series of contentious disputes waged between two factions, artistic liberals and artistic conservatives, whose respective convictions about what art should be and should represent manifested underlying ideologies. This paper surveys the ways in which the two parties devised and deployed distinct definitions of beauty to further their social views and political agendas. Conservatives, such as Jesse Helms and Pat Buchanan, forwarded a Kantian beauty steeped in tenets of universal accessibility; liberal art critics and museum curators countered with specialized beauty, one which appeals to specific audiences and embodies the interests of America’s minority groups. Alternatively branded “sick barbarism” and “brilliant modernism,” the oeuvre of avant-garde American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, whose subjects spanned floral stills to sadomasochistic imagery, militarized proponents of Kantian beauty and specialized beauty; unveiled in 1988, the artist’s traveling retrospective sparked a melee of heated and widely publicized confrontations that illustrated in sensational detail a sharply divided American electorate. Although liberals’ advocacy for expressive freedom would ostensibly triumph over conservatives’ attempts at censorship, a paralyzing fear among art institutions of inciting future controversy paradoxically obfuscated specialized beauty’s practitioners. Analyzing the installments in and fallout from the Mapplethorpe affair, this paper


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contends that the warring ideologies’ bifurcation of beauty, an insidiously subversive concept, effected their mutually assured destruction.

What beauty is, I know not, though it adheres to many things.

Albrecht Dürer

Of the many ideological battles that electrified the United States during the so-called American Culture Wars of the 1980s and 1990s, the epic confrontation over a controversial retrospective of American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s oeuvre ranks among the most tempestuous. Insofar as it concerned an artist’s right to representation in a nation torn between distinct religious and sociopolitical factions, this skirmish analogized a sweeping roster of antecedents and contemporaries. It was peculiar, however, in its execution: the hostile parties, sharply divided along ideological lines, devised and deployed contrasting interpretations of beauty to justify their initiatives and antagonize their opponents. Though beauty was certainly no stranger to altercation by 1988, never before had belligerents so brazenly turned the concept on itself as a means of combat. As the two-year altercation unfolded across an ideologically splintered American electorate, beauty’s ostensibly innocuous veneer cracked, unleashing on an unsuspecting nation the full brunt of its insidious volatility.

The Beauty Pageant


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In 1863, as realists and romantics waged their own campaign over beauty, Charles Baudelaire took it upon himself to situate and interrogate their deliberations within the operative framework of the artist’s function in society. His resulting analyses paint beauty as inherently duplicitous:

Fortunately from time to time there come forward righters of wrong, amateurs, curious enquirers, to declare that Raphael, or Racine, does not contain the whole secret, and that the minor poets too have something good, solid and delightful to offer; and finally that however much we may love general beauty, as it is expressed by classical poets and artists, we are no less wrong to neglect particular beauty, the beauty of circumstance.1

Baudelaire’s distinction between the “general” and the “particular” intimates a duality within beauty’s makeup that had, in this instance, accommodated seemingly irreconcilable aesthetic principles. Extrapolating on this assessment, he opined that:

Beauty is always and inevitably of a double composition, although the impression that it produces a single – for the fact that it is difficult to discern the variable elements of beauty within the unity of the impression invalidates in no way the varieties in its composition. Beauty is made up of an eternal, invariable element, whose quantity it is excessively difficult to determine, and of a relative, circumstantial element, which will be, if you like, whether severally or all at once, the age, its fashions, its morals, its emotions.2

Baudelaire surmised that beauty’s outwardly harmonious visage belies its mercurial trappings: by nature, it is selectively amaranthine and circumstantial. The romantics’ and realists’ contrasting perceptions of beauty were, in Baudelaire’s view, merely the manifestations of concept’s inherent duality. More than a century thereafter, Dave Hickey penned four essays exploring beauty’s relationship to postmodern art movements. His writings 1 Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays”, ed. Jonathan Mayne (London, 2 Ibid., 3.


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effectually translated Baudelaire’s theory of beauty’s duality into 20th-century terms, updating the enumerated characteristics of “general beauty” and “particular beauty” in turn. In the process, Hickey introduced his own perspective on the matter:

Talking about beauty involves us in a physical world bereft of transcendental attributes. Its human attributes are as numerous and protean as the gods of Rome (and amazingly similar in their utility). They fall to hand as we need them – novelty, familiarity, antiquity, autonomy, rarity, sanctity, levity, solemnity, eccentricity, complicity, and utility. Their value in the moment determines the temple at which we offer up our sacrifice.3

Hickey’s depiction of “a physical world bereft of transcendental attributes” diverted from the “eternal, invariable” beauty that Baudelaire identified, but the many shared attributes therein reinforced the French author’s overarching concept of beauty as a corruptible force beholden to external forces. Furthermore, in equating beauty’s features to the lascivious gods of antiquity, Hickey insinuated that human necessities dictated beauty’s interpretation and representation. A sprawling litany of historical (re)definitions corroborated his argument that beauty’s agency mirrored its “value in the moment,” often as an ideological mechanism through which parties voiced opinions and actualized objectives.

Enter the Belligerents: Artistic Ideologies & Robert Mapplethorpe

When, by the late 1980s, the increasingly volatile American Culture Wars had all but engulfed the arts, Hickey’s theoretical musings found practical footing in a debate over beauty that eventually erupted onto the

3 Dave Hickey, “American Beauty” in The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty (Chicago, IL: Unviersity of Chicago Press, 2009), 68. 1990.


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national stage with unprecedented fervor. Fueling this fracas were two distinct factions that had conscripted art to further their underlying ideological convictions: artistic conservatives and artistic liberals.4 The conservative agenda comprised three major initiatives: (1) to lend insight to the arts, (2) to revitalize Christianity, and (3) to oppose abortion and same-sex relationships; liberals, on the other hand, campaigned for equal rights and expressive freedoms. Unsurprisingly, these discordant sociopolitical outlooks espoused equally discordant contemporary art movements. Conservative politicians, such as Jesse Helms and Pat Buchanan, yearned for an artistic “purity” they felt had been forsaken in the postmodern age, while liberal art critics and museum curators advocated for artists’ license to political statements and social commentary. The palpable friction between these dissenting parties decimated all manner of diplomatic platitudes, plunging the United States into an ideological showdown that found artists of all races, gender identities, national origins, and sexual orientations embroiled in an incendiary battle over beauty. At the crux of this heated debate stood American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, whose oeuvre spanned microscopic floral stills to colossal rockstar portraits.5 A former graphic arts student at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, Mapplethorpe transitioned to photography following an influential introduction to John McKendry, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s curator of prints and photographs, in 1971. He strove to capture

4 Henceforth, the two artistic ideologies defined herein appear in italics to denote their distinction from other forms of conservatism and liberalism. 5 “Mapplethorpe’s range is extensive. He has photographed a single, elegant blossom as well as flower arrangements, black male models and a female bodybuilder, earthy portraits of the art world and glamorous celebrities. In his self-portraits, he has depicted himself as both gunman and dandy. He has collaged found-pornographic imagery, stages his own provocative mise-en-scénes, and, on occasion, portrayed children and lanscapes. He has also created abstract reliefs, designed record album covers and furniture, and conceived shoots for liquor advertisements, fashion magazines, and deluxe interior design publications devoted to our more conspicuous life-styles.” Janet Kardon, “The Perfect Moment” in Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 9. 1988.


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“something you hadn’t seen before; […] subjects that nobody else had used because they were loaded,”6 using meticulous figural modeling and lighting distortions to craft “scenes that appear to be distilled from real life.”7 In a transient, fast-paced era ripe with prospects and perspectives, Mapplethorpe’s technical refinement proved all the more exceptional;8 he soon emerged as a leading figure in New York’s contemporary art scene, joining the ranks of several New York-based homosexual artists who achieved national prominence in the mid-1970s.9 With time, his photographs of nude male subjects engaged in sadomasochistic acts became something of an unofficial signature.

Janet Kardon, who as director of Philadelphia's Institute of Contemporary Art spearheaded a major Mapplethorpe retrospective, described the ways in which this particular body of his imagery:

elevated [the nude] to an unnatural innocence, creating a frisson between the licentious subject of the photograph and its formal qualities that purifies, even cancels, the prurient elements.10

6 Janet Kardon, “Robert Mapplethorpe Interview” in Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 26. 1988. 7 Kardon, “The Perfect Moment”, 9. Grace Glueck, “Fallen Angel”, The New York Times, 25 June 1995. http://www.nytimes.com/1995/06/25/books/fallen-angel.html?src=pm (accessed 5 Dec. 2012). 8 “Unbenknownst to myself, I became a photographer. I never really wanted to be one in art school; it wasn’t a high enough art form at that point. But then I realized that all sorts of things can be done within the context of photography, and it was also the perfect medium, or so it seemed, for the seventies and eighties, where everything was fast. If I were to make something that took weeks to do, I’d lose my enthusiasm. It would become an act of labor and the love would be gone. With photography, you zero in; you put a lot of energy into short periods, short moments, and then you go on to the next thing. It seems to allow you to function in a very contemporary way and still produce the material. It also allowed to travel and still be productive. It just seemed to make a lot of sense.” Kardon, “Robert Mapplethorpe Interview”, 23. 9 Glueck, “Fallen Angel”, http://www.nytimes.com/1995/06/25/books/fallen-angel.html?src=pm. 10 Kardon, “The Perfect Moment”, 10.


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Vince Aletti of The New Yorker agreed, celebrating the artist’s “refined style, which never strayed from classic modernism.”11 Even Roger Kimball, an outspokenly conservative critic so often at odds with postmodernism, defended Mapplethorpe’s artistry.12 His photographs, they agreed, “presented the viewer with a certain undeniable reality, implying that the scene of incident in the photograph took place, whether it was staged or candid.”13 Since the works’ formal qualities went uncontested, their controversial capacity must instead be traced to their allegedly obscene, homoerotic, or blasphemous subject matter.14 Indeed, conservatives disparaged Mapplethorpe’s images as deplorable — pornographic, even15 — representations of a deviant, perverse lifestyle, while liberals commended their capacity for relaying an artist’s own concerns and penetrating aspects of America’s collective social psyche.

Beauty’s Bifurcation

Having secured a suitably polarizing battlefield, conservatives and liberals set about codifying their ideologies into a “legitimate” critical mechanism. Beauty, ever amenable to such disputes, was selected by 11 Vince Aletti, “Shoot to Thrill”, The New Yorker, 26 May 2008, http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/notebook/2008/05/26/080526gonb_GOAT_notebok_alet (accessed 3 Nov. 2012). 12 “I may not like Andy Warhol or Karen Finley or Robert Mapplethorpe or Marcel Duchamp, but it is silly to deny that what they produced was art […] The real issue is whether it should be regarded as good art. In other words, what we need is not definitional ostracism but informed and robust criticism.” Roger Kimball, “Can art be defined?”, The Public Interest, 120. 13 Joshua P. Smith, “Why the Corcoran Made a Big Mistake”, Washington Post, 18 June 1989. 14 Ibid. 15 “Mr. President, this pornography [Mapplethorpe’s work] is sick. But Mapplethorpe’s sick art does not appear to be an isolated incident.” 148 Cong. Rec. S8807 (1989) (statement of Sen. Jesse Helms). “Barbarism! The precise word, as we observe journalistic yahoos hail poor, pathetic Robert Mapplethorpe for having photographed, for their amusement, the degraded acts by which he killed himself.” Pat Buchanan, “Pursued by Baying Yahoos”, The Washington Times, 2 August 1989. “Robert Mapplethorpe, God rest his soul, was a pornographer. He just did not pass out the pornography. He took the pictures. […] He was a pornographer. He lived his homosexual, erotic lifestyle and died horribly of AIDS.” 148 Cong. Rec. H5819 (1989) (statement of Rep. Bob Donran).


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default, and the two parties minted and tailored their interpretations accordingly. This bifurcation spawned two entirely incongruous definitions of beauty: The first, rooted in German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s 18th century theories16 and perpetuated in American art critic Clement Greenberg’s mid-20th century formalist criticisms,17 held that beauty must be impartial, depoliticized, and universally accessible. The genuinely beautiful artwork is that which appeals to everyone who encounters it.18 Extolling established conventions, this Kantian beauty seamlessly assimilated the conservatives’ ideological disposition into celebrations of universally accessible and acceptable art. The liberals’ contender, specialized beauty, deliberately targeted a specific audience.19 A product of postmodern critiques penned in the late 1980s, specialized beauty often embodied the interests of America’s minority groups.20 Liberals, often defenders of the underrepresented, had essentially fashioned a beauty to receive the art that conservatives admonished.

Writings from this period attested to conservatives and liberals’ reawakening of beauty’s duality. In a 1989 review of Mapplethorpe’s images, the decidedly conservative art critic Hilton Kramer noted that, “what has to be acknowledged in this debate over beauty is that […] not all forms of art are socially benign in their intentions or their effects.” 21 These telling, prescient words both acknowledged the socially charged expressivity of Mapplethorpe’s portfolio and foretold a protracted ideological altercation

16 Kirk Pillow, “Beauty: subjective purposeness” in Immanuel Kant: Key Concepts, ed. Will Dudley and Kristina Engelhard (Durham, United Kingdom: Acumen, 2011), 159. 17 Clement Greenberg, “Toward a Newer Laocoön”, Partisan Review 7 (1940), 250. 18 Pillow, “Beauty: subjective purposeness”, 159. 19 Henceforth, the terms “Kantian beauty” and “specialized beauty” are italicized to denote their associations with the ideological concerns as have been described in this paragraph. 20 David Joselit, “Mapplethorpe’s Beauty”, address in Imperfect Moments: Mapplethorpe and Censorship 20 Years Later, 12 February 2009. 21 Hilton Kramer, “Art, Morality, and Public Money”, The Houston Chronicle, July 3, 1989, http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl/1989_634461/art-morality-and-public-money-taxpayers-should-hav.html (accessed 8 November 2012).


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over beauty. Although Kramer derided works that diverged from his Kantian ideal, his criticisms of Mapplethorpe’s social statements confirmed the specialized beauty through which liberals evaluated art.22

Strands of Kantian beauty permeated liberal writings, as well. In his opening description of “Let the Record Show…”, an installation artwork commissioned to highlight political hypocrisies surrounding the AIDS crisis (see Appendix 1), liberal curator William Olander indirectly expanded on Kramer in asserting that, “not all works of art are as ‘disinterested’ as others, and some of the greatest have been created in the midst, or as a result, of a crisis. Many of us believe that we are in the midst of a crisis [AIDS] today.”23 “Let the Record Show…”’s political and social statements clearly represent specialized beauty, but in directly comparing “Let the Record Show…” to more “disinterested” works, Olander alluded to the growing dissent between the bifurcated beauties and the ideologies they represented. Disinterestedness, a fundamental principle of Kantian beauty, refuted the social engagement of specialized beauty.

Setting the Scene: Codified Conflations of Obscenity and Ugliness

In its ruling on Miller v. California, a 1973 landmark case, the Supreme Court held that the First Amendment did not protect obscenity. The court also delineated three outstanding criteria that, collectively, comprised an “obscenity test” against which artworks would henceforth be measured:

1. Whether the average person applying contemporary community standards would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest;

22 Ibid. 23 William Olander, “The Window on Broadway” in Discussions in Contemporary Culture, ed. Brian Wallis (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1990), 280. 1988.


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2. Whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual content specifically defined by the applicable state law; and

3. Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.24

While these standards denoted parameters for obscenity, they also codified tenets of Kantian beauty in a definitive legal precedent that has since governed the adjudication of artistic liberty.

The breadth and ambiguity of Miller v. California’s three-prong assessment subjected art to the determinative scrutiny of an undefined majority. By sanctioning the average person’s reactions to art, the obscenity test empowered the Kantian assertion that beauty should be universally appreciable.25 Though the court declined to characterize the “average person” in question, it staunchly defended the sanctity of his potential objection(s) to content. No such considerations were afforded the practitioners of specialized beauty, effectively marginalizing the voices of those who found beauty in what the average person might consider obscene and forcing specialized art to comply with a general audience’s presumed scruples. Although the court purported to encourage scholarly appraisal of a work, but the massively subjective and pliable criteria thereto — “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value”26 — instead opened for interpretation and discussion the definition of artistic value in the postmodern era.

By virtue of its Kantian framework, the Supreme Court’s definition of obscenity armed conservatives with considerable legal agency. Since allegations of obscenity often stemmed from ideological disapproval, conservatives turned to ugliness, the antithesis of beauty, as a conduit for

24 Miller v. California, 413 U.S. (1973). 25 Pillow, “Beauty: subjective purposeness”, 164. 26 Miller v. California, 413 U.S.


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art criticism; a widespread conflation of ugliness and obscenity ensued. At the height of the Culture Wars, political philosopher Joel Feinberg confirmed that (1) an artwork’s “extreme ugliness” could render it obscene in the eyes of the law,27 and (2) obscene artworks frequently demonstrated aesthetic defects in addition to their moral shortcomings.28 While Feinberg's writings did not endorse either artistic ideology, his remarks typified an institutionalized synthesis of ethics (obscenity) and aesthetics (ugliness) that, by 1988, preponderated in the American electorate.

The Battle of the Bifurcated Beauties29 - Phase One: Philadelphian Preparations

By 1988, Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), a subsidiary of the University of Pennsylvania, was a veritable specialized beauty stronghold. Under the leadership of Janet Kardon, the ICA’s director

27 “The judgment that a work of art is ugly is an aesthetic one, though of course it is not by itself the expression of an overall appraisal. Extreme ugliness, conceived as a positive aesthetic flaw, can spontaneously offend the eye and the sensibilities too, and when it is sufficiently barefaced and stark, it is obscene […] Obscene conduct is not merely in “bad form,” ungracious and unseemly; it is conduct in the worst possible form, utterly crude, coarse, and gross. The adjectives that regularly consort with the noun “obscenity” fully reveal its extreme and unqualified character: the obscene is pure and unmixed, sheer, crass, bare, unveiled, bald, naked, rank, coarse, raw, shocking, blunt, and stark. It hits one in the face; it is shoved under one's nose; it shocks the eye. The obscene excludes subtlety or indirection, and can never be merely veiled, implied, hinted, or suggested.” Joel Feinberg, “The scope of the obscene: extended applications” in The Idea of the Obscene: The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law: Volume 2: Offense to Others (Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2006). 1988. 28 “Attempted works of art that fail on aesthetic grounds so often manifest nonaesthetic flaws also, that it is easy to confuse the two types of defect. In particular, the work is likely to manifest moral or charientic flaws of its creator, so that they are attributable to the work itself only as “transferred epithets.” “Obscene” when it is applied in this way to an art object attributes extreme vulgarity to the artist rather than an aesthetic flaw to his creation, though in all likelihood, some aesthetic defect will also be present.” Joel Feinberg, “The scope of the obscene: extended applications” in The Idea of the Obscene: The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law: Volume 2: Offense to Others (Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2006). 1988. 29 Henceforth, this term will be italicized to denote the series of ideological disputes and deliberations that erupted around The Perfect Moment, a retrospective exhibition featuring Robert Mapplethorpe.


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from 1979 until 1989,30 the museum pioneered a series of exploratory exhibitions devoted to contemporary artists.31 During her tenure, the ICA featured Keith Haring’s chalk drawings, Robert Colescott’s satirical genre paintings, and Jon Kessler’s kinetic sculptures, all of which reflected the Institute’s “commitment to showing the work of emerging artists […] and exhibitions that reflected themes or issues in which contemporary artists were interested.”32 Mapplethorpe, “an extraordinary artist [capable of] rendering different, traditional subjects with the same refined eye,”33 was a welcome addition to this distinguished roster. In 1987, Kardon and her curatorial staff began to collaborate with Mapplethorpe on a one-man retrospective. In one exhibition segment, curators compiled photographs from Mapplethorpe’s XYZ series, which encompassed homosexual sadomasochistic imagery (the 1978 X portfolio; see Appendix 2), floral still lifes (the 1978 Y portfolio; see Appendix 3), and nude portraits of African-American men (the 1979 Z portfolio; see Appendix 4),34 into a comparative survey.

On 9 December 1988, The Perfect Moment opened to critical acclaim at the ICA. 35 After six weeks in Philadelphia, the traveling exhibition was slated to visit six other contemporary art institutions across the country: The Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), the Corcoran Gallery (Washington, 30 Edward J. Sozanski, “Janet Kardon’s New Venue: For the Former ICA Director, It’s Been a Hectic – and Rewarding – First Year at the American Craft Museum”, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 19 August 1990. http://articles.philly.com/1990-08-19/news/25933837_1_american-craft-museum-mission-statement-ica-director (accessed 26 October 2012). 31 “Past Exhibitions at the ICA”, The Institute of Contemporary Art, http://www.icaphila.org/exhibitions/past/#1989, (accessed 29 October 2012). 32Janet Kardon, telephone interview by the author, Durham, NC, 25 October 2012. 33 Kardon, telephone interview by the author. 34 “Robert Mapplethorpe: XYZ”, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, http://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/robert-mapplethorpe-xyz (accessed 6 December 2012). 35 Janet Kardon, “Exhibition Itinerary” in Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment, 4. “A curator can tell by the sound of the gallery how effective the exhibition is. The sound in the Mapplethorpe was reverent.” Kardon, telephone interview. Richard Lacayo, “Shock Snap”, TIME, 18 June 2009, http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1902809_1902810_1905179,00.html (accessed 9 December 2012).


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D.C.), the Wadsworth Antheneum (Hartford), the University Art Museum (Berkeley), the Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston), and the Contemporary Arts Center (Cincinnati).36 For a brief, wondrous moment, Robert Mapplethorpe and specialized beauty seemed to have secured a niche, however small, in the pantheon of high art. On 9 March 1989, four weeks after his retrospective debuted at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art,37 Mapplethorpe died from AIDS-related complications.38 In the ensuing battle of the bifurcated beauties, liberals would step forward to defend his imagery and define his legacy.

The Battle of the Bifurcated Beauties, Phase Two: Collisions in the Capitol

On 12 June 1989, in a stunning revelation of Kantian beauty’s persistence, the Corcoran Gallery canceled its exhibition of The Perfect Moment.39 A press release from its director, Christina Orr-Cahall, stated:

Citizen and congressional concerns – on both sides of the issue of public funds supporting controversial art – are now pulling the Corcoran into the political domain. […] Our institution has always remained outside of the political arena, maintaining a position of neutrality on all such issues. In a city with such a great Federal presence, this has been essential.40

Ironically, Orr-Cahall’s efforts to preserve institutional neutrality catapulted the Corcoran into the battle of the bifurcated beauties’s electrified

36 Kardon, “Exhibition Itinerary”, 4. 37 Lacayo, “Shock Snap”, http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1902809_1902810_1905179,00.html 38 “Biography”, The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, http://www.mapplethorpe.org/biography/ (accessed 9 December 2012). 39 Barbara Gamarekian, “Corcoran, to Foil Dispute, Drops Mapplethorpe Show”, The New York Times, 14 June 1989, http://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/14/arts/corcoran-to-foil-dispute-drops-mapplethorpe-show.html (accessed 3 November 2012). 40 Ibid.


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foreground. Livingston Biddle, a former chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts, praised the decision, arguing that Mapplethorpe’s work would not enjoy the reception it deserved in such a tumultuous climate.41 In blaming political pressures, both Orr-Cahall’s and Biddle’s justifications were problematic; to bow to conservative political pressures was to bow to the standards of Kantian beauty, which Mapplethorpe never endeavored to uphold. By placating Kantian beauty’s crusaders, the museum and its defenders once again subordinated the specialized beauty of Mapplethorpe’s work.

Swift and profoundly negative responses to the Corcoran’s withdrawal, however, signaled liberals’ mounting defiance of conservative forces; no longer would specialized beauty passively surrender to its Kantian counterpart’s attempts at subordination. On 1 July 1989, nearly 700 demonstrators assembled near the Corcoran Gallery to protest the cancellation.42 In an iconic juxtaposition of the museum’s professed creed and its contradictory actions, the picketers projected several of Mapplethorpe’s photographs on to the façade immediately next to the museum’s inscription “Dedicated to Art” (see Appendix 6). Art historian Richard Meyer has since argued that the demonstration represented a visible backlash from liberal proponents of specialized beauty.43

41 “’In this current state of confusion, exaggeration, and hyperbole, it would be very difficult for an artist like Mapplethorpe, who is very controversial, to have a good viewing of his work in Washington,’ Mr. Biddle said. ‘I think the decision is beneficial to the arts and to the Corcoran.’” Gamarekian, “Corcoran, to Foil Dispute, Drops Mapplethorpe Show”, http://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/14/arts/corcoran-to-foil-dispute-drops-mapplethorpe-show.html. 42 “A crowd of approximately 700 demonstrators turned out at the gallery one block from the White House, waving placards and chanting ‘Shame, shame, shame’ as they listened to speakers [and] watched [as] projections of slides made from photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe were projected onto the façade of the Corcoran.” Barbara Gamarekian, “Crowd at Corcoran Protests Mapplethorpe Cancellation”, The New York Times, 1 July 1989, http://www.nytimes.com/1989/07/01/arts/crowd-at-corcoran-protests-mapplethorpe-cancellation.html (accessed 4 November 2012). 43 “The projection of Mapplethorpe’s pictures onto the exterior of the museum effectively symbolized their banishment from the interior space of legitimate display. The protest indicted the


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Distinguished liberals were quick to vehemently denounce the latest conservative onslaught. In an editorial for the Washington Post, curator and art historian Joshua P. Smith condemned the cancellation, speculating that the Corcoran’s failure to prioritize art in the face of political adversity would ultimately damage its credibility.44 Indeed, more than a dozen contemporary artists retaliated by withdrawing their works from the museum’s planned exhibitions.45 Lowell Nesbitt, an acclaimed American painter who debuted at the Corcoran in 1964, rescinded his pledged $1,000,000 bequest to the institution.46 Collectively, these protests against the Corcoran marked an extraordinary turning point in the battle of the bifurcated beauties, one in which the agents of specialized beauty began to resist and react against Kantian beauty’s advances. In picketing the Corcoran, publicly censuring its decision, and sabotaging its future

Corcoran’s cancellation of The Perfect Moment by reenacting the museum’s official function – the exhibition of art before a public audience.” Meyer, “The Jesse Helms Theory of Art”, 138. 44 “The Corcoran’s capitulation to outside [political] pressures resulting in its cancellation of this show [Mapplethorpe’s The Perfect Moment] is likely to have many significant adverse consequences. […] The Corcoran’s withdrawal from the Mapplethorpe exhibition may well harm the museum in a fundamental way. In a single action, whether self-inflicted or coerced, the Corcoran may lose its credibility. Any serious museum will hesitate before working with it in the future. Artists and lenders may refuse works for Corcoran exhibitions in a show of displeasure with the gallery’s action. The Corcoran may experience difficult in attracting and keeping a talented [curatorial] staff. Viewers may not be able to trust exhibitions and scholars may not be able to rely on publications of the Corcoran for fear they have been censored or influenced by outside pressures. In sum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art may no longer be considered a significant venue for contemporary art. Washington’s growing reputation as a major center for the exhibition of contemporary art will also be damaged. The Corcoran, ironically, has striven to be a leader in this area by establishing a position of contemporary art and an ongoing series of contemporary exhibitions. Other Washington museums have recently become quite active and proficient in exhibiting contemporary art, but this dramatic cancellation will open Washington to charges that it is at best lacking in sophistication and at worst timid or even philistine.” Joshua P. Smith, “Why the Corcoran Made a Big Mistake”, The Washington Post, 18 June 1989. 45 Paul Richard, “Artists Cancel Exhibitions at Corcoran; Mapplethorpe Case Prompts Boycott”, The Washington Post, 30 August 1989. 46 Judd Tully, “Corcoran Cut from Painter’s Will; Lowell Nesbitt’s Mapplethorpe Protest”, The Washington Post, 6 September 1989, http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/washingtonpost/access/73897099.html?dids=73897099:73897099&FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&date=Sep+6%2C+1989&author=Judd+Tully&pub=The+Washington+Post+(pre-1997+Fulltext)&edition=&startpage=b.01&desc=Corcoran+Cut+From+Painter%27s+Will%3BLowell+Nesbitt%27s+Mapplethorpe+Protest (accessed 6 December 2012).


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exhibitions, liberals lambasted the conservatism that had so egregiously and erroneously underestimated their ideological resolve.

Several days after the Corcoran’s announcement, several artists and art patrons intervened to provide an alternative venue for The Perfect Moment in Washington, D.C. The budding Washington Project for the Arts (WPA) gallery opened the exhibition in July 1989,47 “stepping squarely into an impassioned national debate about artistic freedom, public reception, censorship,”48 and, consequently, into the ongoing crossfire between conservatives and liberals. Committed to making Mapplethorpe’s work accessible, the WPA waived admission fees. Extensive publicity from the Corcoran affair had propelled the artist’s work into the national limelight, and over 49,000 individuals visited the exhibition during its three-week engagement.49 Conservatives found themselves entangled in a self-induced paradox: their successful censorship of Mapplethorpe’s work inadvertently extended specialized beauty to an audience that otherwise might not have encountered it. While Kantian beauty and the conservative ideology had at first prevailed, the D.C. campaign ultimately proved a decisive victory for specialized beauty and the liberal ideology.

The Battle of the Bifurcated Beauties, Phase Three: Beauty on Trial

Following its successful stint at the WPA, The Perfect Moment resumed its planned touring itinerary, visiting Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum in late 1989 and the University of California at Berkeley’s Art

47 Kardon, “Exhibition Itinerary”, 4. 48 “Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment”, The Washington Project for the Arts, http://wpadc.org/catalyst/?p=2845 (accessed 6 December 2012). 49 “Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment”, The Washington Project for the Arts, http://wpadc.org/catalyst/?p=2845


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Museum in early 1990.50 Glowing critical reviews of the two mountings conveyed America’s newfound fascination with Mapplethorpe.51 In her assessment of the Hartford reception, The Boston Globe’s Christine Temin tellingly reported that the “word most frequently heard in the galleries [in which The Perfect Moment was installed] was ‘beautiful.’” Her observation evidenced the public’s increasing participation in the ongoing meditation on beauty previously restricted meditation on the beautiful that had theretofore been almost exclusively limited to liberals and conservatives. It also suggested that, in direct defiance of Kantian beauty’s plea for universality, at least some portion of the public recognized and appreciated the specialized beauty inherent to Mapplethorpe’s images. Artistic conservatives would not concede so graciously; when The Perfect Moment arrived at the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) in Cincinnati, a city ensconced in traditional values and religious underpinnings,52 they seized the opportunity for an ideological rematch. In

50 Kardon, “Exhibition Itinerary”, 4. 51 “Over the first weekend [of The Perfect Moment’s tenure at the Wadsworth Atheneum], more than 2,000 visitors a day – four times the norm – clogged the museum […] There was no tittering, no sign of embarrassment, no outrage. Some mothers brought their preschoolers. People stayed long and looked hard, many using their lunch hours to sit through a 55-minute BBC-TV documentary on Mapplethorpe.” Christine Temin, “Mapplethorpe’s Art Finds Calm in Hartford”, The Boston Globe, 29 October 1989. “The California Arts Council even funded the installation of Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment at the Berkeley Art Museum, and there was ‘NOTHING. It was almost disappointing,’ Juan Carillo [chief of grant programs for the California Arts Council] continues jokingly. ‘The critics loved it, people came from miles to see it, and no controversy developed!’” Christino Cho, Kim Commerato, and Marjorie Heins, “Experience with Free Expression Policies, and Procedures for Handling Controversy” in Free Expression in Arts Funding: A Public Policy Report, ed. Stephanie Elizondo Griest (New York, NY: Free Expression Policy Project, 2003), http://www.fepproject.org/policyreports/artsfunding.pdf (accessed 8 December 2012). 52 “At a Dirty Pictures press conference in January, Dennis Barrie said Cincinnati was, in retrospect, a likely place for just such a skirmish. ‘It could have happened somewhere else ... (but) in Cincinnati, you really did have a kind of mid-American values, sort of a bit of the Bible Belt, a bit of Middle America kind of crossing together. And I think it was the logical battleground for an issue like this,' says Mr. Barrie.” Jackie Demaline, “Mapplethorpe battle changed the art world”, The Cincinnati Enquirer, 21 May 2000, http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2000/05/21/loc_mapplethorpe_battle.html (accessed 6 December 2012).


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light of their earlier defeat, conservatives concocted a new offensive tactic: couching their dissents in terms of obscenity, a legal paradigm predisposed to Kantian beauty. On 7 April 1990, the CAC and its acting director, Dennis Barrie, were indicted for pandering obscenity;53 20 police officers promptly stormed the museum and sealed the gallery housing The Perfect Moment. It was decided that Barrie would stand trial on behalf of the CAC. On 1 October, conservatives and liberals filed into the courtroom to witness the bifurcated beauties’ ferocious showdown.

Summarizing the litigation for The New York Times, Isabel Wilkerson deemed it a cataclysmic moment in which, “the clash between the art world and Cincinnati law-enforcement officials suddenly came into sharp focus.”54 Cincinnati law-enforcement officials, the arbiters of conservatism, were pitted against with liberal art critics and curators. With city prosecutor Frank Prouty at the reigns, conservatives leveraged the Kantian obscenity criteria established in Miller v. California to defame Mapplethorpe as a common pornographer who disguised salacious imagery as art. Citing specialized beauty, the liberal defense countered that the “brilliant artist’s work”55 masterfully reconciled nontraditional subject matter with classical technicality.56 The liberals’ formal evaluations implied that their conservative opponents were as unqualified to gauge artistic merits as they were ignorant of his specialized beauty.

Janet Kardon traveled to Cincinnati to testify to Mapplethorpe’s artistic validity. Decades later, she recalled the contentious proceedings: 53 Robert W. Duffy, “First Freedoms; Dennis Barrie Talks About the Mapplethorpe Case”, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 4 April 1993, http://www.lexisnexis.com.proxy.lib.duke.edu/hottopics/lnacademic/?verb=sr&csi=11810&sr=HLEAD(FIRST+FREEDOMS+DENNIS+BARRIE+TALKS+ABOUT+THE+MAPPLETHORPE+CASE)+and+date+is+April+4%2C+1993 (accessed 7 December 2012). 54 Isabel Wilkerson, “Clashes at Obscenity Trial on What an Eye Really Sees”, The New York Times, 3 October 1990, http://www.nytimes.com/1990/10/03/us/clashes-at-obscenity-trial-on-what-an-eye-really-sees.html, (accessed 5 November 2012). 55 Wilkerson, “Clashes at Obscenity Trial on What an Eye Really Sees”. 56 Ibid.


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I was in a courtroom with a jury and a judge. […] There would be held up certain images that Robert Mapplethorpe had made, and I would be asked, in a sense, why I had included it [in the exhibition]. I would describe the works compositionally and artistically, and then talk about why I felt they were important images. […] You expect a judge to be above everything, to be fair […], but this judge in particular was almost rude; he kept interrupting me and wouldn’t let me finish my sentences. Being on the stand, you would tend to speak very slowly, very carefully, because you know that each word is important, but then I determined that I’d better stop being so careful and get my thoughts out before he [the judge] would interrupt.57

Justice, it seems, had in the heat of battle forsaken its objective blindfold. In a deliberate and distorted imposition of Kantian ideals on Mapplethorpe’s specialized vision, Prouty compelled Kardon to defend the formal values of a particularly controversial Mapplethorpe photograph.58 The former ICA director held her ground, pivoting from the image’s content to its “very symmetrical, very ordered, classical composition […] which Mr. Mapplethorpe described as ‘beautiful.’”59 Robert Sobieszek, senior curator of Rochester’s International Museum of Photography, offered testimony lauding Mapplethorpe’s encapsulation of “a major concern of a creative artist, a major part of his life, a major part of his psyche [and of] his mental makeup.”60 Sobieszek, like Kardon, stressed that the beauty of the controversial works derived en masse from their creator’s specialized intent. Barrie’s acquittal on 8 October 1990 signified the conclusion of the two-year battle of the bifurcated beauties.61 In exonerating the CAC, the jury undercut Kantian beauty’s legal efficacy and severed its monopoly on American values; these symbolic gestures communicated in sensational 57 Kardon, telephone interview. 58 Wilkerson, “Clashes at Obscentiy Trial on What an Eye Really Sees”. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid. 61 Isabel Wilkerson, “Cincinnati Jury Acquits Museum in Mapplethorpe Obscenity Case”, The New York Times, 8 October 1990, http://www.nytimes.com/1990/10/06/us/cincinnati-jury-acquits-museum-in-mapplethorpe-obscenity-case.html (accessed 4 December 2012).


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detail that censorship of the arts would no longer go unchallenged. To that end, liberals garnered an astonishing victory: the Bill of Rights had negated the Kantian criteria of obscenity, thereby reaffirming artists’ expressive freedoms and precipitating “continuance of creativity in the United States.”62

The Fallout and the Future

In forcing the notoriously renegade concept of beauty into a clash in which it played both advocate and adversary, conservatives and liberals unknowingly sabotaged their own initiatives; only after the smoke had cleared could the warring ideological factions appreciate the magnitude of this internal destruction. Although Dennis Barrie’s acquittal proved that the two beauties had declared armistice by late 1990, a critical question lingered: how calamitous a penalty had the bifurcated beauties exacted on each party?

In his then-contemporaneous remarks on the Corcoran affair, Joshua Smith warned that, “the worst effect of the Corcoran’s actions would be self-censorship by museums for fear of controversy;”63 his words proved eerily prophetic. Janet Kardon, too, felt that the negative backlash to the The Perfect Moment disseminated a paralyzing self-censorship reflex across American art museums.64 Although specialized beauty had successfully withstood Kantian beauty’s assaults in Washington, D.C. and Cincinnati, its involvement in such controversial and highly publicized affairs left curators reluctant to exhibit artworks that might provoke similar altercations, often

62 Ibid. 63 Smith, “Why the Corcoran Made a Big Mistake” 64 “The very worst effect of his show [The Perfect Moment] and all that happened around it would be what I called ‘self-censorship.’ Would what happened to this show affect a curator in making a decision about what kind of exhibition they might present?” Kardon, telephone interview with the author.


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the very works in which specialized beauty. Thus e peculiar enigma, one in which the specialized beauty’s triumph made it a pariah among liberals, produced a period in which, “there was a kind of chill going on [among museum curators], a carefulness that had not been there before.”65 Dave Hickey that this self-censorship trend gave rise to “therapeutic institutions” that pathologically ignored prudent thematic queries, such as “What makes art beautiful?”66 These institutions’ deference to a general public (à la Miller v. California) directly undermined the very freedoms for which liberals had vigorously campaigned during the battle of the bifurcated beauties. In spite of their resistance, the conservative, Kantian paradigm had infiltrated specialized beauty’s former havens, sparking an existential paradox in which artists, “who rely on museum exhibitions to develop their careers and to perpetuate their work and reputations, [felt that they had to] conform to ‘acceptable’ norms as dictated by outside interest groups in order to have museum shows.”67 In submitting to the categorically Kantian “acceptable norms,” practicing artists capitulated their abilities to explore the specialized. The battle of the bifurcated beauties had validated the artist’s creative rights at the expense of his access to audiences.

Mapplethorpe, the figurative captive whom liberals had fought to liberate from conservatives’ disparagement, was rendered indivisible from The Perfect Moment’s controversies. Michael Brenson, then a senior art critic at The New York Times, noted in a 2009 reflective address that the battle of the bifurcated beauties had forever fused Mapplethorpe’s works with their social and political contexts.68 Over the subsequent decades, the

65 Ibid. 66 Dave Hickey, “After the Great Tsunami: On Beauty and the Therapeutic Institutions” in The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty (Chicago, IL: Unviersity of Chicago Press, 2009), 54. 1990. 67 Smith, “Why the Corcoran Made a Big Mistake”. 68 “By that time, the history was already in it. It was no more possible for me to see the work apart from its social and political context than it is for me to see Manet’s Olympia apart from its social


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photographer would be recognized as both a bold pioneer of specialized beauty and a helpless victim of Kantian beauty.

In 2010, the battle of the bifurcated beauties when the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery ordered the removal of David Wojnarowicz’s video artwork “A Fire in My Belly” from its Hide/Seek:

Difference and Desire in American Portraiture exhibition. Both artists had rendered in their works “a forthright, utterly self-conscious resistance to dominant ideologies,”69 one that directly challenged the Kantian beauty that dominated the national agenda prior to the battle of the bifurcated beauties. The resulting comparisons made between this incident and those involving Mapplethorpe, a contemporary of Wojnarowicz, revealed a “gradual integration of homosexuality into the mainstream”70 over the course of the 20-year period between them. As in the battle of the bifurcated beauties, the attempts at artistic censorship backfired: “A Fire in My Belly” was soon posted on the Internet, making it available to a larger and more global audience than could possibly have encountered it at the National Portrait Gallery.

Beauty and the Beast(s)

For all its sensationalized coverage, the battle of the bifurcated beauties is but one installment in a volumetric history of beauty’s subversive submissiveness. As conservatives and liberals made abundantly blear in their dispute over Robert Mapplethorpe’s oeuvre, beauty can be hijacked, molded, maneuvered, amputated, and appended to embody different standards of what art should represent, but never without leveraging and critical history.” Michael Brenson, “1989: Battleground Year” address in Imperfect Moments: Mapplethorpe and Censorship 20 Years Later, 13 February 2009. 69 Kat Long, “Censorship at the Smithsonian”, The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide 18.2 (2011), http://www.glreview.com/article.php?articleid=295 (accessed 20 September 2012). 70 Ibid.


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damages as it seeks to reunite itself. Although the warring artistic ideologies adapted beauty into specialized and Kantian constructs to further their own needs and desires, their weaponizing effected significant and inadvertent implications both within and beyond the terrain on which they waged their campaigns.

Appendix 1

ACT-UP (Gran Fury) & William Olander, Installation view: Let the Record Show…” in the window of the New Museum, New York. 1987.

Appendix 2

Robert Mapplethorpe, Saint Sebastian, 1974. Polaroid. This is an example of Mapplethorpe’s renderings of homosexual sadomasochism. It was included in the artist’s 1978 X portfolio and in The Perfect Moment exhibition.

Appendix 3

Robert Mapplethorpe, Gardenia, 1978. Polaroid. This is an example of Mapplethorpe’s floral still lifes. It was included in the artist’s 1979 Y portfolio.

Appendix 4

Robert Mapplethorpe, Ajitto, 1981. Gelatin silver print. This is an example of the nude portraits of African-American men that populated Mapplethorpe’s Z portfolio. It was featured in The Perfect Moment exhibition.

Appendix 5

Interviewer: Justin M. Sandulli, a first year undergraduate at Duke University Interviewee: Janet S. Kardon, the former director of the Institute of Contemporary Art and the curator of Robert Mapplethorpe’s retrospective, The

Perfect Moment Interview setting: The interview was conducted via telephone at 10:30am on Thursday, October 25th.

Beginning of transcript Justin Sandulli: Hello? Janet Kardon: Justin? JS: Yes! JK: Good morning, it’s Janet Kardon. JS: Good morning, how are you doing? JK: Fine, thank you. JS: Good, good. Like I said, we have everything in place so that I can provide a transcript for you. I’ll have that to you next week by fax or by mail. Is that all right? JK: Oh, that’s fine. JS: Great. Let’s start off with some contextual questions. When did you join the ICA as the director? JK: I was the director of the ICA during the 80s. 1979 until 1989 or 1990. JS: And after you left? JK: I became the director of the American Craft Museum in New York, which is now the Museum of Craft and Design. JS: Wonderful. And at what point did you begin to assemble the Mapplethorpe retrospective [The Perfect Moment]? How did it come to exist? Did he approach you? Did you approach him? Was it a mutual attraction?

JK: First of all, the ICA was committed to showing the work of emerging artists and often was the first institution to do so. It also did exhibitions that reflected themes or issues that contemporary artists were interested in. Mapplethorpe, while he had done some small shows, had never staged a major exhibition; nor was there a catalogue of his work. He appeared to me to be an extraordinary artist, and he was certainly qualified as far as we were concerned. JS: In your essay on Mapplethorpe’s work, which was included in the exhibition catalogue, you discussed the remarkable breadth of his work. He wasn’t just limited to photography; he worked in several media. You also discussed that there existed a certain continuity, though. There is a always a sense of Mapplethorpe in all of his work. JK: Absolutely. JS: And, although it matured over time, he started and ended with the same way of looking at and producing images. Although his subjects changed, the way he photographed them was consistent. JK: Quite similar, quite consistent. Consistent is a good word. He focused on pretty different, traditional subjects – portraits, still lifes, and nudes – but they were all rendered with the same refined eye. JS: Now, The Perfect Moment: I was under the impression that it comprised a number of different elements, such as the X and Y collections. Were they part of this exhibition, or am I confusing them with something else? JK: This exhibition surveyed the body of Mapplethorpe’s work. It included still lifes, portraits, and nudes. The XYZ series was almost aside from that, or something parallel to it, I would say. It had never been shown before. JS: But you did draw from the XYZ series? JK: It was a separate element, and we made our selections within the three categories. Robert was particularly interested in exhibiting the XYZ series because it had never been exhibited. We talked very much about how the series was, well, a lot of photographers are interested in not just the single image but in

composing a book because of the sequence and the relationship of one image to another. In the XYZ series, there were three lines, so to speak, of photographs that were in a conversation with one another. Each photograph had a relationship to the one to its left and to its right, and those images were in turn related to each other. There was a two-way dialogue among the photographs. JS: That larger, ongoing conversation between the works ties back to that continuous Mapplethorpe theme that we discussed and also inspires conversation amongst viewers. You interviewed Mapplethorpe in the summer of 1987. When was the exhibition mounted at the ICA? JK: Hold on one second, I have the catalogue in front of me. It was at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania from December 9, 1988 until January 29, 1989. JS: Perfect. And then, subsequently, the exhibition went on tour. In June of 1989, The Perfect Moment was supposed to be mounted at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, and the director, Christina Orr-Cahall, cancelled it just a few days before it was scheduled to open. There followed a widely publicized demonstration outside the Corcoran in which protesters projected several of Mapplethorpe’s images onto the façade, and then a number of discussions about museum censorship sprang up. What do you remember of that particular incident? Was any explanation offered you as the curator who had created the exhibition? What was your take on the cancellation? JK: My take on it from direct conversation with the director [Christina Orr-Cahall] was that her board [of trustees] did not want her to show the exhibition. They were afraid that their being located in Washington would bring them into confrontation with Senator [Jesse] Helms, who had already made his position felt. Now, you also should know that there was an alternative space [the Washington Project for the Arts] in Washington that took the show. JS: Yes, and it attracted 50,000 visitors, which was incredible for a small gallery.

JK: Exactly. The other thing I wanted to be sure to tell you today is that, when I retired, I gave my archives to the Archives of American Art in Washington. JS: Great! JK: If you wanted to do some research there, the Mapplethorpe material, any correspondence, the tapes of the interviews, they’re all at the Archives of American Art in Washington. JS: Thank you so much for telling me that. I would not have known. You mentioned in your analysis of the Corcoran incident that there was a political motivation, and you referenced Senator Helms. There was an ongoing discussion about so-called “obscene” works, such as Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, which is brought to the Senate Floor. The National Endowment for the Arts is also called into question. So, you think that the Corcoran was reacting to political pressures? To avoid becoming part of that debate? JK: They were afraid of the controversy. JS: Do you feel like the Corcoran’s actions caused resonating implications within the museum world? Did it pave the way to more museum censorship, or did it inspire solidarity amongst directors and curators? JK: I think it [the cancellation] was pretty negatively accepted within the museum community. At the time, I was a member of the Association of Art Museum Directors. We didn’t have direct discussions about the incident, but it was certainly something we were talking about in the hallways. A great deal of support was presented to me. JS: That’s very good to hear. In a sense, even though the cancellation itself was negatively received, it didn’t make other museum administrators feel compelled to comply with museum censorship. JK: Yes, I would say there was extreme support. I won’t say “until this day”, because it’s faded away, but, for a long time, when I was introduced to people, young students in particular, they would say “thank you” to me. That was very nice.

JS: AS they should, I think. What you did was so courageous. Not only did you feature Mapplethorpe at the risk of possible backlash, but you also held your ground when that backlash occurred. Dr. Joselit discussed that [in his keynote address at the Imperfect Moments symposium] as well, that you were a strong ally in a time when it wasn’t easy to do that. So, I think they were absolutely right to thank you, and I thank you for so willingly discussing it with me twenty years later. Dr. Joselit also talked about how, in 1990, Dennis Barrie was indicted for obscenity for mounting The Perfect Moment [at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati]. You were asked to testify in that case. Would you please describe that experience contextually and then talk about your impressions of what happened? JK: Well, I went to testify on Dennis Barrie’s behalf. I was in a courtroom with a jury and a judge. The judge forced… well, there would be held up certain images that Robert Mapplethorpe had made, and I would be asked, in a sense, why I had included it [in the exhibition]. I would describe the works compositionally and artistically, and then talk about why I felt they were important images. The judge was not very… well, you expect a judge to be sort of above everything, to be fair— JS: Impartial. JK: Yes. To think very seriously about how he will respond. But this judge in particular was almost rude; he kept interrupting me and wouldn’t let me finish my sentences. Being on the stand, you would tend to speak very slowly, very carefully, because you know that each word is important, but then I determined that I’d better stop being so careful and I’m going to speak more rapidly so I could get my thoughts out before he would interrupt. So, it was a heady moment. JS: Ultimately, though, he [Dennis Barrie] was acquitted, so your testimony was not given in vain. I’m so sorry that that was such an unpleasant experience. I have enough trouble doing formal analysis at my own pace, so I can’t even imagine doing it under time constraints and in front of so many people. [Laughs] JK: [Laughs]

JS: How did that incident relate to what happened in [Washington,] DC? Was it similar? Different? Obviously, it was more extreme in that you had to give testimony. But why Cincinnati? Would something similar have happened in DC if the Corcoran hadn’t cancelled the show? JK: I don’t think so, because nothing happened when the exhibition was presented [at the Washington Project for the Arts]. No, I don’t think anything would have happened, but who knows? JS: What was it about 1990 that caused that disparity, then? Was there anything significantly different about the political landscape that might have provoked that incident? Had Mapplethorpe become entrenched in a larger discussion by that point? What was it that made it [the reception of Mapplethorpe’s work] different in 1990 in Cincinnati? JK: I think it was the nature of Cincinnati’s government. Somebody in the government found out about this [the exhibition], was upset by it, and reacted. If I remember correctly, they [the police] went up to the doors of the museum [the Contemporary Arts Center] and closed them. JS: Wow. JK: And I remember, this is nothing historically accurate or anything, but I remember that when I left, the streets of Cincinnati appeared so pure; there wasn’t a piece of paper out of place. Everything was clean and neat, and it was a very quiet city. And then getting back to Manhattan, where all the noise and the dirt were so welcome. It was great. JS: Manhattan is a special place. I’m certainly attached to it; I was born there, was raised just outside there, so it has always been very close to my heart. There are plenty of other remarkable cities in the world, but something about Manhattan is so captivating. The energy there is in its own league. There’s nothing quite like it. JK: Yes.

JS: Dovetailing with Dennis Barrie’s trial is Dr. Joselit’s point about your using “beauty defense” in your analyses of Mapplethorpe’s works [during the trial]. He argued that, in doing that, you tied the images to a larger, universal sense of beauty – specifically, what he calls “Kantian beauty”. What was your take on that argument? JK: Well, as an art historian, I was trained to look at things in terms of their beauty, so that is inherently the “beauty defense”. I was taught to look at composition, color, sources for the images, and sources for the changes in style. I wasn’t trained as a politician; it’s not that I’m not interested in politics, but that’s not where I’m coming from. I’m trained as a traditional art historian, and that’s the way I see things, and that’s the way I saw Mapplethorpe’s work. JS: Would you please define for me, in your own terms, what it is to be “traditional” or “beautiful”? When you think of the word “beauty”, what is it that you’re specifically looking for? I know you mentioned the hand gestures [in several of Mapplethorpe’s images], which I also consider beautiful and graceful. From your approach to art, what is the word “beauty” tied to? JK: It’s entirely visual. If politics intervene, it’s almost as a footnote, in my opinion. JS: It’s an aside. JK: Exactly, it’s an aside. Now, has art become more political through the years? It has, and if I were a curator today, because artists are more interested in looking at politics, I might follow their direction. It’s always the direction of the artists that establishes what is current and what is important. They’re always the guiding forces. JS: Within the context of early 1989, which is immediately subsequent to the Reagan Revolution and right in the middle of the AIDS crisis, what do you think was the most pressing political statement that Mapplethorpe was making at the time?

JK: I’m not interested in discussing that because it didn’t affect me and had no impact on the way I curated the show. JS: I didn’t get that sense from your essay [in the catalogue for The Perfect Moment], either. You didn’t feel that he was trying to make a political statement. JK: Mapplethorpe? JS: Or, if he had been making a political statement, it wasn’t that quality of his work that attracted you to it? JK: Not at all. Not even today. It doesn’t affect me. JS: From what I can tell from your interview with him and other resources I’ve consulted, he [Mapplethorpe] seems like a very gentlemanly and soft-spoken individual. I find it especially interesting to juxtapose that with the depictions of him that certain individuals, such as Senator Helms, perpetuated. They portrayed him as the deviant “bad boy” of art, if you will. When you read his statements, though, you realize that he was thinking very deeply and in a beautiful way. I wanted to talk about this within the context of Dr. Joselit’s belief that his [Mapplethorpe’s] photographs were beautiful in a sense that might not be appealing to everybody – that although they aren’t as universally beautiful as a Delacroix or a Bouguereau, they represent a “specialized beauty” that targets a certain audience. Do you agree with the assertion that Mapplethorpe’s work represents a shift in the representation of beauty, or do you find that it’s in keeping with your perception of beauty as an art historian? JK: I think he [Mapplethorpe] was courageous in his subject matter, but the way he rendered that subject matter was interesting to me because, traditionally, it fell into line. JS: So, although his subjects were nontraditional, the way he depicted them was— JK: Very traditional.

JS: What do you make of Dr. Joselit’s call for a new interpretation of what makes something beautiful? Is it possible that we need only adjust to new subjects instead of changing the traditional paradigm of beauty? JK: I wouldn’t make a generalization. I would say, “All right, here’s this artist, and this is the work that he’s doing. Why do we call it art?” I don’t think that in saying, “why do we call it art?”, we would be getting involved in politics. Now, I am speaking as a curator who has been retired for about ten years. If you’re a contemporary curator, ten years is like a century if you’re not keeping up with what’s going on. If you miss just three months of what’s going on down in Chelsea, you’ve missed a lot when you’re doing contemporary work. So, I can’t speak for today. I don’t consider myself a valid voice. JS: Do you feel that what Mapplethorpe effected in his images, what he was able to bring forward, created a new aesthetic? Not necessarily in terms of the way he depicted his subjects, but in terms of what his subjects were. In your post-ICA curatorial career and in your continued experience as someone who appreciates contemporary art, have you found that Mapplethorpe had a lasting impact? JK: He opened the doors to new subject matter and expanded what subject matter could be in contemporary work. Was he of great influence? That’s a tougher question. Have other artists imitated his style? Yes, they certainly have, but I don’t know how important that is in the larger realm of things. JS: My mind is running in several different directions right now. Please excuse me while I synthesize my thoughts into a coherent question. So, although his work is replicated today, that doesn’t necessarily imply that he had an amazing impact. It’s so conceptual. JK: I think he was a very important artist of his time. The very worst effect of his show and all that occurred around it would be what I called at the time “self-censorship”. Would what happened to this show affect a curator in making a decision about what kind of exhibition they might present? JS: Interesting.

JK: And self-censorship— JS: On the artist’s behalf, on the curator’s behalf, or both? JK: Self-censorship on the curator’s behalf or on the institution’s behalf. Or on the artist’s behalf; and the artist’s behalf, as well. That hadn’t occurred to me, but of course that’s true. That would be the downside of all that happened. JS: That they feel pressured to adhere to— JK: To be careful. JS: To try to prevent this from happening to them. JK: Right. JS: In another course I’m taking, Contemporary & Modern African-American Art, Kerry James Marshall visited us and mentioned the lack of a clear market for his work. One of the questions I asked him was whether or not he felt that the need to appeal to a market constrained his art. Not necessarily a market in the typical sense of the word, but a larger market that would allow his work to be exhibited. JK: Right. They want to be accepted, to gain entry into the precious world of museums. That’s the danger of it all. JS: Did you see any examples of that self-censorship after the controversies around The Perfect Moment? What brought you to that conclusion? JK: I wish I could remember specifics, but I can’t. It just appeared that there was a kind of chill going on, a carefulness that hadn’t been there before. That concerned me a lot. Does it still exist? It’s hard for me to say. JS: Morley Safer recently explored the world of art fairs in a 60 Minutes special. It seems that museums and galleries are now secondary to those institutions. There is now an expectation that contemporary collectors will participate in these fairs. As far as the market’s concerned, contemporary art seems to have changed gears. It has become a collectible entity, and you seem to find as many people interested in the art itself as people who are interested in adding to a larger portfolio.

JK: I remember, years and years ago, when I was active, wanting so much to increase our audience for contemporary art, hoping that we could reach more people and open their eyes to what we thought was so interesting, fascinating, and compelling. I don’t know that I could have predicted the era of the art fairs, but they have certainly increased our audience. Now, we’ve increased the audience, but is that a good thing? JS: That’s the central question. JK: Yes, it’s become so commercial. JS: Sometimes, the individuals who are genuinely interested in the art and the artists are not necessarily the ones who are purchasing the art. There seems to be a good deal of conspicuous consumption masquerading as high art. JK: Exactly. JS: The contemporary art market is so complex. 50 years from now, I think people will be writing very long dissertations on how it changed during our time. JK: We’ll see what happens! JS: Where do people like Robert Mapplethorpe stand in such a bifurcated market? Does it [the market] diminish the meaning of his work, or does it enhance it by making it available to a larger audience? JK: It probably does both. I do see Mapplethorpes at the fairs, and I go to a fair number of them. It [the art fair construct] is bringing more people in and it’s making art more valuable so that it becomes a commercial enterprise. So, both things are happening. It’s not all bad and it’s not all good. JS: How does today’s contemporary art market compare with that of the 1980s? JK: It was a very limited market. I was in Philadelphia, and I could count the number of [contemporary art] collectors on one hand. The number of serious collectors, that is. I don’t think that’s so today. I’m sure the number of collectors in New York has multiplied. It’s just enormous. JS: Did you feel that the ICA’s connection to an educational institution [the University of Pennsylvania], which rests on the exploration of uncharted

territory, if you will, allowed it to more thoroughly explore art that other galleries and museums might not have touched? JK: I’ll tell you a story: we went to see a Mapplethorpe show in… I don’t remember where it was, but it might have been in Washington. My husband, who knew a lot about art, was with me. He looked at the Mapplethorpe photographs and said, “Janet, do you know what you’re doing?”—this was before my show opened at the ICA—and I said, “Oh, Bobby, it’s perfectly all right. I showed the pictures to the provost and he thinks that he [Mapplethorpe] is a wonderful photographer.” Well, that was the limit of my expectation. Laughs. If the provost approved, I was good to go. JS: So, you did have to discuss it [the exhibition] with the provost? JK: Well, I would have done that anyway. The provost was my boss, so to speak, so I had to keep him informed about what exhibitions we were doing. I would discuss all of our programs with him, not just the Mapplethorpe. He never said “no” to anything, but he just liked to be informed. I’m afraid that the beeping I hear is my phone running out of power, so we might be cut off. JS: Thank you for telling me. JK: Do you hear it? JS: I don’t, but it could just be audible on your side. JK: Ok. So, was there anything else that you wanted to talk about? JS: Well, you [the ICA] mounted The Perfect Moment, and it went off without a hitch, even though it caused controversies in Washington, DC and in Cincinnati. Do you think that the ICA’s association with the University of Pennsylvania might have played a part in that? JK: Not at all. It had nothing to do with it. A curator can tell by the sound of the gallery how effective the exhibition is. The sound in the Mapplethorpe show was reverent. JS: “Reverent”! That’s a terrific adjective! So, there were no incidents during the ICA’s showing of Mapplethorpe’s work?

JK: No. JS: It’s surprising to me, then, that it caused controversy elsewhere. JK: Only in Cincinnati. Elsewhere, there was nothing. JS: Where else did it travel? JK: The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Corcoran Gallery, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, the University Art Museum in Berkeley, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Cincinnati [the Contemporary Arts Center] is not even listed in the catalogue because they were added at the last minute. JS: Well, thank you so, so much for this [interview]. I have a ton of notes and thousands of other questions, but I have an appointment at 11:30. This has been so wonderful, though. Like I said, I’ll provide you a copy of the transcript as soon as possible. This is our parents’ weekend, so I’m juggling all of my relatives until Sunday, but I’ll try my best to have it finished and in your hands by early next week. Is that all right? JK: Oh, that’s all right, but I would like to see the final paper. JS: Oh, certainly! I submit it to my professor on December 11th, and then I will correct it, polish it, make it as beautiful as possible, and then send it to you. Hopefully, it will meet everyone’s expectations. Laughs JK: Well, I wish you all good luck. I think you’ll do a fabulous job. JS: The same to you! I’m happy to know that you’re still keeping busy in the art world. JK: Yes, yes. I’m heading down to Chelsea today, as a matter of fact. JS: Awesome! Well, please enjoy it. Thank you so much for your time. I will be in touch with the transcript and the final paper. JK: Terrific! Good luck, now. JS: Take care! JK: Bye.

End of transcript

Appendix 6

On 1 July 1989, over 700 demonstrators assembled outside Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery to protest its recent cancellation of Robert Mapplethorpe’s retrospective, The Perfect Moment. Several of Mapplethorpe’s images were projected onto the façade in a deliberate act of defiance and retaliation against the Corcoran’s decision.

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in the eye of the beholder: bifurcated beauties in the age of robert mapplethorpe

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