For a Practical Aesthetics

The neoconservative agenda to dismantle the National Endowment for the Arts is, unsurprisingly, part of a larger strategy to reverse the gains made in the past two decades by gays and lesbians, racial and ethnic minorities, women, and other subordinated and subaltern groups. Why attack the aesthetic at this point in time? With civil rights on the retreat, the relatively protected sphere of the aesthetic has become the terrain of political contestation, of addressing crucial ethical concerns in ways that the mass media are disinclined to adopt. It is easier to withdraw advertising from a T.V. station to pressure it to change its programming than it is to convince a panel of experts on what criteria to judge what is or is not art. In any event, the understanding of art itself has been undergoing great changes. With the politicization and commodification of art, few people today can seriously identify the aesthetic with the realm of freedom. The new contestatory movements have provoked a counter-offensive by various sectors of the Right: fundamentalists (anti-obscenity and antiabortion), nationalists (anti-flagburning and English Only advocates) and political conservatives (anti-affirmative action and anti-civil rights). Having learned from the new social movements that the personal and the cultural are political, the Right has openly declared itself the ideological foe not only of subaltern groups seeking enfranchisement but also of liberal, humanistic expressions of universality, such as the that guarantee freedom of practice to their enemies.' In what follows, I focus on the reasons why these political, moral and economic issues have converged on the question of the aesthetic, a dimension of social practice which the social sciences have largely ignored. I also pay particular attention to how current conservative attempts to achieve hegemony do so at the expense of gays and lesbians, who in turn have repoliticized their cultural practices. The conservative backlash to the politicization of sexuality and other intimate matters,' reached the pinnacle of high-handedness last summer when Jesse Helms proposed a ban on public funding for 'obscene and indecent' art and for any work that 'denigrates, debases or reviles a person, group or class of citizens on the basis of race, creed, sex, handicap, age or national origin.'3 The motive was, as everyone no doubt remembers, the offense that Mr. and Mrs. Helms took at the flagrant display of homoeroticism in an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe's