Editor's Letter

The Art of Controversy

Seven years ago, when Patricia Morrisroe asked Robert Mapplethorpe if she could write his biography, she had no idea that he would be at the center of an all-out tug-ofwar over artistic freedom. In the six years since his death from AIDS, Mapplethorpe's photography has twice been the subject of full-scale controversy over what does and does not constitute art. In June of 1989, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., canceled a retrospective of his work that would have been funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. The N.E.A. had come under strong attack from the religious right for supporting the show, and "we had the strong potential to become some persons' political platform," said the Corcoran's director in explaining why she backed out of the retrospective. A year later, when the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati was tried on obscenity charges for showing the same exhibition, it became, writes Morrisroe, "the first time a gallery in the United States had faced prosecution for the art it displayed." In light of the ideological disputes over the nature of his work—were his homoerotic and sadomasochistic photographs art or pornography?—it is surprising to learn that Mapplethorpe himself had little interest in such issues. "He wasn't very political," Morrisroe says, "but I found his politics more conservative than I would have anticipated. He told me that were he to vote he would have voted for Bush, for tax purposes and to protect his assets."

"The Demon Romantics," the excerpt from Morrisroe's book, on page 114, focuses on Mapplethorpe's long and often tortured relationship with punk prophet Patti Smith. But it also reveals the way in which Mapplethorpe used his art to distance himself from passion or commitment. In fact, Morrisroe found, part of Mapplethorpe's appeal as a subject was that he "put himself in the costume of each decade. As one of his Pratt classmates told me, 'One day he was in an R.O.T.C. uniform, the next he was in sheepskin and love beads.'" Had this chameleon artist lived and continued to grow artistically, it would have been interesting to know what, if anything, he would have made of Newt Gingrich's Contract with America, and the budget ax descending on federal funding for the arts.