Money Talks, Again

Abstract

A year ago yesterday I finished the first section ofMoney Talks (Phelan 1990). When I began writing, I believed that fine logic would produce clearer thinking, better decisions, and a more profound understanding of art, identity, and political action. That belief has been shown to be a hollow hope. I am both made cynical and deeply moved by the events of the last year in this tiny corner of the universe. As the long, strong drama in Kuwait unfolds, I turn again to the dreary ugliness of these art wars. The two stories are not unrelated. Both are complex plots about the force of the visible, about the devastation of people, pride, and power, and both are, fundamentally, stories about the fluency of money. Money talks. And what it says is inescapably violent. In the past year the debate about what can and cannot be said with money from the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) has moved from a consideration of photographic to performative transgression. Underneath the debate is, as I said earlier, a pernicious homophobia. This is distinct from erotophobia, although that too functions in these debates. Homophobia and erotophobia stem from an anxiety about unruly sexual bodies: the greater freedom of expression given to the unruly sexual body the more rigid the response of the conservative body politic. It would be disingenuous not to consider the huge specter of AIDS, with all its contaminating popular lies, with all its grief, with all its expense, as the largest ghost which haunts these debates. As a consequence of the multiple conflations of homosexuality and AIDS, homosexuality and the art world, homosexuality and the Left,1 the NEA arguments exploit and catalyze homophobia, both implicitly and explicitly.