RALEIGH – In the spirit of exploring the many justifications for limited government, consider the case of Rocky Mount’s ill-fated statue of Martin Luther King, Jr. After more than two years of contentious debate in the eastern North Carolina community, city leaders decided earlier this week not to continue pursuing the $45,000 project.
Did local politicians finally come to the realization that commissioning an MLK statute was not a proper expenditure of the taxpayers’ money? Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to be the reason for Monday’s decision, since the $45,000 will be spent on a welfare program rather than on core local functions such as police protection or city streets. Instead, the reason Rocky Mount won’t be buying the statue is artistic – the complaint that the planned work did not sufficiently resemble King or depict him in his best light.
I have no opinion on such things – despite the fact that my mother was an art teacher, I am clueless when it comes to the visual arts – but plenty of other people do. It was inevitable, really, that Rocky Mount’s planned statue would elicit strong sentiments about someone like King. City leaders now say that the entire debate was a distraction, a regrettable incident that needlessly stoked racial tensions. They should have foreseen this years ago.
Controversy about taxpayer-funded art is hardly a rarity. From the Robert Mapplethorpe pics to Andre Serrano’s Piss Christ, the battlefields of the culture wars are littered with images that invoke anger not simply because of their ribald or grotesque character but also, crucially, because they were coercively funded, either directly or indirectly.
I remember a case at UNC-Chapel Hill back in the 1980s. The school commissioned a piece of art, a set of sculptures depicting campus life. When the work arrived, it was greeted by vociferous objections. One figure consisted of a black woman balancing her books on her head. Critics viewed this as demeaning and stereotypical. Another was a black man with a basketball. Ditto. Still another showed a male and female student in a way that some viewed as sexist (don’t ask me why). The furor raged for months, though the sculpture was never removed. Indeed, I think it is still visible in a courtyard on campus.
To argue about art is no problem, of course. To provoke is one function of art – though an over-emphasized one these days, I submit. The problem comes when those who find a particular work objectionable realize that they have been forced to pay for its commissioning and display.
To eliminate such rancor, the solution is straightforward: don’t use taxpayer money to fund art. Let a free marketplace of expression and patronage bloom. And if you really don’t like a statue that vaguely resembles Martin Luther King and shows him with his arms crossed, then don’t look at it.
Deal?
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.