Return of the Repressors

"Ironically, with the National Endowment for the Humanities (also eliminated in Trump's 2026 budget) currently administering individual artist grants of up to $600,000 to produce statues for a new "National Garden of American Heroes," it seems as if the right's legal victory in the culture wars of the late 1980s and '90s, which led to the NEA discontinuing its individual artist grants, is being reversed-though it is a Pyrrhic victory for fascism instead of freedom of expression."

"I want to start with the idea of decency. At the core of the amendment to the 1965 National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act that was passed by Congress in 1990, otherwise known as the Decency Clause, and then the Supreme Court's decision in favor of the NEA in the NEA v. Finley case in 1998, was the idea that having federal agencies enforce standards of decency does not violate artists' First Amendment rights."

The National Endowment for the Humanities, eliminated in Trump's 2026 budget, is administering individual artist grants of up to $600,000 to commission statues for a National Garden of American Heroes. That effort effectively reverses a late-20th-century conservative legal victory that prompted the National Endowment for the Arts to discontinue individual artist grants. The reversal is framed as a Pyrrhic victory that advances fascistic aims rather than protecting freedom of expression. Current far-right attacks target cultural infrastructure and mirror earlier censorship battles centered on decency standards and federal funding. The 1990 Decency Clause and NEA v. Finley affirmed that federal enforcement of decency standards does not automatically violate the First Amendment. Institutions are urged to move beyond performative solidarity toward robust, high-level strategies to support and protect artists likely to be targeted.

Read at Artforum