The recent political cause celebre involving the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and its support for a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit has called into question the fundamental assumptions underlying public support for culture in the . This incident amounted to a political scandal for two reasons:

Review by Kenneth Aaron Betsalel of the book The New Politics of Pornography (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1990, 266 p.).

The attached summary of the nineteenth forum in the series, held in April of 1990, examines federal funding of the arts in the , and the impact of new regulations on the New York City arts community.

This report provides brief summaries of federal obscenity and children pornography statutes, as amended by the Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act of 1988, Public Law 100-690, section 7501-7526, and the 1989 dial-a-porn legislation. It also discusses selected Supreme Court cases on the subject, through 1989. Under the Constitution, Congress may enact statutes that regulate pornography that crosses state lines or national boundaries, is imported or exported, or is mailed.

This pamphlet deals with the funding restrictions imposed on the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities towards materials that may be considered obscene as defined by Miller vs. California, 413 U.S. 15, 24 (1973). This report concludes that, if the funding restriction applies only to obscenity as the term is used in Miller, then it raises no constitutional issues, because obscenity is not protected by the First Amendment.

This manual is designed as a hands-on tool for any lawyer who is forming a nonprofit, tax-exempt entity in New York. It is based on materials originally published in connection with a training conference on legal formation of nonprofit corporations which was sponsored jointly by the Council of New York Law Associates, Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts, and Community Law Offices in 1978. The Council is grateful to those organizations for their role in the manual's creation and their support of our efforts to update it periodically since then.

In the mid-1980s, the leadership of Actors' Equity Association became aware of the lack of representation of its ethnic minority membership in the American theatre. At that time, a four-year study of the contracts signed for every theatrical offering throughout the nation was completed, revealing that over 90 percent of all plays produced professionally during that period had been presented with all-white casts. This statistic seemed even more disturbing when one considered our demographics: 25 percent of the population of the is ethnic minority, and the majority of plays produced had been

This essay identifies and analyzes the legal issues raised by the commissioning and proposed relocation of Tilted Arc and the resultant implications for public art programs. When engaged in public commissions, particularly those involving site-specific art, the artist finds himself in a complex series of legal relationships often intertwined with a series of administrative, political and funding considerations. Tilted Arc calls into question the commissioning process itself. By what mechanism and process should public art be selected? What right, if any, does the community have to be

The following pages outline key points of the documents that make up a major but as yet unresolved episode in American culture: the unprecedented series of hearings on Richard Serra's Titled Arc, and the aftermath of those hearings in the press and in public opinion. History, ideology, public policy and the legal rights of the artist intersect and diverge here in a confusing and often disagreeable debate in which the real underlying issues for the principals are never made explicit. How these issues will ultimately be adjudicated remains to be seen. (p. 3)

The author highlights the legal problems facing museums (and other nonprofit cultural organizations) that attempt explicitly to change their missions. Her comprehensive overview of the statutory and court-made law that bears on the power of trustees to change direction, including the doctrines of cy pres and deviation, points both to jurisprudential anomalies and to suggestions for the law's reform. (Introduction, p. 11)