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NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR ARTS v. FINLEY

Opinion of the Court

Since 1965, the NEA has distributed over $3 billion in
grants to individuals and organizations, funding that has
served as a catalyst for increased state, corporate, and foun-
dation support for the arts. Congress has recently re-
stricted the availability of federal funding for individual
artists, conﬁning grants primarily to qualifying organiza-
tions and state arts agencies, and constraining subgranting.
See Department of the Interior and Related Agencies Appro-
priations Act, 1998, § 329, 111 Stat. 1600. By far the largest
portion of the grants distributed in ﬁscal year 1998 were
awarded directly to state arts agencies.
In the remaining
categories, the most substantial grants were allocated to
symphony orchestras, ﬁne arts museums, dance theater foun-
dations, and opera associations. See National Endowment
for the Arts, FY 1998 Grants, Creation & Presentation 5–8,
21, 20, 27.

Throughout the NEA’s history, only a handful of the
agency’s roughly 100,000 awards have generated formal com-
plaints about misapplied funds or abuse of the public’s trust.
Two provocative works, however, prompted public contro-
versy in 1989 and led to congressional revaluation of the
NEA’s funding priorities and efforts to increase oversight of
its grant-making procedures. The Institute of Contempo-
rary Art at the University of Pennsylvania had used $30,000
of a visual arts grant it received from the NEA to fund a
1989 retrospective of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s
work. The exhibit, entitled The Perfect Moment, included
homoerotic photographs that several Members of Congress
condemned as pornographic. See, e. g., 135 Cong. Rec. 22372
(1989). Members also denounced artist Andres Serrano’s
work Piss Christ, a photograph of a cruciﬁx immersed in
urine. See, e. g., id., at 9789. Serrano had been awarded a
$15,000 grant from the Southeast Center for Contemporary
Art, an organization that received NEA support.

When considering the NEA’s appropriations for ﬁscal year
1990, Congress reacted to the controversy surrounding the