On special occasions, the Publisher’s Blog relinquishes its space to a contributing writer who has been moved to put thoughts and emotions to paper. Art that speaks to important issues of the day is often controversial, and the debate that often ensues can hold a magnifying glass to values and tastes that sometimes divide us. Here, Wendy Steiner, a regular contributor to ARTES, shares her views on an acutely controversial cultural debate, recently brought into the public square during this, an election year.

Have you noticed that the term ‘culture wars’ has changed its meaning since the last time it was on everyone’s lips? In the 1990s, the phrase referred to controversies over Culture with a capital C: the arts and the academy. Museum directors were being hauled into court for obscenity, performance pieces lambasted, writers hunted down for blasphemy, universities torn by political-correctness scandals, and even amateur photographers jailed for shots of their toddlers in the altogether.artes fine arts magazine

Those were heady days for champions of the First Amendment. Capping a string of landmark obscenity trials from Ulysses to Caligula, most of the 1990s controversies were resolved in favor of freedom of expression; even PC curbs were finally accepted as safeguards of equality. Though the threats, lawsuits and unwelcome publicity of the 1990s left a chill on U.S. arts institutions, still being felt today, it was exhilarating to witness a whole society up-in-arms over aesthetics. Who would have thought Americans cared so much about culture?

As Culture Wars 2012 suggests, they did not care for very long. Today’s controversies are about women’s and gays’ rights, or in Rick Santorum’s distillation: sex. In place of debates about artistic representations of sex and religion, we have debates about policies relating to sex and religion. When the occasional capital-C-culture skirmish does break out, it has a zombie-like feel. In 2010, the National Portrait Gallery, caving to the Catholic League, removed a David Wojnarowicz video from its exhibition, Hide/Seek; the ensuing protests were spirited (see Wojnarowicz in poster, right), but the issue did not exactly grip the nation. Or when in 2008 Yale refused to exhibit a student’s video of her purportedly multiple, induced abortions, the international press coverage was not answered by the sort of public outrage that launches an artistic career. In contrast, ABC News declared the current culture wars “a perfect storm” of issues enraging the whole country. Though the contraception and abortion movements predate 1990s arts controversies by decades, they have become the definition of “culture” over which the country is mobilizing for war.

But why should today’s debates, and the very different ones of the 1990s, go by the same name? We might conclude that “culture wars” is a placeholder, a blank to be filled in at will. Since Rush Limbaugh’s assault on Sandra Fluke, people are speaking of a “war on women,” as if it were finally apparent what the “culture” in question actually is. But women are just one of many targets in the current disputes, and this momentary clarity is bound to dissipate. Culture wars thrive on vagueness—we do not even know whether they are waged “over” or “for” culture, or over “the culture,” whatever that might be. “Fundamental values” are always at stake, and so is “our identity as a nation,” but pinning down such notions is as hard as winning a culture war.

Bemused, commentators tend to dismiss culture wars as diversionary tactics, distractions from “real” struggles that deserve our attention more: “Why deal with layoffs, foreclosures and Greece,” writes Tim Padgett in POLITICO.com, “when it’s so much easier to indulge in debate over contraception, religious liberty and gay marriage – especially in an election year? It’s a no-brainer.” In 1992, Robert Hughes explained the culture wars of his day in much the same fashion. Jesse Helms and his fellow rightists, Hughes wrote, were attacking the Mapplethorpe exhibition, in order to “establish themselves as defenders of the American Way, now that their original crusade against the Red Menace had been rendered null and void by the end of the cold war and the general collapse of communism. Having lost the barbarian at the gates, they went for the fairy at the bottom of the garden.” In fact, they went for the queer, sadomasochistic photos at the back of the gallery. Anti-gay policymaking was not what people meant by the label “culture wars” in the 1990s. But the general point is the same: that culture wars are a blind for something “more real.”

Dramas of open-ended dissent…shadow struggles displacing the real: culture wars sound a lot like Bachtin’s notion of the carnivalesque. A Punch and Judy show of clownishness, slapstick, and burlesque, culture wars perform fault-lines in the body politic—incompatible values that defy the unifying effects of reason and civility. They foster outbursts of unbridled hatred, disgust, and intolerance. MSNBC commentator, Rachel Maddow, put her finger on it when she claimed that Herman Cain was not a presidential candidate but a performance artist, and few could rival Rush Limbaugh’s recent star turn as a gargoyle in heat.

Today’s culture wars are a display of illogic, inanity, and insensitivity seldom equaled in legitimate theatre. It is a very dark humor though, a touch with madness and cruelty that threatens to erupt into reality. Unlike a Mardi Gras or Feast of Fools or Purim festival, culture wars do not have a pre-set ending. Even the fall elections may not bring the curtain safely down.

We might have wished to be spared this spectacle. Some of us might even find ourselves yearning for a little civic censorship. For oddly, the actors in the 1990s culture wars have switched roles. Now it is the Right who are performing acts of provocation and vulgarity that outrage “decent citizens.” The difference is that this time the art is in the service not of freedom, but of a repression that is becoming the law of the land.

Wendy Steiner is the Richard L. Fisher Professor of English at Penn and author of  The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism.