John Frohnmayer Stands up for Free Speech

Former NEA chair, and potential candidate for the U.S. Senate, John Frohnmayer gave conservative radio talker Lars Larson a lesson in humility in the Oregonian this week.

Larson, it seems, had picked up on a recent column by Dave Reinhard, criticizing the Port of Portland for posting a piece of art in a free speech exhibit at the PDX airport.

Larson calls the art obscene and anti-American. Here's Frohnmayer's response:

Frohnmayer counters that works such as Nichols' are anything but anti-American: "If we can't ask why we're fighting that war over there, then we're in a dictatorship, not a democracy."

"The criticisms of artwork like this get the First Amendment exactly backwards, because they're thinking about protecting the hearer or the seer rather than the speaker," said John Frohnmayer, the Oregonian who was head of the National Endowment for the Arts from 1989 to 1992, during some of its most contentious years.

Frohnmayer, who says he's likely to enter the Oregon Senate race next year as an independent, said art that stirs up controversy is doing its job.

"It's helping us work through difficult issues, and certainly the Iraq war is the most difficult issue we're facing as a society. It's an essential part in furthering the debate. If the criticism of this artwork is that it's political, then the people who are criticizing it don't know much about art, because art is inherently political."

Redacted from the Oregonian, Critics aim cannons...