National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley Case Brief Summary | Law Case Explained

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National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley | 524 U.S. 569 (1998)

The National Endowment for the Arts has distributed billions of dollars federal funding to support works of artistic and cultural significance. But in the 1990s, funding decisions sparked controversy about standards of decency and free speech. The United States Supreme Court had to sort it out in National Endowment for the Arts versus Finley.

In 1990, NEA-funded photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano shocked some members of the art-viewing public. Congress responded by writing section 954, an amendment to the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act directing the NEA to consider general standards of decency and respect for the diverse values of the American public when evaluating the artistic merit of grant applications. Four performance artists, including Karen Finley, who performed nude, had applied for NEA grants before the amendment was enacted. An advisory panel had recommended funding the projects, but their applications were denied by the NEA council.

Finley and the others sued in federal district court, claiming that the NEA had violated their First Amendment rights by rejecting their applications on political grounds. They argued that Section 954 was viewpoint discrimination, because it rejected artistic speech that failed to respect mainstream values or that offended standards of decency. The district court found for Finley. The Court of Appeals affirmed, holding that the decency-and-respect criteria weren’t objective, could be arbitrarily applied, and violated the First Amendment’s prohibition on viewpoint-based restrictions on protected speech. The United States Supreme Court granted certiorari.

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