Assisi: An Online Journal of Arts & Letters Volume 4, Issues 1 & 2 | Page 30

personification of the values that artists, myself included, were required to uphold. If we
violated these standards, the Federal government could and in some cases did, claw back
its assistance.
The culture wars of the 1980’s strangled government support for individual artists
and for any art deemed as transgressing community standards. Consequently, many of
my artist contemporaries and I, educated and of limited means, were denied the support
that earlier artists had utilized in order to transition to being working artists. To survive,
many of us took ‘day jobs’ unrelated to art. Decades later, I continue to work in non-art
related fields. The Tilted Arc and Piss Christ controversies reasserted Civic Virtue in
American social and political discourse in the late 20th century as a reacti ۈ