Frank Rich on Sensation

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Sat Oct 9 00:50:09 PDT 1999


[I dunno what's gotten into Frank Rich, but I thought this was a damned good summation of the sensation flap.]

October 9, 1999

JOURNAL / By FRANK RICH

Pull the Plug on Brooklyn

C ount me as one First Amendment believer who hopes that Rudolph

Giuliani does shut down the Brooklyn Museum of Art as retribution

for exhibiting Chris Ofili's elephant-dung-ornamented painting "The

Holy Virgin Mary."

And while the Mayor's at it, he should lobby the U.S. Senate, which

last week voted to deny Federal funds to the Brooklyn Museum, to do

the same to the N.E.A.-supported Whitney Museum, currently

displaying Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ."

And why not strongarm the New York State Council on the Arts into

ditching the Film Society of Lincoln Center? This week its film

festival screened "Dogma," a movie condemned by the Catholic League

because "God is played by a singer known for her nude videos and

songs about oral sex" (a k a Alanis Morissette).

If we're going to have a culture war, let's go for broke. After two

weeks of cynical posturing on all sides about the Brooklyn Museum's

show "Sensation," it's beginning to seem that nothing more

important than a Senate race hangs in the balance. We take our

freedoms so much for granted that we (and that includes the city's

many cowed cultural leaders) can't imagine that anyone would

actually silence a cultural institution. Were Mr. Giuliani to evict

the Brooklyn Museum, it might at least sweep away the phony pieties

of this uproar and return us to the urgent debate that has been

obscured: the desirability (or not) of having independent, publicly

funded homes for the arts.

The loudest, though hardly the only, cynic in the fracas so far is

the Mayor. If he truly believes that what he deems

"Catholic-bashing" is grounds for eviction, why has he not targeted

additional offenders (including the other city-funded museums

displaying art that could be construed as blasphemous)? Could it be

that the Brooklyn, a struggling museum in an outer borough, is

easier to bully than a Manhattan cultural mecca with a

heavy-hitting board bulging with Giuliani fat cats? Were the

Mayor's real aim to police the public funding of supposedly

anti-religious culture, rather than stage an election-year stunt,

fairness would demand a consistency of enforcement, including a

sweep of public libraries stocking John Cornwell's new biography of

Pius XII, "Hitler's Pope" (also condemned by the Catholic League, a

self-appointed watchdog organization that in fact has no official

connection to the church).

The Brooklyn Museum, for its part, is not anyone's ideal martyr to

the Mayor's wrath. "Sensation" was assembled by a private

collector, the British advertising tycoon Charles Saatchi, and much

of it is kitsch. The museum's own cynicism is evident in its vulgar

marketing campaign (almost nostalgically reminiscent of those at

the dawn of X-rated movies), its abdication of any curatorial

input, and even its camp audio tour narrated by David Bowie (who

intones of the elephant dung, "On a damp day its rich, earthy scent

wafts elusively around [Mr. Ofili's] works"). In an era of empty

blockbuster repackagings of Impressionists and a Guggenheim Museum

homage to the sculptural finesse of Harley-Davidson motorcycles,

the best to be said in the Brooklyn Museum's defense is that its

craven embrace of showmanship is far from an anomaly.

Further confusing the issues have been polemics, in the press and

elsewhere, untainted by any firsthand knowledge of the actual

exhibition. Any journalist who says that Mr. Ofili's Mary is

"smeared" or "covered" or "splattered" with elephant dung hasn't

seen it and is misrepresenting its ambiguous tone. Ditto for the

countless ideologues who have clung to the rhetorical salvo that

the Brooklyn Museum would never exhibit a painting that treated a

venerated African-American in this way: only a few yards from "The

Holy Virgin Mary" in Brooklyn is another Ofili canvas, "Afrodizzia"

which inscribes the names Cassius Clay, Miles Davis and Diana Ross,

among other black icons, on brown clumps interchangeable with those

decorating the "Virgin Mary." Mr. Ofili is nothing if not an

equal-opportunity dung artist.

Another widespread canard is that "Sensation" is the creation of a

liberal elite. Mr. Saatchi is in fact a conservative whose cunning

political ad campaign sped Margaret Thatcher to power; "Sensation"

is a byproduct not of public subsidy but of the go-go art market,

which Mr. Saatchi is skilled at manipulating. An uglier sideshow is

the attempt by some to exploit the controversy by pitting religions

against each other. In Salon, Camille Paglia fingers "a Jewish

collector and a Jewish museum director" for plotting "Sensation."

(How did the museum's First Amendment lawyer, Floyd Abrams, escape

her?) The Catholic League's diatribe on "Dogma" fixates on Harvey

and Bob Weinstein, who initially produced it (as they did the same

director's previous non-religious films). The fact remains that Mr.

Ofili is a Catholic, as are the authors of "Dogma" and "Hitler's

Pope." (And why do Mr. Ofili's critics mindlessly repeat Mr.

Giuliani's assumption that the artist intended to bash Catholics?

He might have been targeting Episcopalians or any other faith

venerating the Virgin Mary.)

Out of all this heat has come scant light. One silly argument has

it that taxpayers should not have to pay for anything of which they

disapprove. Alas, that's not how democracy works. As Fran Lebowitz

succinctly said on CNN last week, "We do not have a line-item veto

on our tax returns. . . . I pay for the sports stadium I never go

into, you pay for the art museum you never go into."

Others have argued that the only way out of this mess is to remove

taxpayers' money from all cultural endeavors. If this is the

argument we want to have -- and it's a profound debate, not a silly

one -- let's have it in earnest, and with the facts.

There is hardly a significant American cultural institution that

doesn't get some money, whether for shows or capital improvements

or exhibition insurance or education, from local, state or Federal

government (or all three). The money is not vast, some of it is

misspent (as in every other sector of the government budget), but

what would happen if we eliminated it all? For every Metropolitan

Museum whose wealthy constituents might fill the gap with donations

and higher admission fees, there's another in Brooklyn and the

Bronx and most of the localities in the nation that cannot. Will an

end to public arts funding lead to a healthy Darwinian winnowing

out of disposable second-rate or fledgling institutions in fly-by

cities, as conservatives might argue, and if so, would anyone care?

Might completely privatized museums lead to even more plentiful and

pernicious commercial enterprises like "Sensation" at the expense

of scholarship and permanent collections?

We don't have a serious national cultural debate to adjudicate such

issues. More typical is what happened last weekend, when the Mayor

made the TV rounds and no one even bothered to book an actual

cultural figure (such as Arthur Miller, Cynthia Ozick or Mary

Gordon, among the 100 signatories of a PEN petition protesting his

stance) to articulate an alternative viewpoint.

Artists can also offer a ground-zero perspective on what happens

when government declares war on the arts. The day the Mayor took on

the Brooklyn Museum, the first call I got was from Al Hirschfeld,

now 96, who immediately started recalling 1937. That was the year

the Nazis held their notorious show of "degenerate art" --

vilifying, in the words of its signs and labels, art that was

"sick," that featured "insolent mockery of the divine" and that

wasted "the taxes of the German working people." (The art in that

show, including Jesus in a gas mask, not only drew the same

official rhetoric as "Sensation" but also a corresponding record

attendance.) It was in 1937 as well that U.S. Government guards

seized the New York theater where Orson Welles and John Houseman

were staging the Federal Theater's pro-union musical "The Cradle

Will Rock" -- a chilling incident that Mr. Hirschfeld likened to

the Mayor's threats against the Brooklyn Museum. "He has the right

to picket the place," said the artist of Mr. Giuliani, "but this is

nonsense." W e all have that right -- to campaign for change at

any cultural institution in any way the law allows. By arguing that

a mayor's power extends to pulling a museum's plug outright or, if

that fails in the courts, to intimidating the city's more spineless

cultural bureaucrats into silence or self-censorship by merely

threatening to do so, Mr. Giuliani takes us back to an era many New

Yorkers aren't old enough to remember. That's why, if the Mayor

were to succeed in evicting the museum -- maybe he can find a

pretext in fire laws that forbid overcrowding -- it might

crystallize what's at stake to the many who are understandably

disgusted by both sides in this culture war. The spectacle of

police padlocking the Brooklyn Museum would be dynamite performance

art even by the raucous standards of the eleven o'clock news.

Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company



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