[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