Despite what New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and the fiery economy have done to clean things up, smelly garbage, careering cabs and dog poop still assault New Yorkers daily. Most residents become inured to the offal they encounter. It's a survival mechanism but also a matter of pride. So it was a bit embarrassing last week when the mayor got ruffled by an art exhibit, of all things.
The rest of the nation debated a decade ago whether taxpayers should fund controversial art, but in the capital of crude, few people consider rude art a problem. Last week, however, an aide showed Giuliani a New York Daily News article with the headline GALLERY OF HORROR. Previewing Sensation, an exhibit set to open at the Brooklyn Museum of Art this Saturday, the article warned of installations containing animals pickled in formaldehyde and graphic sculptures of people with genitalia where their faces should be.
The mayor was appalled, most of all by The Holy Virgin Mary, a 1996 collage by Chris Ofili, an award-winning British artist who uses elephant feces in his work. "The idea of having so-called works of art in which people are throwing elephant dung at a picture of the Virgin Mary is sick," said Giuliani. He announced that the city would cut its funding to the museum--about $7 million this year, or a third of the museum's budget--unless Sensation was canceled.
We've been here before, so the next act was familiar: museum defenders indignantly cited the First Amendment. Performance artist and freedom-of-expression activist Karen Finley, whose art career now seems secondary to her talk-show shouting, went on CNN to lament censorship. And the Brooklyn Museum of Art--which vowed to go on with the exhibition, damn the consequences--was soaked in publicity, creating the sensation it had hoped for. All before most New Yorkers have actually seen the art.
Including the mayor, though he did have a look at the exhibition's catalog. It can't convey all the nuances Ofili intends with excrement, though Giuliani might be mollified if he knew that the artist affixes clumps of dung to just about everything, including Absolut vodka bottles and images of James Brown. It can be hard to take this sort of art seriously--it seems designed only to shock, after all--but it is easy to demonize. For his part, Ofili wasn't talking; his London gallery issued a statement saying that as a Roman Catholic, he wanted to celebrate, not desecrate, the Virgin Mary.
Not that the contretemps has much to do with art anyway. The Brooklyn Museum has long struggled to attract tourists and Manhattanites, which is a pity because it has a remarkable collection (including Egyptian works that are among the most impressive in the world). Museum officials knew Sensation could reinvigorate a museum: it had done so in London, where it drew so many curious viewers that the once fusty Royal Academy of Arts was able to erase a large chunk of its $3 million deficit. The Brooklyn Museum is promoting the spectacle with a cheeky "HEALTH WARNING," saying the art "may cause shock, vomiting, confusion, panic..." (you get the idea).